What's been your biggest "aha!" moment of your research career?
“The biggest “aha!” moment of my research career occurred when I truly recognized the sophistication of language-minoritized childrens' verbal artistry and efficacy. More particularly, when I started to look closely at the forms and functions of Native American kids’ English language use, it was plain to me that I wasn’t witnessing just impoverished versions of what adults speak. What I saw was very complicated, sophisticated, and efficacious talk—in its own right! When I realized that Native American kids' talk had this kind of richness and power, I knew I was really on to something big. Ideologies in the dominant U.S. culture of what constitutes good speaking or good language use can be pretty narrow and limited to the extent that grammatical correctness is the main standard against which language use is measured. If we just open our eyes and ears to the ways of speaking used in different cultures, including the use of English in those cultures, we realize that there is such a wide array of beautifully artistic and highly efficacious talk, ways of speaking that most of us are not accustomed to hearing. There’s so much to learn about these ways of speaking. I'm trying to get at that everyday, what language-minoritized kids can do with language. I am especially interested in what they can do with language that isn't school sanctioned, language use that schools don’t see as legitimate or worthy. I'm looking at ways of speaking that are not considered “correct" by school standards but are, according to local cultural standards, just as expressive, just as artistic, just as efficacious as any language use that is validated in formal educational environments. When these non-dominant ways of speaking by language-minoritized kids are empirically specified, educators can then tap into these funds of linguistic knowledge and skill and build bridges to ways of speaking English that have more widespread social and cultural capital.”
