Sharing communicative responsibility: training US students in cooperative strategies for communicating across linguistic difference

2.1 Online module

The online module was structured around three video lectures presented by three of the authors of this paper. Each of these lectures was followed by skills practice or reflection. After responding to demographic questions and a pre-test survey (discussed below), the participants viewed the first video lecture (full script in Appendix A). The lecture began by suggesting that learning about linguistic diversity would be beneficial for CS students because of the international nature of the university and the technology industry. The lecture pointed out that, although people using English as a lingua franca in such settings speak ‘different Englishes’, research has shown that they can successfully communicate about complex topics. The lecture attributed the success of communication across linguistic difference in these settings to the ‘common cooperative approach’ that the interlocutors adopt. It then focused specifically on the role that listeners play in this cooperative approach through the analysis of a sample scenario. Finally, the lecture suggested that participants probably already know many strategies that they could use to help them communicate across linguistic difference and recommended practicing these strategies by seeking out conversations with people who speak differently than they do. Following the first video lecture, the module presented participants with two reflection questions, with text entry boxes for participants to enter open-ended responses:

1. What skills do you have that would help you communicate with people who have a different accent from you?

2. What could you do to develop new strategies for effective communication with people who speak differently from you?

The second lecture presented information about the diversity of Englishes spoken in the world, taking an explicit approach to introducing unfamiliar accents. As Subtirelu and Lindemann (2016) argue, such explicit approaches may have two possible effects. First, they may present information pertinent to understanding particular accents and thus help people better understand nonnative speech. While most studies find no improvement in participants’ comprehension of nonnative speech after being exposed to this kind of information (Derwing et al. 2002; Kubota 2001; Villarreal 2013), Lindemann et al. (2016) found improved comprehension of individual sentences for their participants who received explicit instruction on features of Korean English. Second, explicit instruction about accent diversity may encourage participants to engage in perspective-taking, or the act of imagining ‘the world from another’s vantage point’ (Galinsky et al. 2005: 110), which has been associated with the development of more positive attitudes toward outgroups. By learning why ‘nativelike’ pronunciation is difficult to acquire in a later-learned language, participants “may come to better understand L2 speakers’ struggles and to see their unfamiliar accents not as a sign of ‘incompetence’ but as a feature of linguistic diversity stemming in part from constraints on L2 acquisition” (Subtirelu and Lindemann 2016: 773).

The lecture presented common differences between the sound systems of English and other languages and phonological processes common in nonnative Englishes, in order to explain how and why accents occur and provide tools to identify the patterns inherent in accents. This second lecture was longer than the first and was therefore broken into two shorter segments to maximize learner engagement. After each segment, participants were assessed on how well they understood the material through comprehension questions, a step that Lindemann et al. (2016) argued was relevant to the success of their explicit training in contrast to other studies. An explanation of the correct response was presented after the participants responded to the items, encouraging participants to review the material before moving on to the next segment.

The third lecture continued this discussion of variation in Englishes and introduced the listening practice by briefly introducing the idea of Chinese and Indian Englishes. These varieties were chosen for the listening training to reflect the demographics of the CS students and faculty at this institution, where a wide range of countries of origin is dominated by China and India. The lecture discusses these varieties, arguing that while there is internal heterogeneity in the way that both Chinese and Indian people speak English, there are also commonalities that the participants might notice.

After the third lecture, the participants were given the opportunity to practice listening to both Chinese and Indian speakers, using an implicit approach (i.e., practice with rather than description of different language varieties) designed to familiarize them with nonnative accents (Subtirelu and Lindemann 2016). First, participants heard four Chinese English speakers each reading different sets of five simple sentences. After each sentence, the participants attempted to transcribe what they heard. They were then given immediate feedback on what the speaker said and the option to listen again. After all twenty sentences, they were prompted to generate ideas about interactive strategies they could use to address any difficulties in real-life communicative situations. Next, participants heard two Indian English speakers each deliver a 1-min informative lecture about advances in technology and answered multiple-choice questions about each. Afterwards, they were again asked to describe how they might deal with communication difficulties in real-life situations.

After all of these activities, the participants were presented with two final scenarios. These scenarios (Appendix B) were based on the kinds of communicative situations documented in research on ITA-student communication (e.g., Chiang 2009; Subtirelu 2017) as well as relevant studies of classroom discourse more generally (e.g., Artemeva and Fox 2011). One scenario depicted a communication difficulty between students and an ITA in a classroom setting, and the second focused on a one-to-one interaction during office hours. The participants were asked to describe what they could do to improve communication in these situations. Completion of the online module was due before class.

2.2 In-person activities

After completing the online module, participants met in their regular CS seminar sections. There were 9 sections total, each with about 35 students enrolled. One of the authors served as guest facilitator for all of the 50-min sessions. In this face-to-face module, students participated in a series of activities designed to explore ways of communicating across linguistic difference, now as part of a larger community.

The facilitator began with a question about students’ impressions of the online module. Next, students were asked to articulate why they thought the unit had been added to their first year seminar course and what value it could have for them now as students and later as CS professionals. Then, the facilitator asked students to think back to the online module’s hypothetical scenarios involving an ITA and brainstorm strategies to effectively and respectfully communicate across linguistic difference. As students contributed possible strategies, the facilitator added their responses to a document projected on a screen at the front of the classroom.

Next, the facilitator led the students in a perspective-taking activity designed to develop a Cooperation orientation by (a) developing empathy and (b) motivating repair and accommodation behaviors they may not habitually use. She asked the participants to imagine that they were the ITA and then to write down responses to two prompts. The first asked ‘What do you think it is like to not be understood?’ and prompted students to complete the statement ‘I would feel …’. The second asked students ‘What might you want from students?’. Students were prompted to complete two statements: (1) ‘In class, I would want students to …’ and (2) ‘In one-to-one interactions, I would want …’. These activities were loosely based on other perspective-taking activities that have been shown to be effective at improving native speakers’ attitudes toward nonnative speakers (e.g., Manohar and Appiah 2016; Weyant 2007). After the students had written down their responses, the facilitator asked them to share their responses and added to the list of strategies that the group had already begun generating.

The facilitator then presented a distinction between ‘working against linguistic difference’ and ‘working across linguistic difference’, concepts that are similar to the Avoidance and Collaboration orientations we discussed above. Working against linguistic difference was described as seeing the cause of communication problems in linguistically diverse spaces as some speakers’ deviations from ‘standard’ language, which structures the burden for successful communication and ‘adaptation’ unfairly. In contrast, working across linguistic difference was described as seeing linguistic diversity as the norm and expecting all parties to cooperate to make sure communication is successful. After introducing these contrasting terms, the facilitator asked the students to discuss what the concepts mean to them, where they might have previously witnessed or experienced contexts where people tend to work against linguistic difference, and what the benefits of working across linguistic difference might be for them personally.

Finally, the facilitator assigned participants to small groups, each including a mix of self-identified native and nonnative English speakers. The students were instructed to imagine that they were working on a group project and were planning the ‘rules of engagement’ or communication norms for the group. Each group was responsible for producing a list of guidelines or strategies they thought would help to ensure effective communication and a successful group project. The purpose of this activity was to give participants an opportunity to discuss strategies with peers from a different linguistic background, gaining ideas for new techniques and feedback about strategies they might feel reluctant to use. Several minutes before collecting group lists, the facilitator asked students to take note of how balanced the responsibility for communication seemed in their strategies, and to intentionally create more balance in cases where either speakers or listeners were underrepresented in their responsibilities. While this request for balance was not originally planned, it was implemented in all nine sessions after occurring organically in the first, when the facilitator noticed how predominantly speaker strategies such as ‘speak clearly’ or ‘talk slowly’ appeared on the lists-in-progress. Finally, while still in class, via a QR code and link, participants electronically completed a post-test with the option to make comments about all or any part of the intervention.

3.1 Data collection and analysis

Drawing on Subtirelu’s (2016, 2017 ethnographic work, we constructed a questionnaire to operationalize students’ orientations toward communicating across linguistic difference with their nonnative English-speaking instructors in order to quantify outcomes from our intervention in pre- and post-tests. Our approach to the questionnaire construction is influenced by the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen 1991) in that it measures reported behavioral intentions, which have been frequently demonstrated to be strong predictors of future behavior (e.g. Bamberg and Möser 2007). Subtirelu and Gopavaram (2016) applied this approach to examine the effects of information about instructors’ language on students’ intentions to register for courses they teach. Our questionnaire extends earlier efforts by measuring students’ intentions to engage in several other behaviors identified in Subtirelu (2017).

In our questionnaire, participants were presented with a scenario in which a course they needed was being taught by a native-Mandarin-speaking instructor from China, the most common background of international instructors in the department, and asked to report on a five-point scale how likely they would be to engage in each of twelve behaviors (Tables 2 and 3). Participants responded to this questionnaire once before the online module (pre-test) and again after the in-class module (post-test). Time between pre- and post-tests ranged from two to three weeks. We assigned lower numeric values to responses indicating less willingness (1 = ‘very unlikely’) and higher values to responses indicating higher willingness (5 = ‘very likely’).

In addition to analyzing participants’ responses to the questionnaire, we considered their written responses to various questions throughout the online module and the in-person session. In particular, as described above, at the end of the online module participants were asked how they would respond to two scenarios—one in class and one in office hours—in which they were listening to an ITA, Yousef, explain mathematical proofs and having trouble understanding. We initially considered making Yousef Indian, representing the second-largest international group in the department, but decided that perceptions and assumptions about Indian English speakers might be too heterogenous, since many Indians are native English speakers and may be recognized by some participants as highly proficient in English. We therefore chose an Egyptian background, which would be widely assumed to be nonnative English speaking. The scenarios are similar to those presented in the questionnaire; both ask the participants to consider how they might respond to situations involving communication difficulty with a nonnative English-speaking instructor. However, the open-ended responses produced for the items about Yousef provide richer explanation of how the participants might proceed in the situations described as well as comments justifying their approach. In addition, 19 participants responded to the optional question at the end of the intervention (after the post-test) asking for any comments they had about their experience of the intervention. Together, this qualitative data provides a valuable complementary source of information about participants’ thinking.

The first author read through all of the responses and coded them according to whether they suggested an orientation toward Avoidance, Collaboration, or a combination of the two. In addition to coding each text, he made notes about surprising, unexpected, or intriguing strategies or justifications for strategies. In the next section we discuss the results from the quantitative analysis, then present examples from these responses.

3.2 Findings and discussion

In order to estimate the change in participants’ orientations toward communication across linguistic difference from before to after the intervention, we conducted Wilcoxon signed rank tests (a nonparametric within-subjects comparison) on each of the questionnaire’s twelve items (using a Bonferroni adjustment, α = 0.004), comparing participants’ reported intentions to engage in Collaboration and Avoidance on the pre- and post-tests. We found significant changes on four items. These included two items from the Collaboration set (Table 2): willingness to raise one’s hand immediately and ask for clarification during a lecture (95% CI [1.49, 0.50]) and willingness to learn more about an instructor’s language and background on one’s own time to improve communication (95% CI [1.00, 0.50]). The other two items were the corresponding items for the Avoidance set (Table 3): likeliness of remaining quiet and letting the problem pass when something in a lecture was unclear (95% CI [−0.50, −1.00]) and assuming that one’s own knowledge of the instructor’s language and background is not important or is not one’s own responsibility (95% CI [−0.50, −1.00]). In comparison to their responses on the pre-test, participants’ responses on the post-test shifted in the desired direction, toward increased intended Collaboration and decreased intended Avoidance, by approximately one half to one full point (or in the case of asking for clarification during a lecture, up to 1.5 points) on the five-point scale.

We also considered the results in terms of the number of participants who showed signs of desired changes in their reported intentions. While participants might change their responses for a variety of study-irrelevant reasons, we observed that two to three times as many of the participants shifted toward increased intended Collaboration as their counterparts who shifted toward Avoidance (e.g., 80 participants becoming more likely vs. 31 becoming less likely to ask for clarification during a lecture). We consider these changes to be desirable, in part because they bring most participants’ reported intended behaviors in line with the apparent desires of their instructors, as reported, for example, in Alberts et al. (2013).

Examining their open-ended responses to a similar situation provides the possibility for richer understanding of the participants’ reasoning and the complex socially-informed determinations that they make. Although at pre-test many participants reported that they would likely let communication difficulty pass in a situation where an instructor was speaking to the whole class (see Table 3, item 6), responses at the end of the online module to a very similar scenario in which an ITA, Yousef, was explaining proofs to a whole class reflected greater commitment to resolving the difficulty directly. In fact, of 174 responses, 158 reported that they would engage in some form of repair. Twenty-six mentioned strategies reflective of Avoidance orientations, including seeking other sources of assistance (23 participants) or doing nothing to deal with this situation (3 participants).

These frequency counts likely reflect the participants’ responses to the encouragement to engage in Collaboration they received from our intervention. However, when we more carefully consider how the participants report that they would attempt to engage in repair, it is clear that a reported willingness to engage in Collaboration does not necessarily lead to strategies that would productively and respectfully clear up communication difficulties. Excerpts (1) and (2) below exemplify responses that do not acknowledge the interpersonal complexities of repair.

Asking a nonspecific question, as in (1), or requesting repetition, as in (2), were common responses to this item. As we suggested in our review of the literature, nonnative speakers may experience nonspecific questions (e.g., what did you say?) or requests for repetition as microaggressions emphasizing their perceived Otherness (e.g., Canagarajah 2013). Hence, the strategies recommended by the students above do not fully address the interpersonal complexities of the situation.

Other responses like the one in (3) show a greater engagement with these interpersonal complexities.

In particular, the participant who wrote (3) shows awareness that repair requests can be interpreted negatively and suggests an approach that attributes blame for the communication difficulty to challenges with course content rather than the instructor’s language. In contrast, the participant who wrote (2) argues that Yousef ‘should not get offended because he must be aware of his own accent’, suggesting a lack of sensitivity to the anxiety about their Englishes that many ITAs experience (Zhu and Bresnahan 2021). Furthermore, the participant who wrote (3) also notes that, at the end of an extensive explanation, specific clarification questions would be more appropriate than non-specific requests for repetition like that suggested in (2). Such observations reveal that willingness to attempt repair with nonnative speakers is perhaps necessary but insufficient for ensuring that native speakers respectfully and productively communicate across linguistic difference. These data suggest that future interventions would benefit from providing greater attention to considering interpersonal complexities.

We now consider the number of participants who showed signs of desired changes in their reported willingness to learn about their nonnative English-speaking instructors’ backgrounds. Again, nearly three times as many participants shifted toward a Collaboration orientation as toward an Avoidance orientation on these items. We consider this change to be particularly desirable in that it shows participants’ greater commitment to acknowledge and examine ways in which they contribute to communication difficulty.

Related data comes from participants’ responses to a question from near the beginning of the online module, in which they were asked ‘What could you do to develop new strategies for effective communication with people who speak differently than you?’ Their answers provide insight into how the initial video prompted them to consider how they might contribute to improving communication across linguistic difference. Below are two responses:

Excerpts (4) and (5) provide examples of suggestions for improving communication across linguistic difference that contrast with observations from studies of students’ attitudes toward ITAs. For example, Damron (2003) reports that many of the students in her study seemed unwilling to interact with their ITAs, apparently including making any effort to learn about their backgrounds. Damron reports that, even after a full semester with their ITAs, 40% of the students she surveyed did not know what country their ITAs were from, and 77% reported having ‘learned nothing about the culture or background’ of their ITA (85). The apparent greater willingness to learn about their nonnative English-speaking instructors would be a welcome change for improving communication across linguistic difference in the US university classroom.

It is also worth considering those items that did not suggest a change in participants’ responses. For the Collaboration set (Table 2), these items all had higher mean scores on both pre- and post-tests than those items that did show change. This may suggest that, at the outset of the intervention, many participants felt they already frequently used the strategies discussed in these items. For example, item seven asks the respondent how likely they would be to ask for clarification in a one-on-one interaction with the instructor. The mean response at pre-test was 3.9, corresponding roughly to ‘somewhat likely’ on our scale. In comparison, the mean response at pre-test to item five, regarding asking for clarification in front of a whole class, was 2.4, a noticeably lower value situated between ‘neutral’ and ‘somewhat unlikely’ on our scale. Hence, in a one-on-interaction the participants reported more willingness to engage in Collaboration at pre-test than when listening to an instructor speak to their whole class. This finding speaks to the importance of the communicative situation in considering how people choose to communicate across linguistic difference. This issue was highlighted by a few participants in saying what they would do if they did not understand Yousef’s lecture on proofs, as in excerpt (6):

Here, the participant admits discomfort with attempting to repair communication difficulty in front of their classmates. Although such responses to this prompt were uncommon, they are similar to concerns from students in Subtirelu (2017) who tended to feel less comfortable engaging in repair when the instructor was addressing the whole class.

Similarly, items from the Avoidance set (Table 3) that did not show changes tended to have lower mean scores than the items that did show change, suggesting that participants were already refraining from those behaviors. For example, at both pre-test and post-test, participants reported being ‘somewhat unlikely’ to switch sections when they found out that their instructor would be a nonnative English speaker. In this case, with high demand for mandatory courses in the department, all CS sections normally fill before the instructors are known, making this an unrealistic strategy for students. Thus, the lack of change observed for many items may reflect participants’ belief that they are already engaging in the behaviors that our intervention encouraged or abstaining from behaviors that our intervention discouraged.

One item from the Avoidance set did not follow this trend. Item ten asks how likely the participant would be to contact a classmate instead of contacting the professor with a question about a homework assignment. At both pre- and post-test, the mean response corresponded roughly to ‘somewhat likely’ on our scale. The lack of observable change in how participants responded to this item (and the related item nine) suggests that our intervention did not necessarily encourage participants to seek out their nonnative English-speaking instructors as resources outside of class. This is not very surprising since our intervention does not explicitly encourage such behaviors, and students often report avoiding reaching out to their instructors outside of class for reasons other than the instructor’s language background (Griffin et al. 2014). For example, one participant added the following as an additional comment after completing the post-test:

Nonetheless, while students may avoid any instructor for many reasons, evidence from this study and others suggest this avoidance may be particularly common for nonnative English-speaking instructors, especially those who are seen by students as problematic communicators. Indeed, research has suggested that, rather than seeking out their instructors’ help, students often rely on peers and others when they struggle to understand their nonnative English-speaking instructors (Plakans 1997).