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About the AuthorTravis Daniel Griffin attended New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and graduated with a B.S. in Technical Communication in May of 2013. Prior to receiving his degree, Mr. Griffin spent ten years working in an international company, addressing the inherent challenges associated with working with multiple cultures. After receiving his degree, Mr. Griffin and his wife moved to Austin, Texas, where he accepted employment h a growing social media management software company. Mr. Griffin works daily with customers from around the world who use his company's software to manage relationships built through social media. Contents |
Methods for explorationOverview For the example in this paper, it was necessary to choose a webpage that had already been designed and written in order to explore the potential of the idea that incorporating an Intermediate-Level model of communication has a significant and measurable impact on the reading comprehension of readers from multiple audiences. That page would be rewritten using the Intermediate-Level model of communication. The overall design and format would not be changed. Once the page was chosen and rewritten, it was necessary to explore the effectiveness of both the newly rewritten research page, as well as the original page for control. Two study groups were selected, composed of either Western readers or Eastern Readers. The study groups were split as evenly as possible and view either the control or the research page. The time spent on each page was calculated and averaged, and each study participant would take part in a short survey to gauge the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of each page. Webpage Selection Because this paper focuses on webpages that could be viewed by audience members of mixed cultural backgrounds, it was necessary to find a page that would be equally relevant to a mixed audience. Each year, New Mexico Tech hosts a “Student Research Symposium” with the goal of attracting any student at New Mexico Tech to participate and highlight research being performed at the university by undergraduates and graduate students. In order to reach and inform students interested in the symposium, an entire website has been established to give students all the information they need in order to participate. Because of these established criteria, and the fact that symposium is open to all students regardless of cultural background, the symposium’s webpages provided fertile ground to conduct the research. The page chosen was titled “What is the SRS?” and was authored by a Technical Communication Student at New Mexico Tech, chosen for the project because of her studies and work in technical writing. The page addressed the questions of “How,” “What,” “Why,” and “When” of the student research symposium. It was written in a straightforward way in order to provide students with all the necessary information about participating in the symposium. Permission to use the page in the research was received from Dr. Mary Dezember, who serves as the faculty sponsor of the Student Research Symposium as part of her duties as Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs, as well as Elizabeth Barteau, the student responsible for authoring the webpages for the symposium. Dr. Dezember and Ms. Barteau also agreed to offer quality assurance in the project and ensure that rewriting the page in the “Intermediate-Level” model didn’t compromise the overall message being conveyed. Application of the Intermediate-Level Model To rewrite the webpage by using the Intermediate-Level features being tested, it was necessary to carefully apply the model to the existing text. Four major criteria were chosen to focus on. These criteria were:
Intermediate-Level context refers to the addition of respectful titles and adjectives into the text. “Professionals” was replaced with “Esteemed Professionals.” This element of High-Context communication comes directly from the works of Campbell and also Andrews. Respectful overtones are generally considered a necessity when communicating with High-Context cultures (Niemeier et al., 1998). The addition of these respectful overtones also serves to invite potential symposium participants to become part of an established group. This invitation serves as a way to communicate a “group” mentality that could potentially appeal to members of High-Context societies which was stressed as an important factor by Andrews (2001). The addition of these elements was kept as simple as possible so that it would appeal to members of High-Context cultures without sounding overly strange to members of Low-Context cultures. All changes to the webpage are included in Appendix 1, but below is one example of the Intermediate-Level context change made in this fashion
In the above example, the ESP concept of sentence shortening was used. In this example, the one original sentence was broken up into three sentences to simplify the concepts being communicated. This strategy allows the participant the opportunity to focus the learning and decision making parts of the brain to focus on the individual concepts and interpret them in a way is meaningful to them. Because the overall quantity of the text is increased, at first glance this may seem counterintuitive to the word shortening. However, sentence shortening focuses on the concept that is being conveyed to the reader and not the overall context of the message conveying the concept. In this example, three different concepts are being communicated in three different sentences as opposed to the original text which conveyed three concepts in one sentence. The simplification of a single sentence into three simpler sentences avoids one of the major pitfalls described by Louhiala-Salminen & Kankaanranta in establishing the Lingua Franca by use of the Intermediate-Context model. This pitfall is the use of English by the writer hides the multiple meanings of message, and can make the reader feel mistrustful of the writer as if the writer were using English to exclude certain audiences. To use etymology and visualization, it was necessary to identify kinds of words could be difficult for readers to understand. While in its purest form, etymology is used to break down words into their historical roots, for the purposes of this study, etymology refers to explaining complex words. While native speakers of English may intuitively understand a word based on the context of the message being delivered, the Intermediate Model makes no such assumption. If a word is potentially complex, foreign, or rooted in another language such as Latin, it becomes necessary to find a simplified definition of the word to allow a reader the opportunity to add that word to their vocabulary. In this exploration, properly using this particular concept of Etymology relies on the writer identifying words that may overly difficult to comprehend, and then finding a reasonable and simple way to convey the meaning of the word. For example, the word “symposium” may not be a recognizable word for all readers. While a native English speaker may rely on the overall context that the word is being used in, a non-native speaker may simply become confused by the word. In order to avoid this problem, the Intermediate-Context Model calls for the word to be explained, thereby educating the reader and allowing them to fully understand the word’s use throughout the document being written. In the original page, the word “symposium” is used without being defined. For the research page, the reader is given a frame of reference for the word “symposium,” and can read the rest of page with hopefully less confusion about the event. At the beginning of the page, the word “symposium” was defined for all readers by writing: “A symposium is a conference of peers and related professionals to discuss particular and shared subjects of interest.” The choice of which words necessitate applying this concept to may seem confusing at first. The writer has no way of knowing what level of English comprehension a reader possesses. In order to decide which words to apply this concept to, the entire document was read carefully, and if a word caused the writer to question whether or not a word needed to be properly defined, it was defined. The idea is that if the writer must question the word, then it must be defined. Incorporating the idea of visualization becomes slightly more complex. Visualization refers to the English teaching practice of giving a student an opportunity to stop and think about what the word means to them. The student’s brain is allowed to imagine and decide on what the word means to them personally. In writing, there are few opportunities to tell a reader to stop and think about what words may mean specifically to his or herself. Instead, the Intermediate-Context model uses whitespace to establish a potential stopping place for readers to visualize the word and what it means to the reader. Figure 3 shows how this was accomplished on the research page. 
As can be seen in the above example, etymology is incorporated into the writing by defining “symposium” and visualization is used by treating the definition as a single sentence paragraph. Using the single sentence paragraph structure, the reader has a natural stopping place to decide what the word means before continuing to read the rest of the page.
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