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.