Shelley Staples

Academic Writing Development at the University Level: Phrasal and Clausal Complexity across Level of Study, Discipline, and Genre.

Using the British Academic Written English corpus, this study focuses on the use of grammatical complexity features in university level texts written by first language (L1) English writers to demonstrate knowledge and perform other specialized tasks required of advanced academic writers. While the primary focus of the analysis is on writing development from first-year undergraduate to graduate students, we also consider interactions with discipline and genre. The study goes beyond most previous work on grammatical complexity in writing by investigating the use of phrasal as well as clausal features. The results show that as academic level increases, the use of phrasal complexity features in writing also increases. On the other hand, the use of clausal complexity features in student writing, particularly finite dependent clauses, decreases as academic level increases. Results further indicate that the extent of the differences across level is mediated by discipline and genre, reflecting patterns observed in research on disciplinary variation in professional academic writing.

The discourse of nurse-patient interactions : contrasting the communicative styles of U.S. and international nurses

The Discourse of Nurse-Patient Interactions: Contrasting the communicative styles of U.S. and international nurses is the first book to quantitatively examine a wide range of linguistic features in a corpus of interactions between nurses and standardized patients. The main goal of this book is to compare the discourse of U.S. (L1 English speaking) and international (L2 English speaking) nurses. The research design relies on a mixed method approach, including both quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis of lexico-grammatical, interactional, prosodic, fluency, and non-verbal features; assessments of interactional effectiveness; and qualitative interviews with nurses. The book offers a detailed description of the situational characteristics of the interactions and compares the discourse of nurses and patients in order to contextualize differences in the communicative styles of the two nurse groups. The results provide new insight into the way that sociocultural and linguistic aspects of nurse discourse contribute to the delivery of patient-centered care.

Nonverbal Communication Behaviors of Internationally Educated Nurses and Patient Care

Background: Because of language barriers and cultural differences, internationally educated nurses (IENs) face documented communication challenges in health care delivery. Yet, it is unknown how and to what extent nonverbal behaviors affect patient care because of research gap in the existing nursing literature. Methods: This is an exploratory study evaluating nonverbal communication behaviors of IENs interacting with standardized patients (SPs) in a controlled clinical setting through videotape analysis. Participants included 52 IENs from two community hospitals in the same hospital system in a southwestern metropolitan area in the United States. Twelve nonverbal behaviors were rated using a 4-point Likert scale with 4 indicating the best performance by the research team after watching videos of SP–IEN interactions. The global communication performance was also ranked in four areas: genuineness, spontaneity, appropriateness, and effectiveness. The relationships between these four areas and the nonverbal behaviors were explored. Finally, a qualitative analysis of two extreme cases was conducted and supplemented the quantitative findings. Results: The IENs received average scores under 2 in 5 out of the 12 nonverbal behaviors. They were “hugging” (1.06), “lowering body position to patient’s level” (1.07), “leaning forward” (1.26), “shaking hands” (1.64), and “therapeutic touch” (1.66). The top three scores were for “no distractive movement,” “eye contact,” and “smile” (3.80, 3.73, and 3.57, respectively). The average overall global impression score was 2.98. The average score for spontaneity was 2.80, which was significantly lower than the scores for genuineness (3.15), appropriateness (3.11), but comparable to the average score for effectiveness (2.85). Finally, therapeutic touch, interpersonal space, eye contact, smiling, and hugging were all significantly correlated with one or more of the global impression scores, with therapeutic touch showing moderate correlations with all of the scores as well as the overall global impression score. Implications: The IENs’ nonverbal behaviors in areas such as hugging, lowering body position to patient’s level, leaning forward, shaking hands, and therapeutic touch have room for improvement. Targeted interventions focusing on norms and expectations of nonverbal behaviors in the U.S. health care setting are called for to improve quality of care.