Term
Fall 2022
Capstone
Capstone Project
Degree Name
MA-TESOL
Facilitator(s)
Julia Reimer
Content Expert
Darren LaScotte
Abstract
Research agrees that monolingualism, through a lack of linguistic and metalinguistic awareness and general linguistic reflexivity, is the source of a widely observed listening problem where monolingual native-speakers (NSs) of English fail to correctly perceive the meaning of spoken English that diverges from their own in phonological forms or contextual norms. On the other hand, research has also shown multilingual communities, such as those which use English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), to display the intuitive use of collaborative, pragmatic listening strategies that keep them from misunderstanding each other, despite their differences in forms and norms. As a result, this project sought to create a website that would teach the strategic multilingual listening techniques intuitive to ELF to monolingual English NSs to raise their speech recognition skills in exchanges with NNSs of English. This objective was influenced by the concept of ambiguity tolerance (TA) which measures a person’s level of listening flexibility based on the sum of their language learning or language exposure experiences over time (Dewaele & Wei, 2013) and by the understanding that a person’s perceptual boundaries can shift (Cenoz, 2019). The website first offers users an self-assessment, through which they are introduced to TA as they respond to prompts about their language experiences and perceptions of English variety. The next two sections of the website offer video-based training, first in understanding the useful linguistic repertoire that each communicator has access to if activated, then in pragmatic listening strategies observed in multilingual ELF-using communities. The goal of this project is to give English NS United States educators, who have had their listening abilities influenced by monolingualism, the chance to act upon their linguistic identities and take responsibility for listening in a way that will positively impact the second language (L2) English students in their classroom.
Project Type
website creation
Keywords
Adult Education, Community Building, Motivation, Multicultural Education
Recommended Citation
Fruechte, Leah, "The Role of the Native-Speaker Listener in English as a Lingua Franca Interactions" (2022). School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Projects. 887.
https://digitalcommons.hamline.edu/hse_cp/887
dc_type
text
dc_publisher
DigitalCommons@Hamline
dc_format
application/pdf
dc_source
School of Education Student Capstone Projects