Michigan State University researcher and Assistant Professor of linguistics Betsy Sneller was awarded $646,385 from the U.S. National Science Foundation, or NSF, to expand educational opportunities for students as part of the MI Diaries linguistics research project.
Sneller and Associate Professor of linguistics Suzanne Evans Wagner launched MI COVID Diaries in April 2020 to answer questions about how language changes over time and to capture people’s day-to-day experiences through the stories they share. Renamed MI Diaries in 2021, the project has evolved into a multiyear study documenting changes in the lives and language of Michigan residents.
In 2021, the NSF awarded $265,830 over three years to Sneller and Wagner to support expanding MI Diaries. Today, MI Diaries has more than 8,700 individual audio records — 1,900+ hours — from over 1,500 participants ranging in age from 5 to 78. Using a mobile app, participants record their voices as part of an ongoing record reflecting the daily lives of Michiganders. Many of the regular diarists record and submit stories weekly.
This new NSF grant will support new and existing partnerships with school districts around Michigan and expand opportunities for undergraduate students. The five-year grant through CAREER, the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program, offers awards to faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and lead advances at their universities.
“Research projects like Dr. Sneller’s MI Diaries are important to the College of Arts and Letters and the state of Michigan,” said Yen-Hwei Lin, interim dean of the College of Arts and Letters. “The ongoing data and continued support of organizations like the National Science Foundation show the value of this sociolinguistic data.”
From the beginning, the MI Diaries project wanted to collect stories from preteens and teens, an age especially important for linguistic and social identity development. The grant will enable direct partnerships with Michigan teachers of sixth through 10th grade and help them integrate MI Diaries into curriculum and coursework.
“School and teacher partnerships will expand opportunities for this age group to be part of MI Diaries,” Sneller said. “As far as I know, this is the first type of data set that will let us look at data from sixth through 10th grade students over the course of an entire school year to see how they may be changing the way they talk.”
These new participants will provide more representative data and an opportunity for in-depth analysis of pre- and early adolescent participation in language change. Teachers interested in learning more about partnering with MI Diaries should contact MI.Diaries@msu.edu.
The grant also will expand an existing MI Diaries partnership with WGVU Public Media by funding a postdoctoral scholar to develop lesson plans for sixth through 10th grade using audio from the MI Diaries public archive on topics ranging from linguistics to history. Those lesson plans, hosted online through PBS Learning Media, will be available to any teachers who may be interested in adding MI Diaries as a part of class curriculum.
Linguistics and sociolinguistics are important for growing fields that rely on language models, including generative AI, voice recognition technology and forensic linguistics. Increasing awareness can help open access to these new types of future career paths.
“These partnerships and MI Diaries overall are ways of exposing kids to the idea that you can actually just study language and linguistics,” Sneller said. “It’s also a way of exposing kids to the idea that dialects can vary. Some people say ‘pop’ while other people call it ‘soda.’ Both are OK, and this is laying the groundwork for understanding larger complex social issues like linguistic diversity.”
The impact of this grant will also be felt at MSU. Since 2020, MI Diaries has been a way for undergraduate and graduate students to gain experience working with an active faculty research project.
“For anyone who wants to get research experience, MI Diaries is a nice sort of stepping stone because, although this data can be used for highly specialized research, it’s also possible to do a smaller research project with this data that doesn’t require as much specialized knowledge to do,” Sneller said. “With MI Diaries, we have this incredible ability to meet students wherever they are.”
Through the grant, Sneller and the research team will develop curriculum for a year-long undergraduate course centered around MI Diaries that will culminate in an independent research project for students. This will be open to students of any major and offers a way for students to develop and execute small-scale research projects.
“MI Diaries demonstrates both the excitement generated by community-engaged research and the power of storytelling for understanding the world around us,” said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, interim associate dean of research for the College of Arts and Letters. “Betsy Sneller and her collaborators make the importance of research in the arts and humanities clear, and we can’t wait to see how the project continues to develop.”
