New South Voices and Language Analysis

• TOOLS FOR LANGUAGE ANALYSIS

Charlotte Narrative and Conversation Collection (CNCC) contains narratives, conversations and interviews in English and other languages representative of the residents of Mecklenburg County, NC and surrounding NC communities.

Students of Professor Boyd Davis (Department of English, UNC-Charlotte) began recording oral narratives and conversations with native and non-native speakers of English in 1995; UNC-Charlotte faculty in the Department of English and the College of Education continue to contribute student-collected narratives to the CNCC.

Initial funding from the North Carolina Council of the Humanities supported the cataloging of the first 500 English-language narratives in the CNCC to mark the growing diversity of the Charlotte region at the turn of the millennium. CNCC tapes and transcripts are housed in Special Collections at J. Murrey Atkins Library and are part of the NEW SOUTH VOICES digital sound project.

The current expansion of the CNCC has been made possible by Project MORE, a teacher-training initiative sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. Project MORE, which supports the collecting, transcribing, editing, and encoding of metadata to narratives in English and other languages, draws on the narratives in the CNCC to create classroom materials for use with new English language learners (ELLs). Using these materials as models, the project then helps teachers who work with ELLs to use narratives from the CNCC to produce materials suitable for their own classes. We invite you to visit the Project MORE site.

Another component of the CNCC focuses on changes over time in the speech of aging persons who have cognitive deficits, such as Alzheimer's disease. Since 1998, Davis, Drs. Linda Moore (Nursing), Dena Shenk (Gerontology) and Ruth Greene (Psychology, Johnson C. Smith University) have recorded conversations with persons with Alzheimer's disease; faculty in Gerontology, Applied Linguistics and Speech Communication are currently soliciting parallel conversations to add to the CNCC.