Unpacking unequal participation in culturally diverse groups: Developing linguistic awareness in discussion tasks

Group interaction in classrooms involving students from diverse cultural backgrounds is a major focus for researchers with an interest in promoting equal participation. Discussion tasks are an important context in which the... [ view full abstract ]

Group interaction in classrooms involving students from diverse cultural backgrounds is a major focus for researchers with an interest in promoting equal participation. Discussion tasks are an important context in which the impact of certain linguistic and interactional strategies in empowering or disempowering participants has been exposed (e.g. Baxter 2002). As Gee (2017) underlines, “Discourse linguists have long realized that even what seem to be very minor aspects of language can have important consequences in communication” (p. 612). Giving students opportunities to develop their communication skills in discussion tasks with cultural others is widely seen as sufficient to prepare them for participating in the global workplace. Yet evidence from HE reveals considerable student dissatisfaction with multi-national groupwork. It emanates largely from interactional mismatches resulting in unequal talk share (and ultimately, unequal participation in team projects). Research addressing solutions to this problem is so far limited. In response to calls for wider implementation of methodologies such as those discussed by Marra (2013) for raising awareness of different communication styles, the present study explores an approach in which participants analyse their own interaction in a typical collaborative task. The presentation draws on examples from a corpus of audio and video data collected from activities carried out by three diverse teams of students from China, France, Italy, Philippines and Pakistan taking an intensive undergraduate course in the UK. We report on how participants scrutinised the features of their own interaction in a new task based on Lafferty and Pond’s (1989) ‘Desert Survival Situation’. By drawing on analytical categories such as turn distribution, topic shift, interruptions, and overlap, together with questions, feedback, and humour, they were able to understand the impact of differences in each other’s communication patterns and styles. Supplementary data from interactions with tutors facilitating the projects is provided to illustrate how students engaged with the challenge of linking micro-level features of their discussions to macro-level concepts such as leadership (cf. Walker & Aritz 2014). The presentation concludes with implications for promoting more equal participation in multi-national groups and teams through developing linguistic awareness and understanding the impact of particular discursive strategies.