Raising business communication students’ awareness of nonverbal features of interaction

Abstract

Analysis of conversations between international university students in the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca Interaction (CELFI, McDonough & Trofimovich, 2019) has demonstrated that holds, which are temporary cessations of dynamic movement, are a robust visual cue of nonunderstanding that can be reliably interpreted by external observers as signals of listener comprehension difficulties (e.g. McDonough et al., 2019, 2022, 2023). Using CELFI materials, this study used an experimental design to explore whether business communication students (N = 64) benefit from instructional activities designed to raise their awareness of holds as a signal of nonunderstanding. The students carried out perception tests in Week 1 and Week 5 that presented video excerpts from CELFI showing the depicted listeners’ hold onsets and releases, and the students rated those listeners’ comprehension. In the interim, 31 students completed weekly awareness-raising activities via Moodle (2 hours per week) for four weeks. A mixed ANOVA showed that students who participated in the awareness-raising activities showed significant improvement in their ability to discriminate between hold onsets and releases. Implications for the use of awareness-raising activities to promote recognition of nonverbal behavior are discussed.

FRENCH ABSTRACT

L'analyse des conversations entre étudiants universitaires internationaux dans le Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca Interaction (CELFI, McDonough & Trofimovich, 2019) a démontré que des arrêts temporaires du mouvement dynamique sont un signe visuel solide de non-compréhension qui peuvent être interprétés de manière fiable par des observateurs externes comme des indicateurs de difficultés de compréhension de l‘auditeur (par exemple, McDonough et al., 2019, 2022, 2023). À l‘aide du matériel du CELFI, cette étude a utilisé une conception expérimentale pour déterminer si les étudiants en communication d‘entreprise (N = 64) bénéficient d‘activités pédagogiques conçues pour les sensibiliser aux arrêts des comportements non verbaux en tant que signe de non-compréhension. Au cours de la première et la cinquième semaine, les étudiants ont effectué des tests de perception qui présentaient des extraits vidéo du CELFI montrant les arrêts et les recommencements des mouvements non verbaux des auditeurs représentés, et les étudiants ont évalué la compréhension de ces auditeurs. Entre-temps, 31 étudiants ont suivi des activités de sensibilisation hebdomadaires via Moodle (2 heures par semaine) pendant quatre semaines. Une ANOVA mixte a montré que les étudiants qui ont participé aux activités de sensibilisation ont montré une amélioration significative de leur capacité à faire la distinction entre les arrêts et les recommencements des mouvements non verbaux. Les implications de l‘utilisation d‘activités de sensibilisation pour promouvoir la reconnaissance des comportements non verbaux sont discutées.

PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY

When listening, people can signal that they do not understand the speaker by using words (e.g. ‘what?’) or body language. One type of body language that listeners use in many different languages and cultures to show that they do not understand the speaker is hold. A hold is a brief stop in dynamic movement that the listeners maintain until they understand again. In this study, we taught business communications students about holds to see if they could get better at recognizing them. This skill would help them know if their listeners were understanding so that they could change what they were saying. We taught some students about holds and compared them to other students who did not learn about holds. We found that the students with training did better at recognizing when a hold started and ended than the students who did not get training.

Keywords:

• Nonverbal communication
• holds
• nonunderstanding
• business communication
• awareness

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the members of our research group who shared their valuable insights (Tzu-Hua Chen, Chen Liu, Oguzhan Tekin, Aki Tsunemoto, Pakize Uludag, and Tengteng Xu) and all the research assistants who helped with the corpus data collection and transcription: Marie Apaloo, Dalia Elsayed, Sarah Ercoli, Lisa Gonzales, Xuanji Hu, Ashley Montgomery, Jie Qiu, Quinton Stotz, Lauren Strachan, Kym Taylor Reid, Roza van Lieshout.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this study was provided by a grant awarded to the first and fourth authors by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Grant number 435-2019-0754).