Language Acquisition & Symbographic Research

I recently sat in on a lecture/salon regarding language acquisition research and it re-confirmed the power and value of SymbographicTM research to help understand the meaning, motive, emotion, and identity of constituent groups and audience segments.

As some of you know, my wife is in the data collection phase of her PhD dissertation. She is using a mixed-methods approach -- looking at motivation among middle school-aged students to persist or not in foreign language immersion programs. I sat in on a presentation she gave earlier in the week and saw some strong parallels in her research and those of my research and consulting background in communication and symbolic identity. Not to trivialize her research or over simplify it, but rather to keep this post a manageable length I’ll focus on two items – the value of Symbographic research in understanding your audience segments and the need to conduct research with your target customers and constituents.

1) In her research, she is seeing strong elements of motivation and identification that would not be picked up solely in a quantitative study. From a SymbolicID and Symbolic Convergence perspective this makes sense. While we may have people that are demographically and sociographically similar, their motives and identification with a foreign language are quite different. From a Symbographic perspective, some of the students persist for righteous reasons (they want to learn more, stretch the brain, etc. – which is quite interesting that middle-schoolers are that progressive), while others do it for more social reasons – family and peer group influence, or by learning other languages you can communicate with more people. Social reasons may exist for not persisting as well, as the kids are now feeling nervous about fitting in with their peers. I’m guessing there would be few pragmatic reasons for persisting in a language immersion program.

2) Another element in my wife’s research is way the students have been traditionally left out of the research. Some scholars are recognizing and calling for research with the students when discerning their motivation for persisting – not continuing to rely on the teachers and parents for data. This reminded me that we often gloss over the customer/end-user in our communication and research efforts, like the students have been in previous motivation research.

Take-Aways
1) Symbographic research provides valuable insight into the meaning, motive, identity and emotion of your consitituent groups and audience segments. By understanding the dramas (righteous, social, pragmatic, hybrid, or no vision) you can more effectively communicate with your audience than relying on your standard demo-, socio-, and psycho-graphic research.

2) Remember the end-user/customer in your research and design.