| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Brandon Cooper bcooper@tamu.edu |
| Faculty Mentor: | |
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Meeting Times:
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Mondays @ 4PM |
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Team Size:
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4
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| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Opportunity to explore fields of applied linguistics, social psychology, and communication; attend/participate in conferences and conventions like Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, American Educational Research Association, American Association of Applied Linguistics, etc.; earning co-authorship on papers submitted for conference presentations and publications
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Team Needs:
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Interest in/familiarity with social psychology, cross-linguistic & cross-cultural communication, and/or applied linguistics; organizational skills; commitment to equity and inclusivity; ability to plan, schedule, and facilitate social events |
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Description:
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This study investigates contact-based approaches to improve cross-linguistic communication. Because prejudice toward an out-group can have detrimental impacts on speech comprehension (Rubin 1992), intergroup contact is believed to be an effective intervention because “contact across cleavage lines may reduce prejudice by increasing knowledge about the out-group and revealing negative stereotypes to be false. Second, [they] may reduce anxiety about encounters with out-group members. Third, contact may result in increased empathy and perspective-taking” (Scacco & Warren, 2018, p. 656). Additionally, intergroup contact affords participants exposure to unfamiliar speech ways, which improves comprehension in cross-linguistic interactions. Gass and Varonis (1984) reports that familiarity with out-group speech in general, out-group speech ways in particular, and a specific out-group speaker are all significant predictors of comprehension across linguistic differences. And Baese-Berk, Bradlow, and Wright (2013) notes that when individuals are exposed to a variety of out-group speech patterns, the positive benefits on comprehension generalize to novel patterns with which they had no previous experience. Thus, with respect to cross-linguistic communication, all contact is not the same. One form of contact that is frequently utilized in both language proficiency programs and service-learning activities directed toward pre-service teachers is the conversation partnership – an approach that matches a second language learner with a first language user for regular, one-on-one interactions. The conditions of a conversation partnership can be favorable for “producing positive, ‘personalized’ interactions during which interactants not only see each other as unique individuals, but also acquire specific, even self-relevant, information about each other” (Wright et al., 2004, p. 123), including information about specific out-group communication practices. Such conversation partnerships represent “a more intimate form of intergroup contact” (MacInnis & Hodson, 2019, p. 12) that contrasts with group contact, during which participants might interact with a variety of out-group members. Both approaches (i.e., one-one-one and group-based contact) have been shown to improve participants’ perceptions of speech comprehensibility (Staples et al., 2014; Kang et al., 2015) both by reducing bias and increasing experience with unfamiliar speech patterns, but we know little about how the different forms of intergroup contact might facilitate and/or motivate modifications in interlocutors’ communicative strategies, which could also result in improved perceptions of comprehensibility. The present study aims to compare the relative effectiveness of two contact-based approaches to improving cross-linguistic communication. The questions that we hope to answer are: Does one-on-one intergroup contact, wherein individuals have sustained interactions with a single out-group member, result in a similar repertoire and range of communicative adjustments as group-based contact, wherein individuals have shorter interactions with a variety of out-group members? Do participants engaged in one-on-one contact notice their interlocutor making similar communicative adjustments as participants engaged in group-based contact? The aim of this study is to identify the most effective contact-based means for training individuals in cross-linguistic communication. This study is significant because it begins to identify the range of communicative practices that may be acquired through contact-based interventions and those that may require more explicit, classroom intervention. Additionally, we aim to describe the comparative benefit of individual versus group-based contact on enhancing cross-linguistic communicative competence. |