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TPO 6 Conversation 2
Narrator
Listen to a conversation between a student and a professor.
Student
Professor Martin?
Professor
Uh, hi, Lisa, what can I do for you?
Student
Well, I’ve been thinking about, you know, what you were saying in class last week, about how we shouldn’t wait until the last minute to find an idea and get started working on our term paper.
Professor
Good, good, and have you come up with anything?
Student
Well, yeah, sort of. See, I’ve never had a linguistics class before, so I was sort of, I mean, I was looking over the course description and a lot of the stuff you described there, I just don’t know what it is talking about, you know, or what it means. But there was one thing that really did jump out at me
Professor
Yes?
Student
The section on dialects, cos…like, that’s the kind of thing that’s always sort of intrigued me, you know?
Professor
Well, that’s certainly an interesting topic. But you may not realize, I mean, the scope...
Student
Well, especially now, cos I’ve got like one roommate who is from the south and another one from New York. And we all talk like totally different, you know?
Professor
Yes, I understand. But…
Student
But then I was noticing, like, we don’t really get into this till the end of the semester, you know. So I…
Professor
So, you want some pointers where to go for information on the subject? Well, you could always start by reading the chapter in the book on social linguistics.
That will give you a basic understanding of the key issues involved here.
Student
Yeah, that’s what I thought. So I started reading the chapter, you know, about how everyone speaks some dialect of a language. And I’m wondering like, well, how do we even manage to understand each other at all?
Professor
Ah, yes, an interesting question. You see…
Student
So then I read the part about dialect accommodation. You know, the idea that people tend to adapt their speaking to make it closer to the speech of whomever they’re talking to, and I’m thinking, yeah, I do that when I talk with my roommates, and without even thinking about it or anything, you know.
Professor
OK, all right. Dialect accommodation is a more manageable sort of topic.
Student
So I was thinking like, I wonder just how much other people do the same thing. I mean, there are students here from all over the place. Does everyone change the way they talk to some degree depending on whom they are talking to?
Professor
You’d be surprised.
Student
So, anyway, my question is, do you think it’d be OK if I did a project like that for my term paper? You know, find students from different parts of the country, record them talking to each other in different combinations, report on how they accommodate their speech or not, that kind of thing?
Professor
Tell you what, Lisa, write me up a short proposal for this project, how you’re going to carry out the experiment and everything, a design plan. And I think this’ll work out just fine.
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