Capitol News

Michigan State University researcher and Assistant Professor of linguistics Betsy Sneller has been awarded $646,385 from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to expand educational opportunities through the MI Diaries linguistics research project.

Sneller, alongside Associate Professor of linguistics Suzanne Evans Wagner, initiated MI COVID Diaries in April 2020 to explore how language evolves over time and document people's daily experiences. The project was renamed MI Diaries in 2021 and has since become a multiyear study capturing changes in the lives and language of Michigan residents.

In 2021, the NSF granted $265,830 over three years to support the expansion of MI Diaries. Currently, the project boasts over 8,700 individual audio records — totaling more than 1,900 hours — from upwards of 1,500 participants aged between 5 and 78. Participants use a mobile app to record their voices as part of an ongoing documentation of Michiganders' daily lives.

The new NSF grant will foster new and existing partnerships with school districts across Michigan and broaden opportunities for undergraduate students. The five-year grant is part of CAREER, the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program, which awards faculty who have potential as academic role models in research and education.

“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.”

The MI Diaries team engages in various outreach events to interact with communities and encourage participation. At such events as the MSU Science Festival, Sneller showcases the MI Diaries mobile app to children.

From its inception, MI Diaries aimed to collect stories from preteens and teens due to their critical stage in linguistic and social identity development. The grant will enable direct collaborations with Michigan teachers from sixth through tenth grade to integrate MI Diaries into curricula.

“School and teacher partnerships will expand opportunities for this age group to be part of MI Diaries,” Sneller stated. “As far as I know, this is the first type of dataset that will let us look at data from sixth through tenth-grade students over an entire school year.”

These new participants will contribute more representative data for analyzing language change among pre- and early adolescents. Teachers interested in partnering with MI Diaries can contact MI.Diaries@msu.edu.

The grant will also enhance an existing partnership with WGVU Public Media by funding a postdoctoral scholar to develop lesson plans for grades six through ten using audio from the public archive on topics including linguistics and history. These lesson plans will be available online through PBS Learning Media for any interested teachers.

The importance of linguistics extends into fields reliant on language models such as generative AI, voice recognition technology, and forensic linguistics. Increasing awareness may open access to these 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 remarked. “It’s also a way of exposing kids to the idea that dialects can vary.”

At MSU, since 2020, MI Diaries has provided undergraduate and graduate students with experience working on active faculty research projects.

“For anyone who wants research experience, MI Diaries is a nice sort of stepping stone because it’s possible to do a smaller research project with this data that doesn’t require much specialized knowledge,” Sneller noted.

Through this grant, Sneller's team will develop curriculum for a year-long undergraduate course centered around MI Diaries culminating in independent student research projects. This course will be accessible to students across all majors.

“MI Diaries demonstrates both the excitement generated by community-engaged research and storytelling's power for understanding our world,” said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, interim associate dean of research for the College of Arts and Letters. “Betsy Sneller and her collaborators make clear the importance of arts-and-humanities research.”