In multilingual teams, people speaking different native languages combine expertise and perspectives to achieve common goals. A major problem faced by multilingual teams involves grounding--establishing shared understanding of intended meanings--during collaborative writing in English. Common ways to establish grounding such as face-to-face chat create additional challenges, such as the need for verbal explanations and overlapping schedules. This project investigates new ways to create grounding in multilingual teams engaged in collaborative writing. It will improve understanding and develop new tools. Knowledge and design solutions generated from this project will benefit diverse workers, including members of global research projects, students in international education programs, and employees of multinational business organizations.
The project introduces the term “editing traces†to refer to information generated as a by-product of document editing processes. Editing traces will be investigated as a means of grounding communication in a collaborative writing environment. Sharing selective editing traces between native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) will be researched as a means for grounding intended meanings. Three interwoven activities are expected to contribute to developing new understandings of practices, needs and requirements involving conversational grounding in collaborative writing activities, and techniques for supporting them: (1) developing classifications of grounding issues and editing traces for understanding how collaborative writing works in multilingual teams; (2) specifying the effects of using selectively displayed editing traces from NNS to alleviate targeted grounding problems detected by NS; and (3) using editing traces in the design of a tool that supports the establishment of grounding between NS and NNS.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
