Student and Faculty Publications
Publication Date
1-1-2023
Journal
Psychology of Language and Communication
Abstract
We studied social-psychological effects over time of a faculty-mentor workshop intervention that addressed attitudes associated with language variety and their impact on scientific communication (SC) skill development of PhD and postdoctoral STEM research trainees (N = 274). Six months after their mentors attended the workshop, all mentees had significant gains in productivity in speaking tasks. In particular, mentees with high language discomfort rated their quality of communication with their mentor and their enthusiasm about communicating more highly (p < .05 for both measures), compared to mentees with low language discomfort. In addition, mentees raised speaking nonstandardized varieties of English reported significant reductions in discomfort related to language use (p = .003), compared to mentees raised speaking standardized English. We conclude that training mentors to understand and respond to language diversity and development results in multiple beneficial outcomes for mentees, including the amelioration of language-variety related discomfort in the research environment.
Keywords
research training, impostor, diversity, equity and inclusion, dialect, mentoring, scientific communication, language variety, belonging
Included in
Bioinformatics Commons, Biomedical Informatics Commons, Medical Sciences Commons, Oncology Commons
Comments
PMID: 38738168