How to Do Things With Words: Language Interventions to Improve Mentoring Effectiveness

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are by now a familiar part of the landscape of academia, and many policies, systems, and programs have been launched to broaden opportunity and create a safe and just environment for all. This presentation will discuss a powerful but underappreciated aspect of diversity and inclusion: the role of language background (what we grew up speaking) and language use (how we use language in our everyday lives). People rarely stop to think about how much they know—or think they know—about others by the way they speak and write, and how much they tell—or don’t tell—others about themselves, by the way we use language. Imagine for a moment that you hear someone speaking but you can’t see them. What image do you form in your mind about their gender, their race or ethnicity, their age, their level of education, where they’re from and how long they may have been where they are now, and possibly their sexuality, their level of intelligence, their energy level, their attitude, and their emotional state, to name a few? We make these judgments almost instantaneously and often unconsciously. Language use is a key marker of identity, and a unique one. Studies have shown that infants under 6 months of age prefer a stranger who uses the same voice accent as their mother to a stranger who is of the same racial characteristics as their mother (Kinzler et al., 2011). Unlike physical characteristics, we have the power to modify how we use language. But unlike the clothes and hairstyles we use, we can’t change our customary way of speaking instantly or without some effort and practice. Language use is a special case.

Mentees and language use

Mentees are typically striving to enter a professional community of practice, whether STEM, social science, clinical, or humanities research. One unavoidable fact of this process is that mentees have to do a lot of talking and a lot of writing, and they have to do this in a new kind of language, the language that recognized professionals use. For all but a privileged few, this process takes time and emotional resilience. It is an even more intense process for mentees who are speakers of languages other than English or whose family backgrounds are very different from the world of mainstream academia. With a little bit of awareness, though, mentors can guide and support their mentees through this process. The goal is not to ‘fix’ the way mentees speak and write, but to normalize this rite of passage, to recognize unconscious biases, and to offer resources and a safe environment for mentees to develop their professional communication skills.

This presentation will focus on two broad areas where mentors can have a meaningful impact without becoming language instructors and without an onerous time commitment. The first way is helping mentees develop their scholarly communication skills in a way that works with the dynamics of language development rather than against them. The second way is through recognizing and understanding the diversity of communication styles found among academic researchers and helping to reduce feelings of uncertainty and stigma. These two approaches are each at the heart of an interventional research project focused on mentoring and communication skills.

Project 1: “Scientific Communication Advances Research Excellence” (SCOARE)

The SCOARE project is the culmination of over 9 years of research on mentoring scientific communication skills for STEM doctoral and postdoctoral trainees. The first two phases of this research found that the mentored development of scientific communication skills predicts intention to remain in a research career. Grounded in Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent et al., 1994), the hypothesis was that research trainees who were mentored appropriately for scientific communication skill development and who made the effort to communicate more frequently would have higher science identity, higher self-efficacy for scientific communication, and stronger outcome expectations for scientific communication (Cameron et al., 2013, 2020). Based on these findings, the research team designed and tested an intervention to help mentors apply this knowledge to their mentoring. SCOARE is a 6-hour mentoring skills workshop for STEM faculty mentors of PhD and postdoctoral trainees. These mentors and the mentees they nominated completed surveys before the mentor attended and 6 months after the mentor attended the workshop (The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center IRB Protocol 2018–0206). See Figure 1. The SCOARE workshop has been delivered nationally for over 4 years, originally in person and then virtually, to over 400 faculty mentors, as well as program directors, deans, and administrators around the country.

Figure 1:

SCOARE study design

SCOARE’s relevance to DEI

The SCOARE workshop addresses DEI through a nontraditional approach: encouraging inclusiveness and development of science identity through scientific communication skills. Home language background (whether one was raised speaking Standard English, or one or more of a regional dialect, an ethnic sociolect, or English as a second language) and knowledge of the highly specialized type of English needed for academia play critical roles in whether individuals feel like they “belong.” Prior studies have shown that mentees who feel they are judged unfavorably because of the way they speak and who experience discomfort in the research environment due to the way they speak English are significantly more likely to have been raised speaking nonstandard varieties of English or another language. Moreover, this group is significantly more likely to be members of underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds and/or first-generation college students (Trachtenberg et al., 2018). SCOARE aims to surface and normalize the impact of linguistic diversity and to provide mentors with strategies to make mentees feel welcome and included while at the same time scaffolding the development of their professional communication style.

Description of the SCOARE workshop

The SCOARE workshop’s purpose is not to teach mentors how to teach scientific communication or edit manuscripts, but to teach faculty STEM mentors how to mentor the development of communication skills from a linguistically informed perspective. Content is organized around the following objectives:

• Understand the role of communication skills in research career development;

• Understanding and respond appropriately to linguistic diversity;

• Provide expectations and structure for communication skill development;

• Give acknowledgement and feedback skillfully;

• Stimulate engagement in writing and speaking and provide frequent opportunities for low-stakes opportunities to write and speak.

Each of the objectives is achieved through a brief didactic presentation followed by discussion and application exercises; attendees themselves contribute a wealth of experience to the discussion. SCOARE provides practical strategies that can be implemented immediately, and participants need no special knowledge of grammar, composition, technical writing, or editing. Some examples of strategies include diagnosing individuals’ particular challenges, including internalized linguistic stigma; coaching mentees through building a coherent research narrative; giving feedback in a productive and respectful manner; and finding numerous opportunities to get mentees writing and speaking about research every day. An external evaluation of SCOARE’s Year 2 cohort found that mentors self-reported statistically significant skill gains (p < .001) in providing feedback to trainees about their scientific writing, speaking, or presenting; diagnosing trainees’ needs in scientific writing; applying new and various techniques when mentoring trainees in scientific writing; and motivating trainees to engage in writing, speaking, or presenting (Dahlstrom et al., 2022).

Overview of SCOARE study results: Mentee effects

Preliminary results from the research survey of 199 mentees suggest that 6 months after mentors attended the workshop, their mentees experienced significant gains in self-efficacy for writing (p < .001), spoke up more frequently (p < .001), and had no changes in the level of science identity, whereas a control group whose mentors did not attend (n = 40) did not experience these positive changes and had diminished science identity (p < .001). Among the group of mentees whose mentors did attend the workshop, mentees who were raised speaking language varieties other than Standard English (n = 144) experienced reductions in two levels of discomfort, “feeling judged unfavorably due to the way I speak” (p < .001) and “discomfort at work or school due to the way I speak” (p < .001), while the Standard English group (n = 130) had no changes.

Project 2: “Building a Diverse Biomedical Workforce Through Communication Across Difference” (CAD)

CAD, like SCOARE, is also concerned with the role of communication in mentees’ academic lives and identities and is also a workshop intervention preceded and followed by research surveys to test the intervention’s effects. But whereas the SCOARE workshop is centered on scholarly scientific communication, the CAD workshop is centered on the social process of building bridges with those who are culturally and academically different across a range of dimensions: race/ethnicity, language background, first-generation status, stage of training (undergraduate vs. graduate or postdoc), scientific discipline studied, and institutional background (private/public, large/small, high/low research, etc.). Research trainees experience all of these differences at once and may not be sure to what they should attribute feelings of ambiguity associated with entering their new environment. The overall goal of CAD is to surface and process these thoughts and feelings, which come naturally with joining a community of practice that is highly diverse culturally, intellectually, and scientifically. CAD is grounded in the Tripartite Integrated Model of Social Influence (TIMSI) (Estrada et al., 2011; Kelman, 2006), and its research aim is to test the effects of a shared mentor-mentee learning experience on science identity, on self-efficacy for communicating across various dimensions of difference, on the intention of undergraduates to continue in STEM research, and on the intention of near-peer mentors to work with diverse mentees in the future.

Description of the CAD workshops

In the workshop condition, undergraduate mentees and their doctoral or postdoctoral near-peer mentors attend two workshops together and participate in exercises that explore the many dimensions of difference across STEM research (Figure 2). In Workshop 1, CAD addresses differences of scientific discipline and level of training (which may result in feelings of being less prepared than their peers and colleagues), and then addresses differences in the cultural communication style the participants were raised with, such as directness vs. indirectness, formality vs. informality, and expressiveness vs. reservedness. For example, a mentee may have been raised in a culture where speaking up without being called on is considered immodest or self-promoting, and then experience confusion in a lab environment where speaking out is expected and rewarded. Another example might be a lab with members who feel that open disagreement and even argument about research is positive and necessary and with other members who are less comfortable disagreeing face-to-face. The CAD workshop provides a vocabulary with which to discuss these differences. In Workshop 2, speaking about research is considered from both the scholarly and the lay perspectives, and dyad partners work together to first create a research narrative that has key elements such as a clear purpose and gap in knowledge for the mentee’s project, and then plan a short video that will appeal to the mentee’s family and friends. In this way, the near-peer mentor coaches the mentee on how to report research, and the mentee coaches the near-peer mentor on how to communicate successfully with a lay audience of the mentee’s family and friends. Thus, the two workshops cover a broad spectrum of research communication occasions and encourage participants to feel more at ease with the way they communicate.

Figure 2:

CAD Study Design

In the control workshop condition, near-peer mentors and mentees, either together or separately, attend a single brief workshop on how to describe a research project and are invited to make a video on their own (without collaborating with the dyad partner). Whereas the study condition aims to maximize personal exchange and exploration between the dyad members, the control condition makes no attempt to manipulate the interpersonal experience.

Status of CAD study

The CAD workshops were scheduled to launch in the summer of 2020 and were delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The project is currently underway with a redesigned recruitment strategy; target enrollment is 120 dyads for intervention and 120 dyads for control. To date, approximately 60 dyads have participated in the study condition and approximately 10 dyads have participated in the control condition. Representative participant reactions to the workshop, as expressed in evaluations and chat messages (informed consent obtained, The University of Texas MD Anderson IRB Protocol #2019–1010), include

• I really enjoyed listening to other people’s perspectives regarding communication in academia. I found that it’s really common to not understand the work of people in other disciplines, regardless of your education level. That made me feel less incompetent, considering that I’m really new to research.

• It was heartening to know that many other people faced the same challenges when navigating their new role as either mentor or mentee.

• I realized that there is a clear way to communicate my project with my family.

• The difference between direct and indirect communication was the most eye-opening. As a direct style communicator, seeing the impact of indirect instances and how to better facilitate these conversations helps when I encounter these in my own experiences.

These and other qualitative comments center around a few central themes: feeling less ‘different’ than others and more confident about one’s place in the research environment; gratitude for the space to speak personally rather than about research with the mentor or mentee study partner; identifying and discussing similarities and differences with the study partner and with others in their lab group; benefitting from seeing the perspectives of a wide range of other research trainees.

Conclusion

Both the SCOARE project and the CAD project seek to test whether it is possible to create a more livable environment for both mentors and mentees through enhancing understanding of the social and psychological aspects of language background and language use. Perhaps the most important of these aspects is the role of language in both creating and expressing identity and in gaining entry into a professional community. While outcomes from the CAD project are anticipated in the coming months, the SCOARE intervention has proven so far to improve affective, social cognitive, and behavioral outcomes for doctoral and postdoctoral STEM mentees.