Reporter Volume 26, No.24 April 13, 1995

By LISA WILEY
News Bureau Staff
A Puerto Rican parrot stands on her shelf looking out the window. "It
kind of reminds me of home  -- at least the color," says Barbara Avila-Jim
nez, assistant professor of Spanish at UB, referring to the wooden
memento that she brought from her native country.
	Home is a very important place for sociolinguist Avila, who
teaches upper-level Spanish and a Spanish linguistic course at UB. It
occupies a special spot not only in her heart, but also in her
research.
	She joined the UB Department of Modern Languages and
Literatures last September and brought new ideas for the teaching of
Spanish, which she is implementing as the new director of the
department's Spanish Language Program.
	"I always loved language," she says. "By the time I was 11, I
had read the whole library in the house." Most of the gifts she
received as a child were books.
	Yet her family's support for her love of language went well
beyond her childhood years. Avila's father accompanied her throughout
27 Puerto Rican municipalities as she conducted 90 sociolinguistic
interviews as part of her doctoral research. Her parents were "very
proud, very supportive and very scared," she says, when she first left
the island to pursue graduate studies at Cornell University.
	Avila believes that language instruction should not be
confined to the classroom. Buffalo's large Hispanic community is part
of what attracted her to UB.
	"Here you have a community outside the university where you
can do research and also share skills and information," she says. "I
really want to know the needs of the community by connecting with the
people and knowing them on a personal basis."
Eventually, she would like to conduct sociolinguistic interviews with 
Hispanics in Buffalo, discussing such topics as their backgrounds,
families and religion.  She then would analyze the tapes
linguistically for features such as semantics and syntax to see if
patterns emerge.
	Avila hopes to reintegrate into the UB curriculum a Spanish
course for native speakers that was previously offered here. It would
be for students who grew up bilingual, but have had little formal
language instruction and cannot be placed in upper-level courses. The
need for such courses is expanding, says Avila, as the university's
Hispanic population grows.
	In addition, she would like to introduce computer-assisted
language instruction and is examining possible computer language
lessons and drills.
	Avila spent the summer of 1991 at the University at
Pennsylvania under the tutelage of William Labov, the father of
sociolinguistics in the United States, who established the field as a
separate discipline with its own methodology.
	Avila received her bachelor's degree from the University of
Puerto Rico, where she majored in English language and linguistics and
minored in education. Her honors thesis was on the Spanish influence
on English lexicon.
	Her doctoral dissertation focuses on how different variables
such as age, education and occupation have an effect on Puerto Rican
speakers' use of Spanish pronouns. So far, she has found that people
with less education are more likely to follow the norm of Spanish
dialects spoken in Spain and other Latin American countries. Citizens
with professional backgrounds have a higher rate of subject personal
pronoun usage, she says.
	These findings, Avila says, may have implications in terms of
the entire syntax of the Spanish language as it is spoken in Puerto
Rico.