Browsing by Author "Connor, Ulla"
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Item The CoMac DescriptorTM and Psychosociolinguistic Tailored Communication to Promote Self-Management (TCPS) in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2016-04-08) Connor, Ulla; Gokpinar-Shelton, EsenAbstract: Estimates show that between 35-50% of patients with chronic conditions do not adhere to medical prescriptions. Lack of adherence to treatment plans results in poor clinical/patient outcomes, higher healthcare costs, and lost productivity. Adherence is connected to health literacy and health communication. Health literacy includes the ability to comprehend medical information and make decisions about healthy behaviors. Much of the focus on health literacy has been on reading and numeracy; however, in the clinic setting, health information is most often exchanged through provider-patient verbal communication. Verbal exchange of information includes speaking and listening. Linguistic tactics can be used to draw individuals’ attention to messages, selecting specific words, phrases, and style of communicating, informed by linguistics, can create a psychological closeness between the message and the audience. Increasing attention to oral messages should be a key strategy in health communication to promote adherence and self-management. This presentation describes the effectiveness and the practicality of an innovative psychosociolinguistic intervention tool, based on previous research in linguistic analysis of patient talk, the CoMac DescriptorTM and the subsequent psychosociolinguistically informed communication (Connor et al., 2012; Connor & Lauten 2014). As an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the International Center for Intercultural Communication (ICIC) at IUPUI, we have used the CoMac DescriptorTM, a 12-question survey, to identify and segment patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) based on patients’ psychosociolinguistic characteristics. We have then offered healthcare providers psychosociolinguistically informed communication, matching the linguistic styles of patients. We will share the key findings such as 1) patients’ and healthcare professionals’ overall satisfaction with the CoMac DescriptorTM and psychosociolinguistically informed communication; and 2) statistically significant relationship between the health behaviors and health outcomes of patients using the CoMac Descriptor and psychosociolinguistically informed communication.Item Developing a targeted English-language curriculum and materials for Latino caregivers of infants with special needs as part of a NICU pre-discharge education program(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2015-04-17) Connor, Ulla; Rodgers, Rylin; Traversa, Ana; Akers, Jennifer; Gokpinar-Shelton, Esen; Lorch, MattHealthcare disparities in the Latino community are well documented; Latino infants with special healthcare needs are at high risk of mortality or poor health outcomes and have difficulty obtaining specialty care. Poor English-language skills add an additional layer of vulnerability. Existing health-related English-language curricula address adult, not pediatric health concerns. A clear need exists for short-term health-related English-language education programs to develop survival communication skills in low-literacy Limited English Proficiency (LEP) caregivers. International Center for Intercultural Communication (ICIC) and Family Voices Indiana (FVI) are collaborating to develop and facilitate a targeted English-language curriculum for LEP Latino caregivers of infants with special healthcare needs at Riley Children’s Hospital. ICIC brings expertise in English-for-Specific-Purposes (ESP) program development; FVI serves parents of children with special healthcare needs, including LEP parents, and brings the ability to make such a program meaningful and useful to our target population. The first stage of the project is currently ending, and has featured • Needs-analysis data collection onsite through the observation of current education modules with Latino parents at Riley Hospital as well as surveys of relevant healthcare providers and other hospital staff, followed by • The development of a curriculum, instructional materials, and pre-post intervention assessments based on the identified needs. The second stage will feature the actual intervention and will involve working with a minimum of six (6) low-literacy/low-proficiency caregivers to • Improve their health-related English for the specific purposes of communicating with their infants’ physicians and other healthcare staff while at Riley, • Facilitate communication after discharge, • Increase their readiness to engage in community ESL classes, and • Ensure eventual adaptability of the curriculum for ESL caregivers of various language backgrounds, stronger language or literacy skills, a variety of healthcare contexts, and the larger pediatric population. The post-intervention stage will feature data analysis with the purpose of assessing the viability of the curriculum and materials, and will lead to revisions. ICIC will also train FVI facilitators to offer the program to the population they serve. ICIC will then work with Indiana University Research and Technology Corporation (IURTC) to copyright and license the final curriculum and materials.Item Development of patient-centric linguistically tailored psychoeducational messages to support nutrition and medication self-management in type 2 diabetes: a feasibility study(Dove Press Ltd, 2014-10-07) Bartlett Ellis, Rebecca J.; Connor, Ulla; Marshall, James; School of NursingPurpose: This study evaluated the feasibility of developing linguistically tailored educational messages designed to match the linguistic styles of patients segmented into types with the Descriptor™, and to determine patient preferences for tailored or standard messages based on their segments. Patients and methods: Twenty patients with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) were recruited from a diabetes health clinic. Participants were segmented using the Descriptor™, a language-based questionnaire, to identify patient types based on their control orientation (internal/external), agency (high/low), and affect (positive/negative), which are well studied constructs related to T2DM self-management. Two of the seven self-care behaviors described by the American Association of Diabetes Educators (healthy eating and taking medication) were used to develop standard messages and then linguistically tailored using features of the six different construct segment types of the Descriptor™. A subset of seven participants each provided feedback on their preference for standard or linguistically tailored messages; 12 comparisons between standard and tailored messages were made. Results: Overall, the tailored messages were preferred to the standard messages. When the messages were matched to specific construct segment types, the tailored messages were preferred over the standard messages, although this was not statistically significant. Conclusion: Linguistically tailoring messages based on construct segments is feasible. Further - more, tailored messages were more often preferred over standard messages. This study provides some preliminary evidence for tailoring messages based on the linguistic features of control orientation, agency, and affect. The messages developed in this study should be tested in a larger more representative sample. The present study did not explore whether tailored messages were better understood. This research will serve as preliminary evidence to develop future studies with the ultimate goal to design intervention studies to investigate if linguistically tailoring com - munication within the context of patient education influences patient knowledge, motivation, and activation toward making healthy behavior changes in T2DM self-management.Item Does everyone write five-paragraph essays?(University of Michigan Press, 2019) Connor, Ulla; Ene, EstelaThis chapter considers and provides evidence-based answers to several important questions: How widely is the five-paragraph essay really taught around the world, in English-speaking countries, other first languages, and EFL classes? What circumstances surround its adoption or rejection? What values and ideologies are passed on through the teaching of the five-paragraph essay, to what effect, and how can we show students what lies beyond the curtain of the five-paragraph formula? Before examining EFL contexts, we should first note that the five-paragraph essay is not taught everywhere in English-speaking countries. In the U.S., “the essay”--very loosely labeled--is taught or assigned most frequently, and it encompasses almost any multi-paragraph written text (as also mentioned in Caplan, Tardy, and Johns in this volume and Melzer, 2014). Often, various assignment types (e.g., research paper, essay, report) (Johns, 2011) are conflated under the “essay” category based on perceived shared structural features (Tardy, this volume).Item Implementing person-centered communication in diabetes care: a new tool for diabetes care professionals(Dovepress, 2019-08-26) Connor, Ulla; Kessler, Lucina; de Groot, Mary; Mac Neill, Robert; Sandy, Robert; English, School of Liberal ArtsPurpose: This study tested the clinical implementation of the CoMac Communication System, an empirically validated tool for individualized Diabetes Self-Management Education and Support (DSMES). This system provides immediate feedback and guidance to health care providers (HCPs) to facilitate speaking with persons with type 2 diabetes mellitus in language reflecting patients' own worldviews and health beliefs. Patients and methods: This 6-month implementation science study at an accredited diabetes care clinic in a Midwestern US hospital was conducted in two phases. Phase I consisted of CoMac implementation, qualitative interviews with HCPs, and evaluation of clinic flow among the diabetes education team. Seventy-two participants received CoMac's linguistically tailored patient-centric communication; a control group of 48 did not receive this intervention. In Phase II, glycosylated hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) levels from the first visit to the follow-up visit for each group were compared. Results: Interviews conducted during Phase I suggested that the system can be successfully implemented into DSMES practice. Knowing individual psychosocial profiles and participants' language use allowed for more effective patient counseling. In Phase II, multiple regression analysis with HbA1c change as the dependent variable showed that the key variable of interest, treated with the CoMac intervention, had a one-tailed t-value of -1.81, with a statistically significant probability value of 0.037. Conclusion: Findings suggest that use of the CoMac System by diabetes care professionals has the potential for improved patient health outcomes. Patients receiving the CoMac intervention showed significantly improved HbA1c levels, suggesting that this approach has great promise for effective DSMES management.Item Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication – A Signature Center Initiative(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2011-04-08) Connor, Ulla; Lauten, KathrynThe Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication (ICIC) is a university-based research and service organization created to enhance links between the city of Indianapolis, the state of Indiana, and cultures/nations throughout the world. The center is part of the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts in the Department of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). ICIC conducts internationally-recognized research on language and intercultural communication; provides practical training in language and culture for specific purposes that is informed by its research; and applies its expertise to benefit the wider community. Research Current research is on health discourse/health literacy and intercultural rhetoric/discourse through quantitative and qualitative analyses in several areas, to identify factors and forms of interaction and communication, that impact medication adherence, risk comprehension, patient decision-making, and successful self-management of diseases. Training ICIC offers group training programs and individualized tutoring in language and intercultural communication to students, faculty, medical residents and postdoctoral researchers, as well as business professionals in the community. Students from around the world come to Indianapolis to participate in our specialized language training programs. ICIC also offers training to instructors of language and intercultural communication. Our goal is to provide training tailored to learners’ needs and learning situations.Item Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication – A Signature Center Initiative(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2012-04-13) Connor, Ulla; Lauten, KathrynThe Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication (ICIC) is a university-based research and service organization created to enhance links between the city of Indianapolis, the state of Indiana, and cultures/nations throughout the world. The center is part of the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts in the Department of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). ICIC conducts internationally-recognized research on language and intercultural communication; provides practical training in language and culture for specific purposes that is informed by its research; and applies its expertise to benefit the wider community. Research Current research is on health discourse/health literacy and intercultural rhetoric/discourse through quantitative and qualitative analyses in several areas, to identify factors and forms of interaction and communication, that impact medication adherence, risk comprehension, patient decision-making, and successful self-management of diseases. Training ICIC offers group training programs and individualized tutoring in language and intercultural communication to students, faculty, medical residents and postdoctoral researchers, as well as business professionals in the community. Students from around the world come to Indianapolis to participate in our specialized language training programs. ICIC also offers training to instructors of language and intercultural communication. Our goal is to provide training tailored to learners’ needs and learning situations.Item Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication: Translating Health Discourse Research into Action(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2013-04-05) Connor, UllaThe Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication (ICIC) is a university-based research and service organization created to enhance links between the city of Indianapolis, the state of Indiana, and cultures/nations throughout the world. ICIC conducts internationally recognized research on language and intercultural communication and applies its expertise to benefit the wider community. The Center also offers group training programs and individualized tutoring in language for specific purposes and intercultural communication to students, faculty, medical residents, postdoctoral researchers, and business professionals in the community as well as international language educators. ICIC’s research focuses on health discourse from the perspective of intercultural rhetoric. The Center’s strong linguistic background provides a unique multimodal approach to the study of factors and forms of interaction and communication that impact medication adherence, risk comprehension, and patient disease management and decision-making. In keeping with the Signature Center Initiative mandate to conduct research that translates into practice, the results of ICIC’s research translate into action in the form of training to healthcare providers and guidelines for patient-tailored language and communication strategies. This poster features results from recent ICIC research projects, among them a study of linguistic indicators related to diabetes patient self-management and an intercultural analysis of sources of medical information in Spanish-speaking diabetes patients. Also featured are ongoing and future projects: a psychosociolinguistic study of patient voices to be applied to the development of patient-tailored messaging and the health-literacy oriented redesign of the Walther Cancer Center information portal for patients.Item An intercultural analysis of sources of medical information in Spanish-speaking diabetes patients(2012-12) Antón, Marta; Connor, Ulla; Lauten, Kathryn; Balunda, StephanieUnderstanding and improving health literacy have become important goals in health communication. Research has shown that limited health literacy is associated with poor health outcomes and that it is more prevalent in culturally and linguistically diverse populations. The goals of this study are to describe English-speaking (ES) and Spanish-speaking (SS) diabetic patients’ perceptions of sources of health information, to identify the actions patients report taking in seeking that information, and to test reading comprehension of medical information among SS patients. Data for this study were based on semi-structured interviews, life-story narratives, and a reading comprehension test with diabetic patients (43 native ES patients and 22 native SS patients with limited English proficiency) collected at a bilingual clinic and at an English-speaking clinic in the Midwestern United States (Indianapolis, Indiana). The results showed that the three approaches to the assessment of health literacy revealed disparities in access and use of sources of information as well as disparities in reading comprehension of health information. In view of the results, we argue that understanding and assessing health literacy, particularly in the case of ethnic minorities, requires complementary approaches of study. Emphasis should be placed on addressing the disparities SS patients face. Interventions should aim at maximizing the role of oral sources of information, training patients to use a wider variety of sources, and designing linguistically and culturally appropriate sources of health information for patients with limited English proficiency.Item The Promotion of Self-Regulated Learning in English Instruction at Colombian Universities(2023-03) Bravo Zambrano, Jackeline; Ene, Estela; Connor, Ulla; Green, MichelleOne of the main educational discourses in the era of globalization is lifelong learning. Self-regulated learning and learner autonomy are considered to be cornerstones of lifelong learning and are currently topics of main discussion and interest in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages in Colombia and other countries around the world. Although previous research has suggested different teaching alternatives to promote self-regulated learning (SRL) in English instruction in Colombia, what actually happens in the classroom and its impact on the development of SRL have received little attention. This study aimed to identify what Colombian university English instructors know about language teaching methods, approaches, principles, and strategies to promote SRL and to understand to what extent their teaching practices help to promote SRL. Using a survey questionnaire and in-depth interviews, this study was developed based on a mixed-methods approach to understand how the processes involved in SRL, as proposed by Zimmerman (2002), are promoted implicitly or explicitly in the university English classroom. Consistently, most university English instructors are not familiar with the construct of SRL, and their teaching practices mainly focus on teaching, evaluating, and giving feedback on language use and task completion, but not on the processes involved in SRL. Nevertheless, SRL-related aspects, such as learner motivation and the learning of strategies, are part of some instructors' teaching agendas. It is suggested, among others, that university English course programs should incorporate SRL education initiatives such as pre-academic courses on SRL, as well as on how successful language learning takes place. This is to help learners be more prepared for successful and lifelong learning, not only in the English classroom, but beyond.