A scientific communication mentoring intervention benefits diverse mentees with language variety related discomfort

Abstract

We studied social-psychological effects over time of a faculty-mentor workshop intervention that addressed attitudes associated with language variety and their impact on scientific communication (SC) skill development of PhD and postdoctoral STEM research trainees (N = 274). Six months after their mentors attended the workshop, all mentees had significant gains in productivity in speaking tasks. In particular, mentees with high language discomfort rated their quality of communication with their mentor and their enthusiasm about communicating more highly (p < .05 for both measures), compared to mentees with low language discomfort. In addition, mentees raised speaking nonstandardized varieties of English reported significant reductions in discomfort related to language use (p = .003), compared to mentees raised speaking standardized English. We conclude that training mentors to understand and respond to language diversity and development results in multiple beneficial outcomes for mentees, including the amelioration of language-variety related discomfort in the research environment.

Keywords

• research training
• impostor
• diversity
• equity and inclusion
• dialect
• mentoring
• scientific communication
• language variety
• belonging