Amanda Black

Amanda V. Black, a senior here at CSUSB, plans to graduate with a BA in French and a second BA in Liberal Studies in June 2006. She has been accepted into a graduate program at Indiana University where she will be pursuing a Ph.D. in Linguistics with a specialization in French Linguistics.

Amanda studied in Aix-en-Provence, France as part of the 2003-2004 CSU International Programs Study Abroad Program. The following year she served as the Alumni Assistant for CSUIP San Bernardino campus.

In 2005, Amanda was one of the nineteen CSUSB Students chosen to participate in the McNair Scholars Program. The McNair program encourages students to pursue graduate studies by providing participants with a mentored research experience (see http://mcnair.csusb.edu for more info). Her research focused on computer use in second language acquisition. Amanda's research paper titled. “Communication Strategies in Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication: A Two-Way Information Gap Task Activity,” was accepted to be presented at the 2006 Joint Conference of AAAL and ACLA/CAAL in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and at the 2006 CALICO Conference at the University of Hawaii.

Amanda also enjoys traveling to new places and in her spare time she loves to research and sew historically correct costumes from before 1600.

 

Amanda's Project

Communication Strategies in Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication:

A Two-Way Information Gap Task Activity

This study investigates the choice of communication strategies made by intermediate-level non-native language students when completing a two-way information-gap task in a synchronous computer-mediated environment. Findings demonstrate that students choose two specific strategies, Circumlocution (41.83%) and Approximation (38.02%), more often than Word Coinage (0.38%), Language Switch (12.93%), Appeal for Assistance (6.84%), or Literal Translation (0.00%). Students also used a combination of Approximation followed by Circumlocution 40.64% of the time. This combination suggests that this use of communication strategies can demonstrate student ability to produce complex grammatical structure needed for learning second language unlike what has be thought previously about information gap activities. Also this type of task yields itself to aiding student in reaching strategic competence, the ability to use communication strategies to complete goals, like the goal of completing this task. Results also produced the need for a more specific labeling of the communication strategy Circumlocution to demonstrate the complexity of the use of this strategy by participants in this study. In subsequent studies with a larger testing base the speed of completion will be tested.