The Future of Education

New international students attending BYU-Hawaii go through an adjustment period, which often results in students from the same country grouping together to converse in their first language. Gallois et al. (1995) claims that a great amount of adjustment is required in the social interaction of cross-culturally different individuals. When international students rely on their co-nationals for social interactions, this leads to more difficulties in cross-cultural interactions. A program called VOICE allows international students to practice English language conversational skills with volunteer speaking partners. The primary focus of this research was to see how the VOICE program functions on campus, and how student engagement is manifest in demographic and participation data. This study was performed at BYU-Hawaii from August 2016 to February 2017. The subjects were 208 international students at BYU-Hawaii from 26 different countries. This research explores: to what degree international students engage with the VOICE Program as revealed by demographic data, and what topics are manifest in VOICE Program sessions. By examining "cultural scripts" as defined by Wierzbicka (2004), valuable participation patterns by country emerge. Additionally, four prominent topics of conversation across cultures emerged from the data. These evidence that by understanding cultural scripts, conversation partners may better serve their students. The four most popular topics of conversation in the VOICE program were religion, school life, family, and homework. These can be used as a guideline for partner-initiated conversation. The data obtained provides insights into further sociolinguistics support of conversation tutoring.

Keywords: sociolinguistics, speaking partners, intercultural competence;