Sabrina Neugebauer

Twelve thousand feet above sea level in the small town of Cusco, Peru, doctoral student Sabina Neugebauer began to see her interests in language attitudes and identities come alive. What began as a summer to learn fluent Spanish turned into a summer of learning a lot more for Neugebauer.

Two grants, the David Rockefeller Fellowship and the Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, provided her an opportunity to travel to Cusco, study Spanish, conduct classroom observations, and live with a family. Initially, she planned to improve her Spanish for the ICON Project, a digital literacy intervention program for English Language Learners with Shattuck Professor Catherine Snow.

Instead, the unique makeup of Cusco--which has an indigenous Andean population--gave Neugebauer a rare opportunity to examine the complex linguistic relationship between the native languages of Quechua, an original language of the Inca Empire still spoken in South America today, and Spanish, the other official language of Peru. She conducted interviews on the history, language, and social experiences of these different linguistic groups.

For nearly two months, Neugebauer took a notebook everywhere. She took four hour-long classes in Spanish, followed by afternoon classroom observations in the public and private sector, and then interviewed school officials.

“All the theory regarding linguistic capital that I learned in courses in Language and Literacy at HGSE served to enhance my understanding in this setting. There's no way I could've conducted those observations without my training at HGSE,” she said.

While Neugebauer is indeed a better Spanish speaker now, she said she took away so much more from the experience. As she moves forward, she plans to revisit Cusco this fall and is currently developing an instrument that measures linguistic self-worth and self-efficacy.

“I wish to return because of the responsibility I feel toward the people I interviewed.”
she said.