Assessing Preservice Teachers’ Presentation Capabilities: Contrasting the Modes of Communication with the Constructed Impression

A research-based understanding of how to develop and assess classroom presentation skills is vital for the effective development of pre-service teacher communication capabilities. This paper identifies and compares two different models of assessing pre-service teachers’ presentation performance – one based on the Modes of Communication (voice, body language, words, and alignment between those elements) and another based on features of the Constructed Impression of the communication acts (confidence, clarity, engagement and appropriateness). The Modes of Communication and the Constructed Impression of 164 pre-service teacher presentations were rated. The Constructed Impression model provided a better fit to data, while averaging of Modes of Communication elements offered more accurate prediction of overall score. All elements in both models made a significant contribution to the overall perception of communication performance. The study also reports on the relative contribution of voice, body language, words and alignment to the perceived confidence, clarity, engagement and appropriateness of the pre-service teacher presentations. Implications for developing pre-service teachers’ presentation capabilities are also discussed

The polite wiggle-room effect in charity donation decisions

We extend research on charity donations by exploring an everyday tactic for increasing compliance: asking politely. We consider three possible effects of politeness on charity donations: a positive effect, a negative effect, and a wiggle room effect where the perception of the request is adjusted to decline donating without feeling selfish. Results from six experiments systematically supported the polite wiggle room effect. In hypothetical donations contexts, indirect requests were judged more polite. In real donation contexts, though, indirect requests were not judged as more polite and had no consistent effect on donation decision. Rather, the decision to donate predicted the perceived politeness of the request, independently of its phrasing. Experiment 4 provided causal evidence that participants justified their donation decisions by adjusting their perception of the request. The polite wiggle-room effect has important implications for organizations that seek to increase compliance while maintaining a positive image

Notions of impoliteness at the Argentinian workplace. Representations and evaluations from users and learners of EFL for business purposes

Treball Final de Màster Universitari en Ensenyament i Adquisició de la Llengua Anglesa en Contextos Multilingües. Codi: SAY531. Curs acadèmic: 2011-2012Despite some attention given to the teaching of politeness phenomena from a non-universalistic view (Brown, 2010; Cashman, 2006; Meier, 1997; Nurmukhamedov & Kim, 2010; Sharifian, 2008; Uso-Juan & Martinez-Flor, 2007), impoliteness has largely been ignored by both teachers and researchers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) (Mugford, 2008, 2009). This is particularly true in the area of English for Business Purposes (BP), where the understanding of cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness is but starting (Culpeper, Crawshaw, & Harrison, 2008; Culpeper, Marti, Mei, Nevala, & Schauer, 2010). Given such state-of-the-art, I contribute to this area by researching first-order notions of impoliteness (Watts, 2003) as it emerges from Argentinian users and learners of EFL-BP when exchanging emails with U.S. American employees in workplace contexts. From a natural corpus of emails, I select two syndicated conflictive email sequences (words=939) as the basis for the design of research instruments. These involve a questionnaire and a discourse completion test to Argentinian participants (n=22), as well as a semi-structured interview to U.S. American interviewees (n=10). Argentinian participants characterize impoliteness through features referring to aggressiveness, imperativeness, inappropriateness, inconsiderateness, heedlessness, unfairness, and evasiveness, while U.S. Americans referred to interrupting, tardiness, and uncooperativeness. Initial pedagogic implications for the teaching of impoliteness are derived from these results

Augmenting Situated Spoken Language Interaction with Listener Gaze

Collaborative task solving in a shared environment requires referential success. Human speakers follow the listener’s behavior in order to monitor language comprehension (Clark, 1996). Furthermore, a natural language generation (NLG) system can exploit listener gaze to realize an effective interaction strategy by responding to it with verbal feedback in virtual environments (Garoufi, Staudte, Koller, & Crocker, 2016). We augment situated spoken language interaction with listener gaze and investigate its role in human-human and human-machine interactions. Firstly, we evaluate its impact on prediction of reference resolution using a mulitimodal corpus collection from virtual environments. Secondly, we explore if and how a human speaker uses listener gaze in an indoor guidance task, while spontaneously referring to real-world objects in a real environment. Thirdly, we consider an object identification task for assembly under system instruction. We developed a multimodal interactive system and two NLG systems that integrate listener gaze in the generation mechanisms. The NLG system “Feedback” reacts to gaze with verbal feedback, either underspecified or contrastive. The NLG system “Installments” uses gaze to incrementally refer to an object in the form of installments. Our results showed that gaze features improved the accuracy of automatic prediction of reference resolution. Further, we found that human speakers are very good at producing referring expressions, and showing listener gaze did not improve performance, but elicited more negative feedback. In contrast, we showed that an NLG system that exploits listener gaze benefits the listener’s understanding. Specifically, combining a short, ambiguous instruction with con- trastive feedback resulted in faster interactions compared to underspecified feedback, and even outperformed following long, unambiguous instructions. Moreover, alternating the underspecified and contrastive responses in an interleaved manner led to better engagement with the system and an effcient information uptake, and resulted in equally good performance. Somewhat surprisingly, when gaze was incorporated more indirectly in the generation procedure and used to trigger installments, the non-interactive approach that outputs an instruction all at once was more effective. However, if the spatial expression was mentioned first, referring in gaze-driven installments was as efficient as following an exhaustive instruction. In sum, we provide a proof of concept that listener gaze can effectively be used in situated human-machine interaction. An assistance system using gaze cues is more attentive and adapts to listener behavior to ensure communicative success

Direct or Polite? Antecedents and Consequences of How Employees Express Voice.

Prior research on voice has focused predominantly on voicers’ perception of threats to the self, paying significantly less attention to voicers’ perception of threats to the presumed voice targets, such as to their manager. In this dissertation, I posit that voicers’ perception of threat to their manager in a voice episode influences the methods of voice. In particular, I draw from politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987) to propose that voicers actively mitigate anticipated threats to their manager in a voice episode by varying the degree of directness (being explicit about desire for change) and politeness (being mannerly, courteous, and respectful). I then explain how interpersonal characteristics between voicers and their manager (in the form of psychological power and leader–member exchange) alter the voicers’ perception of how their manager interprets and reacts to voice. Results from a diary study and a situated experiment provide convergent evidence that employees are less direct and more polite when they raise an issue that is perceived as potentially threatening to their manager. Moreover, these effects are mitigated when the quality of the leader–member exchange relationship is stronger. Finally, results linking voice directness and voice politeness with managerial responses to voice show that voice directness is more strongly associated with idea endorsement, whereas voice politeness is more strongly associated with subordinate liking. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.PHDBusiness AdministrationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100002/1/chakfu_1.pd