Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. MaryAnn Romski, committee chair; Rose A. Sevcik, Lauren B. Adamson, Roger A. Bakeman, committee members. Electronic text (53 p. : ill.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 17, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 48-53).

The purpose of the research was to develop a test of oral communicative competence for English as a Second Language (ESL) students at the college level. This research first reviewed the current literature on the topic of communicative competence from the perspectives of linguistics and sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and speech communication. The 1iterature on testing for communicative competence within the ESL and foreign language teaching fields was also reviewed. A 7-minute oral semi-direct taped test was then developed and administered to a trial group of 5 ESL students and a final group of 25 ESL students at Portland State University. The test consisted of 5 short information questions and 10 social situations to which the subject was requested to respond. The test was rated for three separate criteria: intelligibility, grammatical correctness, and appropriateness. Two different raters were used for each criterion; another rater rated for all criteria. A reliability study was conducted on the raters wherein the reliability of the raters was shown to be significantly high. The validity of the test was established by conducting face-to-face interviews with the trial and final subjects prior to their taking the taped tests. The results showed that the degree of association between the overall ratings on the taped test and the overall ratings on the interview was significant, though not significant for individual criteria. A correlation with the CELT listening comprehension test was not significant.

This study investigated how a medium's richness, the type of organizational communication message, and organizational level of the respondent affected two dimensions of communication competence: appropriateness and effectiveness. In total, 93 employees of a single organization responded to a three-part questionnaire that posed episode specific questions assessing the competence that they would attribute to the use of each of five media in each of the three episodes. Research questions addressed the effects of the richness of five media (face-to-face; voice mail; electronic mail; written memo; and typed document) on communication effectiveness and appropriateness ratings when episodes involving production-, innovation-, and maintenance-type organizational functions were considered. Also considered as an independent variable was respondent occupation level (physical, clerical, managerial) to determine if ratings of communication competency change given the organizational level of the respondent. A 3 x 3 x 5 factorial analysis of variance (AN OVA) was employed to analyze the effect of the three independent variables on perceived communication effectiveness and appropriateness. Results showed that the effect of type of medium on perceived communication effectiveness and communication appropriateness of a message depended on the nature of the situation in which the medium was used and that the effect of organizational level on perceived communication competence depended on the type of medium used. Organizational level alone did not have an effect on perceived effectiveness and appropriateness, nor did the interaction of organizational level and type of message affect communication competency ratings. Strong support was found for the role of face-to-face communication as the most effective and appropriate medium for organizational communication regardless of the situation.

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published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1984 W37 / Master of Arts

The increasing contact among humans across the globe has shifted cultural, political, ecological, economic, and technological realities and boundaries that shape the shrinking world of the twenty-first century (Chen & Starosta, 2008; Spitzberg & Changnon, 2009). With this increasing contact and shift, today’s world is becoming semiopragmatically and socio-semiopragmatically more heterogeneous (Zuengler & Cole, 2005). This heterogeneity creates "zones of contact" (Pratt, 1991) which engender "sites of struggle" (Norton, 2000) for people from different socio-semiotic backgrounds. In these zones and sites, people encounter affective, cognitive, and behavioral challenges when communicating social and cultural meanings through the semiotic resources available to them (Halliday, 1978; Hodge & Kress, 1988; Hymes, 1962, 1964, 1972; Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008; Waugh, 1981, 1984). The reasons for these challenges basically have their roots in the socioculturally contexted nature of those semiotic resources that have particular semiotic potentials or affordances within or across communities of practice (Gibson, 1979; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Liddicoat, 2009; van Leeuwen, 2004).Based on these underpinnings, the current study defines the concept of communication through the lens of social semiotics and ethnography of communication–the combination of which is referred to as semio-ethnography in this research. The conceptualization of communication through semio-ethnography leads to a reformulation of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) regarding the three different and yet intertwined aspects of ICC, as suggested by Chen and Starosta (1998, 2000, 2008): affective (intercultural sensitivity), cognitive (intercultural awareness), and behavioral (intercultural adroitness). With this reformulation, this study proposes an alternative framework of ICC called the "Semio-Ethnographic Model of Intercultural Communicative Competence (SEMICC)". In the light of this alternative model, this research examines the ICC of Turkish international graduate students in the United States of America through the triangulation of an intercultural sensitivity scale (ISS), an oral discourse completion test (DCT), and semi-structured interviews. With this particular aim in mind, the obtained data are both quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. The findings indicate that the semio-ethnographic approach to communication can serve effectively to understand how communication takes place on the affective, cognitive, and behavioral planes in a given socio-semiotic world. Within the realm of this approach to communication, the findings show that intercultural sensitivity constitutes an important aspect of ICC because L2 learners' active desire and motivation to understand, respect, and acknowledge diversities or differences across socio-semiotic worlds can either promote or hinder the development of their ICC. The qualitative and quantitative results reveal that intercultural awareness establishes the ground for L2 learners' awareness of their own and others' socio-semiotic worlds because they need to detect the diversities among these socio-semiotic worlds and the sources of challenges to effective and appropriate navigation in the target socio-semiotic context. The findings also show that intercultural adroitness has equal importance in the crux of ICC because L2 learners need to use the semiotic resources (e.g., language, kinesics, proxemics, chronemics, and the like) available in in the target socio-semiotic world effectively and appropriately in order to communicate social and cultural meanings. Given these findings, this dissertation aims to enrich the ICC literature by offering various theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical implications and directions for future research and applications.

This ethnographic study of language use and English language learners in Central Java, Indonesia examines globalization processes within and beyond language; processes of language shift and change in language ecologies; and critical and comprehensive approaches to the teaching of English around the world. From my position as teacher-researcher and insider-outsider in an undergraduate English Department and the community surrounding the university, I engaged in reflections with students and educators in examining local language ecologies; needs for and access to English language resources; and how English majors negotiated "double positionalities" as both members of a global community of English speakers and experts in local meaning systems within which English forms played a role. In order to understand English, language ecologies, and globalization in situ, I triangulated these findings with language and education policy creation and negotiation at micro-, meso- and macro- levels, (Blommaert, 2005; Hornberger & Hult, 2010; McCarty, 2011; Pennycook, 2001, 2010).Globalization is found to be part and parcel of the distribution of English around the world; however, English's presence around the world is understood to be just one manifestation of contemporary globalization. More salient are the internationalization of standards, global corporate and media flows of information, and access to educational and information resources. These are all regulated by the state which, while working to maintain an Indonesian identity, relegates local languages to peripheries in space and time, and regulates access to all language resources, creating an upward spiral of peripheralization wherein the levels of proficiency in local, national, and English languages represent access gained to state-provided educational resources.