We Don't All Talk the Same: Teaching Linguistic Diversity

Speech Science courses are a key component to the curriculum within a variety of disciplines, but coursework is frequently lacking in terms of representation of those from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In this episode, we talk to Melissa Baese-Berk (University of Chicago) and Paul Reed (University of Alabama), about why it's so important for instructors to use a variety of voices in the classroom, and how to talk about other ways of speaking when one feels ill-equipped to do so. 

Associated paper: Melissa Baese-Berk and Paul E. Reed. "Addressing diversity in speech science courses." J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 154, 918–925 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0020613.

Read more from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA).
Learn more about Acoustical Society of America Publications.

Music Credit: Min 2019 by minwbu from Pixabay. 

Transcript

Kat Setzer  00:06

Welcome to Across Acoustics, the official podcast of the Acoustical Society of America's publications office. On this podcast, we will highlight research from our four publications. I'm your host, Kat Setzer, editorial associate for the ASA. 

Kat Setzer  00:25

Speech Science courses are a key component to the curriculum within a variety of disciplines, but coursework is frequently lacking in terms of representation of those from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Today, I'm talking to Melissa Baese-Berk and Paul E. Reed, whose forum article about this topic, "Addressing diversity in speech science courses," appeared in the August 2023 issue of JASA. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. How are you guys doing?

Paul Reed  00:48

Great, thank you for the invites. Good, great to be here.

Melissa Baese-Berk  00:51

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Kat Setzer  00:52

Excited to talk about this. So first, just tell us a bit about your research backgrounds.

Melissa Baese-Berk  00:56

So I did my PhD at Northwestern University in 2010, and then I worked for a while as a postdoctoral researcher at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, and then at Michigan State University. I was a faculty member at the University of Oregon for about 10 years, and last summer, I joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in the Department of Linguistics.

Paul Reed  01:16

So I got my PhD from the University of South Carolina in 2016. And then I worked in the speech perception laboratory there at the University of South Carolina in 2017. And I joined the faculty at the University of Alabama, in their Department of Communicative Disorders in 2017. And I was just recently tenured and promoted to associate professor, so that's I'm kind of still... My feet really haven't touched the ground for like the last seven months.

Kat Setzer  01:38

Congratulations. That's exciting.

Paul Reed  01:40

Thank you. Thank you. 

Kat Setzer  01:41

Okay, so let's start with a really large-scale question. What is speech communication or speech sciences?

Melissa Baese-Berk  01:48

So I think in general speech communication is what it sort of sounds like: our ability to communicate with our spoken language skills. For individuals who use spoken language, it's our ability to both understand the speech signal that we hear and to produce a meaningful speech signal. So our ability to you know, say words and phrases and sentences and our ability to understand what somebody else means when they produce those words, phrases and sentences.

Paul Reed  02:15

And so speech science or speech science is studying that. So we studied both the production of speech, so how is it that we as human beings do this thing, this sort of, you know, tongue and lip and jaw ballet to produce the sounds? But then also, on the flip side, how is it that we interpret those sound waves and things that are produced? How is it that we sort of extract meaning? So first, we got to divvy up that signal into something that's meaningful for us, and then we have to interpret that. And we have to sort of make all sorts of adjustments for different people, different places, different environments. And so how is it that we both produce and interpret speech? And then sort of what is it that we as humans... What do we, how do we do that? And so that's what we study. 

Kat Setzer  02:54

Very interesting. Okay. So what role does Speech Science play within the teaching of other disciplines?

Melissa Baese-Berk  03:01

I think speech sciences are really interesting example of something that is truly interdisciplinary, because you'll find a speech science class in a linguistics department, like where I teach, you'll find it in a Communicative Disorders and Sciences Department, like where Paul teaches, you'll find it in sometimes anthropology programs, you'll find it in communications departments, you'll find speech science classes in a range of different places, including, for example, let's say education. And because it's so interdisciplinary, this means that the science that informs our work is also really interdisciplinary. And it's also because it's so interdisciplinary and reaches so many students across a variety of disciplines, it also makes it really critical that we get teaching it right from a variety of perspectives.

Paul Reed  03:46

Because also, there's different goals for each of those disciplines, right? So for example, sometimes it is truly just understanding what it is that we're doing. But for example, like in my department, in a Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, we're trying to sort of understand how we do this, but also, what happens if, you know, if something is going wrong, if there is some some type of atypicality, or some type of pathology that's there? And so understanding what is sort of the typical way of doing things, if there is an atypicality, but then also, like, how do you tell the difference? And so sort of being informed with that, and again, you can sort of imagine in the other fields, how that would come into play, that there's different goals, different strategies, different histories, and different sort of, you know, methods that they would use speech science and speech sciences within their sort of research goals.

Kat Setzer  04:33

Okay, that makes sense. So can you give a bit of an overview of pedagogy surrounding speech sciences, both historically and present day? 

Melissa Baese-Berk  04:41

Yeah, historically, speech science has been a really kind of innovative pedagogical discipline. I think folks in speech sciences, were doing flipped classrooms, for example, before it was cool, where they were doing kind of in-class demos and laboratory-based studies in the classroom. And so really, in terms of history, speech science has been at the forefront of pedagogy and pedagogical advancement. And you see this even now, like, we have speech science forums in a variety of places, including at Acoustical Society of America meetings, where we talk about pedagogical advances in the field and what the best practices are for doing speech science teaching. And so it's been a really fun area for me to teach in. Because it's something where a lot of people do care really deeply about what they're teaching, why they're teaching it and how to really make it a wonderful experience for students who are in our classrooms.

Paul Reed  05:34

And it's also one of those things where it because it is so interdisciplinary, you can take little snippets and things from different things and be on that forefront, because there's been a lot of technological advances over the last, you know, especially 15 years, 10 to 15 years, where you could, the tools that were once only housed in the laboratory have gotten smaller and smaller. And now, if you have a laptop and just a handful of things, you can do some really, really innovative things in a classroom. And students can really immediately be able to do that. So we can have things like acoustical software, things like Praat or Adobe Audition, or various things where, in just a few minutes, students can go from your discussing sound waves, to being able to make recordings and look at them and start to extract some measures very easily. So that's one of the things that has been just sort of, to reinforce what Melissa said, it's on the forefront because we were able to do those things, have these labs, have these hands-on experiential learning things, really, throughout, but especially within the last decade, decade and a half, where every speech science classroom gets to do fun stuff. We get to do like, "Hey, let's go record this. Let's go do that. Here's how we can take this and immediately put it into practice."

Melissa Baese-Berk  06:40

And there are low-tech versions of doing fun things in classes. Like I think all the speech science faculty I know have their office slinky that they take into class to show how waves work, for example, right? Because, like all acousticians, we're dealing with physics, right, in the classroom. And so we're teaching students properties of physics. And we're able to do that in I think really fun and innovative ways, but also ways that really make things sort of real to students, because we're talking about something that's not abstract in terms of a sound wave, sort of, generally speaking, but we're talking about a speech signal. So the sound wave that makes up a speech signal. And so students already have something to sort of grasp onto, which I think is really helpful for a lot of students.

Kat Setzer  07:19

Right? That makes sense, it's probably... Speech is one of those things where we all have encountered it for our entire lives. And so it's very easy to see the application in your own life in the classroom, in a way. 

Melissa Baese-Berk  07:34

Exactly.

Kat Setzer  07:35

So this article challenges the status quo in speech science courses, arguing for the need for more linguistic diversity in the curriculum. What is linguistic diversity? 

Paul Reed  07:45

Well, linguistic diversity is just the idea that, you know, everyone speaks a little bit differently. So every single person, every sort of group of people, when you think about group, we can think about like sociological groups or like things like demographics, but we can also think about, like, hey, the people that are really interested in this one topic, maybe the folks you know, that like to play this game have this way of speaking related to that game, all the way up to, we know that there are different languages that are spoken. And so the idea of linguistic diversity is that, just that: that language itself is diverse, there are all sorts of different ways that it is expressed, and that is sort of one of the inherent properties of it. So this is a podcast, but just for those out there listening, I'm about six foot eight, and Melissa is not. And so you can hear a little bit of that difference just in the diversity in our voices, because one of us is, you know, very large human with a big head and a long neck, nd there's another human that's more normal size. And you can tell that difference in our voices. Some of that is related to physiology. Some of it's also related to where we grew up. I grew up in the American South, Melissa grew up in the American Midwest, I think that's the, you know, Midwest is always nebulous to me, so I'm not exactly sure where it begins and ends, but it's there. And so we reflect that in the way that we speak, both those sort of like, you know, size-based in sort of, like, you know, gene-based things all the way up to where we grew up, and who we grew up around. 

Melissa Baese-Berk  09:14

And there are also issues around our socialization, right? So I was socialized as a woman, as a girl growing up, and a woman, and Paul was socialized as a man. And so you can hear those differences in our gender identity as well in our voices. So in addition to physiological differences, there are all of these social differences, and geography can play a role. So there's lots and lots of things that can contribute to linguistic diversity. And in the article, we're talking about all of those differences.

Kat Setzer  09:41

So it includes big scale Diversity, as we know it in diversity and equity and inclusion, but also just like, you two are different. I am different from you two. 

Melissa Baese-Berk  09:51

Exactly.

Paul Reed  09:51

Exactly.

Kat Setzer  09:52

Right. So what made you guys realize that the lack of diversity was a problem, and why is this change so important?

Melissa Baese-Berk  09:58

It comes back to an ASA meeting. So we were at an ASA meeting that had a section on teaching innovations in speech science. And we had a sort of group discussion at the end of this. And this was during the pandemic, so we were all on Zoom. And, you know, it's a kind of a gathering of friends. And people were talking about linguistic diversity, and expressing their sort of reluctance to cover linguistic diversity topics in the classroom, because they're not expert in those areas. And I think what Paul and I were sort of hoping to do in the article, and as a result of that meeting, was just sort of lovingly and gently push our colleagues into the understanding that in deciding not to teach about linguistic diversity explicitly, they're making statements about what is normal in speech science. And in general, what is "normal" is, in speech science, is the speech of your instructor, first and foremost, since that's the speech you're getting the most of, but also many of the examples that we use come from white cisgender men in America or Britain. And I think, you know, whether or not we realize that's a choice we're making, we're showing to students that that's the normal thing, and anything that we're not presenting is deviant in some way. And I think Paul can speak to this in a little bit more detail, but one challenge is identifying what deviations from typicality are themselves normal, and what are results of some sort of pathology, for example, and this is something that I think students and society really misunderstand, in the kind of interpretation that anything that deviates from some perceived norm, or some sort of unremarked upon characteristics of speech is a deviation that is a problem or is disordered in some way.

Paul Reed  11:56

And I mean, from that discussion, what sort of we gathered was a lot of folks, they didn't feel comfortable talking about some of the topics, partly because that wasn't part of their training, which, again, that's totally understandable. You know, I'm a phonetician, I'm a sociophonetician. I study, you know, the intersection of society and language. But every so often, I have to teach about, like syntax, so the order of words and phrases, and so that's not necessarily my wheelhouse, but sometimes I do that. And so since we know that diversity is kind of inherent in language, the idea being like, we need to be modeling that for our students, and diversity, broadly defined both of the big demographic ones, the contextual ones, both the linguistic context and like the situation that the speech is sort of occurs in. Because, you know, like, we mentioned that speech science is so interdisciplinary, that there's going to be folks that are, you know, might be studying to be teachers, might be studying to be speech language pathologists, might be, you know, studying to be researchers, and all of those folks are going to be encountering linguistic diversity in all of their fields. And so for example, again, taking it to my students, you know, I'm teaching them and preparing them to be a speech language pathologists, and part of their career path will be understanding what is just difference? What is just, you know, this person is from Alabama, where I am, this other person might be from Colorado, there's going to be some differences there. Are you aware of that, and just to make sure that you're not considering that some type of pathology or disorder, and then also, you know, closer to home, like, if somebody does present with some concerns, which ones do you need to exert your time and effort and energy to intervene, versus those that are just part of the normal variation and variability of speech. So that way you are directing your energies, your finite time and effort and energy on things that really do need your attention. And so part of that is just understanding that diversity is going to be inherent, what diversity is sort of just natural and normal and to be expected, versus the the stuff that might indicate that more investigation, more assessment might need to be done.

Kat Setzer  13:52

Okay, interesting. You kind of already touched on this, about the lack of comfort that a lot of instructors feel in including linguistic diversity in their courses, but why do you think coursework traditionally doesn't include much linguistic diversity?

Paul Reed  14:06

I mean, I think a lot of is because, you know, historically, the folks that have been teaching have sort of looked like me, you know. They've been white dudes. And that's, again, not necessarily a knock, because I mean, again, we tend to use ourselves as our primary source of data in classes, because, you know, here's me producing this speech sound, here's me producing that speech sound. And then we have this sort of body of examples and different things that have been collected and used and shared, that are good because they demonstrate exactly what we're talking about, okay. There's this great sentence, you know, "How to wreck a nice beach," you know, to recognize speech, like, just the sort of the ways of using that. We have recordings that have been shared, we have sort of corpora of example sentences that have been collected, that tend to all sort of be used and sort of get sometimes reinforced in different textbooks in different places that have made them available for folks. And so it just kind of tended to be, we all use the same examples because they're good examples. Now, that's also to be aware that, it also tends to be a particular kind of speech from only, you know, again, a sort of a small sliver of the big diversity that's out there. And so I think part of that is just, you know, sometimes a lack of awareness of the available things that are there. And then also just the fact of a lot of us teach from textbooks, and we use what we were given from that, and then we supplement it with what we have. So I think that's part of the reason.

Melissa Baese-Berk  15:28

I think there are two other sort of practical things as well. And I think one of those things, as Paul mentioned, is the issue of textbooks. As part of our writing of our piece, Paul and I did a little survey of the textbooks we have on our shelves, which are many, and we looked like whether variability was even mentioned in the textbooks. And I think it was mentioned in one of the textbooks, like even mentioned in one of them, right? In terms of being a term that shows up in the index of the text. So that's a practical challenge, right? Because if you're going to teach about it, where do you find that content? Do you have to create it for yourself? Do you have to create it for your students? How do you get your students to read about these things? That's not trivial, right? 

Melissa Baese-Berk  16:09

And I think the second piece of this is, we're all dealing with finite time. I work at an institution where our terms are nine week quarters, and there's only so much I can cover in a nine week quarter. And historically, the things we've sort of valued above other things are things that we view of it as sort of being like the core of speech sciences: I have to teach them about the acoustics of consonants and vowels. And I kind of can't get around that. And I think this sort of fallacy that we've built up as a field around that is, like, teaching about variation would take away from teaching about core concepts. And I think there's this misapprehension that we're not teaching about variety or lack of variety if we're not explicitly mentioning it. We're showing students what we think about variety if we offer them a limited sample of speech. And so I think our sort of message to everyone has been, like, you're already teaching about variety, whether or not you know it, you're just making choices about what variety is important for you to talk about and what isn't. And, you know, I think there is a sort of anxiety among a lot of people about teaching Big D diversity issues, right, talking about race and talking about gender, and talking about class are really uncomfortable things for a lot of people to talk about, even just acknowledging in a classroom. And so I think people have felt comfortable saying, like, well, that's not my job, that's the job for another class. And that has a lot of problems.

Paul Reed  17:44

And I think also like, you can still cover those basic concepts. You know, you think about, like, you know, we talk about vowels, you're talking about formants, and formant transitions and how to measure those. Well, it doesn't matter if you're using like a white male voice like mine, or any other type of voice. You can still say, "This is what a formant is. This is how you get that measurement." And even just in doing something as basic as like, including a lot of different voices for people to hear, and doing the things that you would be doing anyway, extracting those formant measures or creating a pitch track, so that way, you can sort of see the pitch of the voice going up or down or measuring something like voice onset time, it's going to be part and parcel of all of those voices. And those are used for these basic concepts. So it doesn't have to be this huge, "Now we're going to talk about big D diversity." And we have this like, you know, big "Ta da!" and trumpets in the corner. It could literally be like, "Hey, we're gonna do the same thing we did on that example in class. Here's another example from a different person, different type of voice. Here's another one from a different voice." You're doing the same thing, and you are now showing your students, hey, all of these differences are to be expected. And sometimes you can actually highlight concepts from class about, okay, this person was taller or shorter, from this part of the country or that part of the country, this language, that language, all of the things that we mentioned that fall under diversity can be highlighted there, while you're doing quote-unquote, the basics.

Kat Setzer  19:09

I imagine you can probably even more precisely teach certain concepts if you have a few variations that you compare, and you can say, "Oh, look how they all overlap." Right? Okay. So just just to slightly  switch gears, you guys talked about this concept of critical language pedagogy. What is it, and why did you use it as a framework for your discussion?

Paul Reed  19:29

Got it. Pedagogy by omission, essentially. 

Paul Reed  19:29

So critical language pedagogy is literally just evaluating how we teach about language and the things that we explicitly say and the things that we don't say, and considering the implications of those choices. So Melissa alluded to it earlier, where if we are only playing one voice for our students, that's the choice that we have made. But if we look at sort of, like, what that is implicitly saying is like, "Hey, this type of voice kind of matters more for this class than other voices," even though you haven't overtly  said that, that's kind of the implication that could be drawn from that. Or if, hey, when the only examples you have for your quizzes and tests are these, well, these others might not be as valuable or could be interpreted as that. Or if you also think about like, hey, we're only going to talk about diversity in the diversity module. And so we're going to pull that aside is something separate? Well, that kind of gives an indication of that it's something different or something rare or something where you have to, like, put a particular focus on it, rather than, just if you think about, if it's just more sort of spread throughout the curriculum across every thing, then is sort of like, oh, well, everything varies, because it does. But if you only highlight it in one module, what are the underlying implicit things that are being sort of taught because of those choices?

Paul Reed  19:38

Yes. So, like what is, what are you including? And what are you excluding? And what are the potential and also the real world ramifications of that? I mean, we can think about all sorts of other things like, hey, if I'm asking for one particular answer, but there's another answer that could work, but one is based on like my background. Like, hey, I'm asking for the thing you push around a grocery store. It's a buggy and you say "shopping cart," and I only count "buggy" as correct? Well, I've sort of brought my language bias into that, even though technically, both of those would work. It's just if I'm only showing you buggy, then I'm biasing, even if it's unintentional, even if I'm not like I'm not saying "Oh, shopping cart's never to be used," it's more like, "Oh, buggy is right in this class." I'm using a non... very southern example for that on purpose to show that, how that could actually be interpreted like. Oh, this class is doing something a little bit different.

Kat Setzer  21:48

Right.

Melissa Baese-Berk  21:49

And I think the really important thing that Paul brought up was real-world ramifications for this. And if you think about where students sort of see themselves in a particular class, if you present a really normative perspective of what speech should sound like, and it's not the thing that those students sound like, that can be a really alienating experience for those students. And I think in particular about, you know, for example, students who Paul works with are, you know, many of them are from the south, right? And if they took a speech science class with me in the north, they might experience not hearing any voices like theirs. And they might experience a sense of like, "There's something sort of weird or wrong about the way I speak, because it's not represented here in this class." And this gets back a little bit to your very first question, Kat, about, you know, what is speech science. And you said that everybody has some experience with this, right? Everybody does have experience with it. And it's a really big part of our personal identities. So like, my voice, and how I sound and my accent, and all of these things are part of who I am, like, what I sound like, it's a really important part of who I am. And I think that in not representing a sort of variety, we implicitly are telling students, like, "You're outside the norm," if they don't fit in to whatever you have framed as normal in the class.

Kat Setzer  23:13

Okay, so I feel like this is leading to the answer of this next question, which is, so you actually say that instructors should be wary of presenting certain forms of speech as diverse. Why? 

Paul Reed  23:25

Because, again, if you're highlighting something is sort of like, "Oh, look at this rare thing that is so interesting, it's so different." Well, now you're making somebody feel like the way that they may sound... Again, so take Melissa's example of somebody from the south going to school in Chicago, has been like, "Ooh, let's ask the southerner for how they say southern things." Well, that's sort of pointing out something that is just natural and normal. Language varies. Different people have different ways of saying things. But if you imbue it throughout the course, and it's not how it is, like, "Oh, we're talking about different things now!" It's a way of sort of making everyone sort of be seen in a way that is not pointing them out just for the sake of pointing them out. Because again, no one wants to be the emblematic person for whatever group that we're talking about. That's unfair. But also, you want people to recognize that language varies all the time. Like it varies by, you know, time and place, and society and the groups that you belong to, and your background and the choices you make and the things you want to do. And it's not something that is weird to sound different. It's just part of language. 

Melissa Baese-Berk  24:31

And I think there's this feeling, you know, of not just pointing something out as being a wrong way to do something, right? So I don't think it would be the case that you would... You'd be sort of hard pressed to find a class that might say, "Like, well, in the south, they say things this way, and it's wrong." But it's, I think, just as dangerous to kind of, as Paul was pointing out, not just exoticize, but also sort of trivialize things that are a part of your identity. So I always think about this example of this scene from Love Actually, where one of the characters goes in, he's English, and he goes into this bar in Wisconsin. And they're just having him, like, say random words in his dialect. And he says a bunch of them. And then they're like, well, say "table." And when he says table, it's basically the same. And they're really disappointed, because it's like, the kind of cute accent isn't different for this thing. And I think that trivialization of something that's part of your identity is a really dangerous thing to experience. And I think it's something that we as instructors, you know, we never want our students to kind of feel bad in a classroom. But that's a pretty easy case where a student could feel bad if they were presented as the diverse example, if that diversity is based on geography, or language experience in general, or race or gender, or whatever the case might be. 

Paul Reed  25:49

Yeah, so a personal example. So I studied abroad. And so I'm from East Tennessee, I'm a hillbilly in the flesh. And so I was down in South America studying, and the students had never heard me speak English before, because we were there to practice our Spanish. And so we had a meeting with all of the students from the United States. And it was actually like, the, it's funny, the "culture shock" meeting to make sure that everybody was doing okay, because we'd been there long enough that, you know, the novelty had sort of worn off. And I was sitting in the back, because, again, I'm taller, I'm trying not to block the view. And so the instructor said, "Hey, could you read this paragraph?" And so I'm looking down at a page reading. And but, I have to preface, all of the other students were from the University of Minnesota, which again, would pull from, you know, the upper Midwest. And so I'm looking down, reading this passage, and I look up, and everyone is looking at me, because I was the only non Minnesota or University of Minnesota student. And so they're all looking at me. And this young lady says, "Are you faking that?" I was like, "Faking what?" And she said, "Your-- your accent." And I was like, "I don't have an accent. Y'all have an accent!" Right? I mean, obviously, because again, I was being exoticized. And again, it wound up, we sort of, we got past that. But it was just like this idea of being sort of pointed out that way, because that's part of who I am. That's sort of how I sound, that's my presentation to the world. And it's sort of like, whoa, that's, that's not cool. I mean, granted, it was also because no one had ever heard me speak in English before. And so that was just a little taste. And obviously, I hadn't heard them speak in English, either. So I, there's all sorts of great northern cities vowel shift stuff that I will try to not nerd out on. 

Kat Setzer  27:29

Yeah, it makes me think of when my dad went to school. He's from North Carolina, and he went to school in New Jersey, and this is in the 60s. And he basically got rid of his entire southern accent, because of going to school in New Jersey. And it was like, "Oh, that's not how educated people sound, you know, they don't have Southern accents," which I can imagine, this is what you would like to prevent happening.

Paul Reed  27:54

Exactly, exactly. Because you can, you are forcing someone to change something about themselves that is near and dear-- how you sound your voice. And because again, it could be the voice of your parents, your grandparents, the people that raised you, your community of support, and you don't want to force or have someone feel like the way that they sound is not respected or wrong, or somehow exotic in a way to want them to change, for whatever reason. Now, it's also it's to be celebrated. Diversity is what makes it cool. That's what makes language fun. It's sort of like, you know, I mean, there's a time and a place for like, monochromatic art. But the most interesting types of art are when someone has put different colors into or different textures together to make something beautiful, because of the weaving of diverse and different things together, and language is just like that.

Melissa Baese-Berk  28:43

And I think one of the challenges, Kat, to the situation you're pointing out is, you know, it's a very common story that somebody moves from a place to another place and realizes they sound, you know, uneducated or not the same way that the people around them sound, and that they're taken less seriously as a function of that, and they changed the way they speak. But in doing so, when they go back to the place where they're from, it's changed not only the way they speak, but their relationship with the community around them. Right? So it changes how people from that community view the person who has come home, right? And I think that change is something we as linguists don't want to encourage people to feel like they have to do. If it's a choice that you want to make, that's a choice you want to make. And I think that, you know, Paul, and I have personal thoughts and feelings about whether you should make that choice, but you know, that's your decision. At the same time, making that decision, just because you think educated people don't sound a particular way or something along those lines, is something we're hoping that the classes that we're encouraging folks to teach in Speech Science will change that perception, sort of broadly speaking.

Paul Reed  29:57

 Absolutely. Absolutely.

Kat Setzer  29:59

Yeah, because there's difference between changing how you speak so that people perceive you differently, or better, quote-unquote, and Madonna getting a English accent, because, you know, that sounds like a fun thing to do, you know? Okay, so a couple of questions kind of about applying this idea of diversity to the classroom: How might instructors be impacted by increasing linguistic diversity in speech science courses, and what happens if an instructor feels that they are not qualified to teach about linguistic areas different from those in their sociolinguistic experience?

Melissa Baese-Berk  30:33

I think there are a few possible ways in which someone could be impacted. If you've been teaching the same class for a long, long, long time, it might make the class a little bit harder to teach the first couple of times because you're going to be incorporating new and different material. That said, I don't think Paul and I are advocating for like, big, massive changes in every class. And I think we'll get to this a little bit later in our conversation, but I think one thing, Kat, that you already pointed out, is that in some ways, it makes our jobs easier, because we're able to show through diversity, ways in which particular sounds are produced and ways in which they overlap even in the face of variation. And so I think that that's a really nice tool. We can think about it in terms of a tool. 

Melissa Baese-Berk  31:19

In terms of the second question about what happens if an instructor feels they're unqualified to teach a particular kind of type of diversity, I'd say a couple of things. So one is, especially in our field, we're often asked to teach a little bit outside our particular area of expertise. So I mean, I think almost every speech scientist has had to teach some class that is outside of their specific area, or at least some kind of module within a class that's outside of their specific area of training. So, for example, for many years at University of Oregon, I taught about theory of second language acquisition, which is outside of anything I had ever taken a class in, right? Paul was not trained as a speech language pathologist and teaches classes in the realm of communication disorders, right? And so we teach outside of our comfort zone pretty frequently. And so I think, you know, people who are teaching these classes are smart and capable, and can figure out how to teach a variety of content. So the first thing I'd say is like, even if you feel unqualified, you still can do it. So don't use that as an excuse. But I think the second thing I would say is, as a field, we've done a really great job of sharing resources. Historically, we've done an amazing job of sharing resources for teaching. So sharing examples, sharing lesson plans, sharing content. When I started teaching, and I started teaching a phonetics class, which was my university speech science class, I had materials from I think ten other instructors at other institutions, who shared their resources with me. And there are people who are already incorporating linguistic diversity into their class content, who would be very willing to share those resources with you. And for people who are listening who are like, "I don't know any of those people," you should feel free to cold email Paul and I, and we will share our resources. But I think that, you know,  using that as a sort of excuse only goes so far, because even if you think you're not capable of teaching about linguistic diversity, it doesn't have to be teaching about diversity in the big D, DEI sort of way, it can literally just be the inclusion of multiple voices of people from multiple backgrounds,

Paul Reed  33:37

One of the things that I always highlight is, you know, just to, again, to reinforce what Melissa just said, we do, all do that in some way, form, or fashion, where we have to sort of grow and branch out and sort of do some study as we prep for our classes. But then there's also something that is literally sometimes staring us right in the face: that our class has diversity in it. So even though I teach at a university in the South, in every class, I have folks from other parts of the country. And there's also variation within states. I've got folks from North Alabama, from South Alabama, from the states that border Alabama, I've got, you know, folks from different backgrounds, you can literally just mix up the students, you know, have them form different groups. And so if you're practicing vowel production or vowel perception, they're going to get more input just by moving them around in the classroom. Or have, you know, if you're recording particular things to do, things like you know, vowels and consonants, some of these basic measures, you can have a recording, and then share those recordings with the class and say, use somebody else's speech. In that sense, like, that's immediately building in more diversity without actually really changing your, the structure of your class because you're doing some of those same things. Like I think we all have labs in some way, form, or fashion where you get some basic measures of formants or VOT or something like that. And literally you can have that built in, you can use your class as a resource. And so again, sometimes we get nervous because we're talking about diversity. But again, thinking about diversity broadly defined, even something as simple as that can immediately increase the diversity that your students are practicing the skills, those quote unquote basics on, it can be very low stakes changes. It doesn't have to be, oh, I've got a flip everything, and I've got to bring in all sorts of stuff. It could literally be, is there a way I can bring in this diverse stimuli into this assignment, into this question, into this exam, into this, you know, whatever it may be, and that could be an easy place to start.

Paul Reed  33:56

So students... We can't really discuss pedagogy without talking about students. How does increasing linguistic diversity in the curriculum impacts students?

Paul Reed  35:47

I think maybe we kind of referenced this earlier, but part of it is just so students may have more of a chance to see themselves in the stimuli, in the examples, in what we're talking about. And just so that way, it's not highlighting, just you know, one person or one type of person, one type of voice. And there's also lots of really good research out there that that makes folks learn something more, if you can see yourself in some way in the topic at hand, you tend to retain it more. So there's a good chance that we may actually teach our courses better by doing that and have better outcomes where you know, things are, there's more retention and better retention. Also, by doing some of this, it kind of makes it... I mean, language variation, there's more variety. And so it can also make, you know, sometimes, we've all had the dull lecture from time to time. But if you have different things that are there, it can also make it a little bit more interesting, just in the day to day.

Melissa Baese-Berk  36:41

I think it's only a win for students for the reasons Paul brought up and also for the fact that it literally trains our students better. So in the case of training, let's say speech language pathologist or teachers, they can look at examples of things they encounter in the real world and have a better sense of what is kind of typical naturally occurring variation, and what is something that might warrant some sort of intervention. If you have only ever been exposed to one type of thing, and then you see something that varies from that type of thing, you're going to think of that as being deviant, right, and requiring intervention to become more like the standard thing that you've seen. And I think that it literally will make people better at their jobs. Because when they get into the real world, I mean, this is a problem, right? For any job we train anyone for the sorts of things you experience in the real world, are never precisely the things that you've been trained for, in whatever your training is, even if that's like on-the-job training, right, you're always going to encounter something that's new and different. And figuring out how to handle that new and different thing is much easier to do, if you've been exposed to some variety before, to be able to make sense of the thing that you're encountering, in the context in which you're encountering it. And so for students, I think there's no way to construe this as anything but a win for them both in terms of engagement for the students, but also in terms of what they're learning. how they're learning it, and how it can be applied outside of the classroom. 

Paul Reed  38:18

There's nothing more rewarding than the students coming back to me sometimes years later, and talking about how, "Hey..." because, again, I teach future speech language pathologists, and so they're like, "Hey, I now lead a continuing ed or an in service day at the school that I'm at now, to help our teachers just to be more aware of this," or, you know, "I helped work with changing the way that we did certain types of things to be more aware of the variation in the folks that we serve. So that way, we're focusing on the things that really need the attention." And it's, I mean, it's really rewarding, because that's one of the fun things, is that they talk about the fact that what they learned, helped them be better at their careers, in this case for speech language pathologists, and gave them opportunities that may not have been there. But they also talk about how they've been better clinicians because they focus on the things that really need their attention. And they're not, you know, spending time or effort or energy with things that don't, because they want to be SLPs because they want to help folks. And if you say, "Hey, that's not helping someone. That may actually be, you know, interfering with someone," then they don't necessarily want to do that. And so I think that that sort of tapping into that notion that Melissa was just referring to is, it's a benefit. It's a win-win-win situation.

Kat Setzer  39:33

Right, right. That absolutely makes sense. So how do you recommend instructors incorporate more linguistic diversity into the classrooms?

Melissa Baese-Berk  39:41

Our article has a bunch of very practical recommendations. I think at a bare minimum, include another voice, like find one other voice to include besides your own and whatever examples you're currently using. It's usually not that hard to do. And, you know, finding one other voice to just represented some amount of diversity is a very good, easy first step.

Paul Reed  40:04

And again, if you're thinking like, "I'm the only person in the department," or something like that, there are, again, some freely available publicly available corpora of all sorts of voices from all over the world. One is IDEA, the International Dialects of English Archive, you can narrow it down from just the US as a whole, you can pick a state, all sorts of stuff. They have various reading passages, you can grab one of those. And so again, that's something where take the assignments, the labs that you have right now, the things and just, again, incorporate more voices. And then as you do that, you can start to see the possibilities. And so again, yeah, pick one voice, well pick more than one, but at the same... start with one. Pne voice is the is the start, is the first step. So it was the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. So take that step,

Melissa Baese-Berk  40:50

I think the second thing that I would add is just like a general principle that I think everyone should be doing for every class they teach in general, is being reflective about why you're making the choices that you're making. And sometimes those choices are made because they're the easiest thing to do. And in a lot of cases, do the easiest thing, that's totally fine. I teach a pedagogy seminar here at University of Chicago, and I tell my students, you know, not everything needs to be the best, most perfect lecture that ever existed, right? Sometimes you need to do the good enough thing. And so that's a fine decision. But being reflective about what we're teaching and why we're teaching it, what examples we're using, and why we're using them is a really good first start, because I think, if we start to do that, we'll recognize places where "Oh, it doesn't make sense to use this again. Actually, it would be a better example for me to use another speaker's voice." Or "It would actually be great to have an example of racial diversity here", or "Maybe the way I'm teaching about gender is a little bit outdated. And now I need to update this with other examples of gender diverse voices." I think that just having that moment of reflection, and this doesn't mean spending hours and hours on teaching prep; this means just really asking yourself, "What am I teaching, and why am I doing it?" is a really useful exercise that helps our classes be better for students and more fun for us to teach.

Kat Setzer  42:15

Do you have any other closing thoughts?

Paul Reed  42:17

I would say just it is a bit of a call to action. But it's one of those things that the benefits far outweigh the efforts required. Because again, you can be reflective, you can be more interesting, you can keep speech science being on the sort of the forefront of that innovation that we referred to it way back at the beginning of our conversation of just, we've been good at making this class fun and interesting. And this is just adding to that sort of long history of being able to do that in a way that benefits our students and benefits us and can really help for the goals that our students have in their future careers.

Melissa Baese-Berk  42:55

I'd add to that, just because you haven't thought that you're making a choice about what you're presenting and why, you're making a choice about that. And so being clear with yourself about what that choice is, and why, is an important part for all of us of thinking through what diversity, linguistic diversity, small scale and large scale, really means. And I think that's something that the field is increasingly good at thinking and talking about. Tools for these conversations exist; people who are interested in these conversations exist. And, you know, we look forward to continuing this conversation with our colleagues in our field.

Kat Setzer  43:34

Awesome. Well, I have to say you have convinced me of the importance of including more than one voice in speech science courses. Hopefully our listeners have found this as fascinating of a discussion as I have, and those who teach speech science courses or related fields can use some of your tips to help bring more linguistic diversity into the classroom. Of course, we will link to your article in the show notes and we can also try to link to some of the other resources you mentioned. Thank you again for taking the time to chat with me and have a great day. 

Paul Reed  44:00

Thanks, y'all. Take it easy.

Melissa Baese-Berk  44:01

Thanks for having us.

Kat Setzer  44:04

Thank you for tuning into Across Acoustics. If you would like to hear more interviews from our authors about their research, please subscribe and find us on your preferred podcast platform.