by Sara Carter
Week of May 7- 11
As our first full week of living in Granada draws to a close, it seems inconceivable that our elapsed time here in fact consists of little more than a week. Although the copious differences between daily life in State College and Granada would be virtually impossible to enumerate, the facility which with I have found myself adapting to living in this very different environment has been surprising. Having arrived in Granada last Tuesday night, Emily and I spent quite a bit of time during the first several days just walking around Granada and orienting ourselves within the city . Aside from a few anxiety-provoking instances in which I temporarily found myself dreadfully lost, the city has quickly begun to feel much smaller and more accessible than it did when we first arrived and I initially wondered how I would ever be able to venture more than a block away from our apartment. With the arrival of Amelia, and then Alvaro, and finally Clair and Melissa, our group spent our first night of being all together partaking in the celebration of the of Dia de las Cruces, or Day of the Crosses, a Spanish holiday in which various groups construct crosses of vibrantly colored flowers and groups of little girls perform dances on stages set up in plazas. We walked through the narrow mazelike streets of the Albayzin, the old Arabic quarter of the city that is packed with white houses that seem to emerge from the hill upon which the neighborhood is built and windy cobblestone streets, all of which seem to slope steeply upward and, astonishingly, none of which I have yet to trip and tumble down. It was during those first few days that the initial feeling of being merely on a vacation gradually morphed into a state of walking through the plazas and streets and experiencing Granada as a city in which we are actually living and doing work.
Over the course of just these first few days of actually living in a foreign country as opposed to merely visiting, I have repeatedly been struck by the tremendous variety of ways in which the most mundane aspects of daily life in the United States differ from those of Spain and how thoroughly we take these minute facets of our culture for granted as the . For example as it turns out, it is customary to not tip in restaurants here, which we learned early on when we did so and generated an atmosphere of tense confusion with the waiter. We are also adapting to the time schedule here, in which everything is pushed back several hours as compared with the United States, with dinner taking place no earlier than 9 pm, for example. There is also a roughly two hour period in the middle of the afternoon during which certain types of shops close, only to reopen on into the evening, a tendency that certainly differs from our experience of living at home. The manner in which Spanish is spoken here in Andalucia is also quite different from what I have become accustomed to learning in Spanish classes I have taken in the past, in that pronunciation here differs significantly and has proved challenging at times to understand. There is a tendency to drop the/ s/ at the end of syllables, which often results in confusing changes in how verbs appear to be conjugated, and to omit the /d/ between vowels, transforming, for example, the word “terminado” into “terminao.” Though we learned about these dialectic differences in Spanish linguistics classes I have taken, it has been very interesting to see how this actually manifests itself first hand, much as it has taken a bit of getting used to. Although at first I was extremely timid about speaking Spanish, I have gradually gotten less hesitant to participate in conversation and am loving being surrounded by the language.
As my experiment seeks to investigate the effects of immersion in the L2 environment upon verb bias and plausibility in native English speakers, recruiting participants for the study has been somewhat of a challenge because the population that we are seeking for our study is far from abundant. Fortunately, the project on which Alvaro is currently working requires data from L1 English speakers residing in Granada as well, so we have been able to coordinate our efforts in looking for people for our study. Our strategy in seeking participants has so far been based upon visiting and contacting schools in the city that offer English instruction, as it seemed to us a reasonable assumption that the teaching faculty at these institutions might be partly comprised of L1 native speakers of English, or that that this would at least be our best bet for finding participants in any significant number from a single source. I have also been able to find a several participants just by meeting people and talking with them about other people they know who meet the requirements for the study. This has been quite different from my experience with seeking participants at Penn State in the past, which took place entirely within the confines of the campus environment, as we didn’t need to leave the setting of the university to find the population necessary for the study. However, as most of the students at the University of Granada are L1 Spanish speakers, we will not be able to rely upon the University here as a source of participants. Although I was truthfully not anticipating that the process of recruitment would prove to be so challenging, the more broad-based approach that we have had to take has required that we do quite a bit of moving about through the city to locate the schools and hang up posters, which has enabled me to explore the city to an even greater degree. I am certainly eager to begin running participants, but have also reached a point of being comfortable with the fact that the process of finding people for the study, especially with our fairly specific requirements, will be ongoing. I am also looking forward to being able to work on conducting a study in this entirely different environment, as all previous experience I have had with research has taken place alongside a full class schedule.