Staff Support for ELA Students: Communicating

Michael Newman
The Opinion Pages
The New York Times, October 5, 2015
SUMMARY:
In “How a New York Accent Can Help You Get Ahead,” from the NY Times on October 5th, Michael Newman writes about the influence of the New Yorker accent on listeners during the 2016 presidential campaigns. Based on linguistic research about New York directness and evidence of directness from presidential candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the writer suggests that there is a lot of power in a New York accent. The perception of power comes in part from the stereotype of New Yorkers in general:
direct, confrontational. Mr. Newman concludes, “However, Democrat or Republican, in an age where trust in politicians is at a minimum, it is not hard to see the attraction of that blunt aspect of the New York image. It’s a quality that can be profoundly appealing.”

Katherine D. Kinzler and Jasmine M. Dejesus
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66.6 (2013): 1146-1158
Please note: Full-text copies of this article are not available online. Current Edmonds CC faculty should use the OneSearch system on the library's Articles and Databases web page to request a copy.
SUMMARY:
Katherine D. Kinzler and Jasmine M. DeJesus’s social psychology research on regional American accent impressions (from "Northern=smart and Southern=nice: The Development of accent attitudes in the United States" from the December 9 2012 issue of Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology) investigates the age at which a child hears an accent and forms an impression about people with that particular accent. From a fairly early age, 9 or 10 years old, the researchers found that common impressions had formed by children living in the North (Illinois) and the South (Tennessee). The article explores potential causes for the formation of such impressions including accent exposure on national television programming, parent/regional attitudes, etc.
Personal commentary:
I selected this article to highlight the tendency toward bias even among speakers of the same language. We must battle with our brains (and socio-cultural pressure) to really listen to English spoken in an accent other than our own!

Ray Young and William Faux, V, II.
The Qualitative Report, 16.2 (2011): 494-508.
Summary:
In Faux and Young's study based on analysis of over one hundred open-ended questionnaires, published in The Qualitative Report in 2011, the data starts to characterize difficult conversations between native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) as interactions involving a sense of belonging or not. "Difficult conversations" involved the NS's attitude toward the NNS's group belonging. If a NNS was accepted as a member of the group, the NS offered help, but if the NNS was not seen as a group member, the conversation became a struggle. The sense of belonging often related to behavior that was expected in a certain role. For instance, if the NNS was a "worker" (like a front desk receptionist at a hotel), and certain behavioral expectations weren't met, the conversation wasn't always successful. Context is king! In the discussion section of the study, the author paraphrases from Chen (1998) stating, "Being mindful requires an awareness of multiple perspectives and identities within contexts of intercultural communication and pertains to all individuals on the personal and cultural levels of interaction" (503).

Matthew S. McGlone and Barbara Breckinridge
Scientific American, September 21, 2010
Summary:
This Scientific American article, written by Matthew McGlone and Barbara Breckinridge reports recent research that Lev-Ari and Keysar did on foreign accent bias. On a very basic level, our brains process speech less easily when the input is more complex (accented, with errors, etc.). Our brains doubt the authenticity of messages uttered in more complex ways. The article explores implications of the bias in the workplace, etc. There is also some interesting commentary here about how accent bias is not mentioned in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964!

Shiri Lev-Ari, Boaz Keysar
The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46 (2010): 1093–1096
SUMMARY:
Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago published accent bias research in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2010 in an attempt to understand why there is a bias against non-native speakers' English accents. In the study, Lev-Ari and Keysar solicit native-speaker credibility judgments of true trivia statements (Ex: A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.) said with a native-speaker accent, a mild non-native speaker accent, or a heavy non-native speaker accent. Native speakers were more likely to believe statements that were uttered by native speakers. In the study native speakers felt that the trivia presented by heavy-accented speakers was the least credible. In the study's review of literature section the researchers examine reasons why there is a non-native speaker bias, and a more simple explanation is that our brains prefer simple and clear in a lot of contexts (handwriting, musical note sequences, etc.). An accent sometimes makes a message more difficult to understand, so perhaps our brains process accents with difficulty much like a note from someone who has handwriting that is difficult to decipher. There seems to be a connection between the difficulty of processing something and the credibility of that thing we are processing.

Seth Mydans
New York Times, April 9, 2007
SUMMARY:
This NY Times article by Seth Mydans highlights the rise of English as the dominant language spoken on this planet. However, it also reminds us of the variety of Englishes spoken around the world because of specific purposes (air traffic control) or specific common technology (the internet) or because specific regions use it as an official language (Singapore). At the end of the article the writer suggests there is some doubt about whether English will continue to dominate as the lingua franca due to the arrival of translation technology that we have yet to see-

Christa de Kleine, Notre Dame of Maryland University
Rachele Lawton, The Community College of Baltimore County
SUMMARY:
Christa de Kleine and Rachele Lawton prepared a white paper on linguistically diverse college students for the College Reading and Learning Association. They begin the paper with a definition of linguistic diversity, which includes students who come from non-English speaking backgrounds, students who speak a global variety of English (ex: English spoken in India), and students whose English is not identical to “mainstream” English taught in public institutions. While the number of speakers of non-English languages surges in the U.S., the challenges faced by linguistically diverse students in the college classroom are not all the same. For example, a student who immigrated to the U.S. as an elementary school-aged student, a generation 1.5 or U.S. educated linguistic minority student, will often come to a college with strong “ear” learning strategies (their writing may even look “oral” in nature) because they have been exposed to spoken English input for an extended period of time; however, an international student may have had more exposure to the written form of English prior to moving to the U.S. for college and may have stronger “eye” learning strategies (they more readily memorize written patterns and often have less experience with turning written words into spoken words). Further, speakers of African American Vernacular English (term varieties including Ebonics, African American English, and Black English) face challenges with reading and writing skill development at school when their home language is not valued in “mainstream” educational English classes.

Because linguistically diverse students face different challenges, many different approaches must be implemented to support these students on college campuses. The article describes a host of measures including building awareness among staff, faculty and administrators that linguistically diverse students face different challenges, acknowledging that varieties of English are not deficits to students, and carefully placing students into courses depending on the way they know English (not all students are served best by ESL classes, and not all by developmental English either). De Kleine and Lawton believe resources are needed and policies need to be in place to make colleges a place of success for linguistically diverse students.