Intercultural Converstaions Blog
Welcome to our friendly conversations on accents, languages, and cultures in the United States and beyond.
If you would like to join in the conversation, please email me with your comments, and I will bring them here to discuss. Enjoy!
Welcome to a blog on accents, languages, and cultures! My name is Agata and I hope to involve you in great discussions on these fascinating topics.
This blog is a result of my passion for differences in languages, accents, and cultures. I could write pages these topics. I would probably never run out of material to discuss because not only it is a broad area, it also constantly changes. The world turns and changes; with it, its languages, its accents, and its cultures are also constantly in motion. Scientists who study these topics acquire new knowledge, test new ideas, create new theories and disband or modify old ones. It is a captivating process and one that requires constant attention to the past, present, and future developments. It also necessitates education, learning, discussion, and above all, an open mind. I hope to provide all of these in the posts here.
To make a long story shorter, I was born and raised in southeastern Poland. I came to the United States in 1999, to stay for two years. Needless to say, 11 years later, I am still here. In the meantime, I completed undergraduate degree in psychology and history at Cornell University, where for my senior thesis I explored cross-cultural differences in decision-making. I continued my research at Yale University, from which I obtained a PhD in 2010. My research focused on the psychological and social effects of speaking with non-native (non-English) accents in the US. During graduate school, I also worked for a management consulting company, first at a research associate, then junior associate, and now as a full associate, where I have obtained practical experience in consulting. After receiving my PhD, I decided to found my own consulting practice, where I could use my knowledge and experience to help private companies, non-profit organizations, and educational institutions leverage the benefits of cultural and linguistic diversity by improving intercultural communication skills. As an alternative to time-consuming and often ineffective accent reduction, and I focus on all aspects of intercultural communication (language usage, accents, and cultural differences) and train both native and non-native English speakers to become better communicators. In all my work, I use scientific evidence, proven findings and methods, as opposed to relying on unreliable intuitions and common misconceptions.
I plan to continue to write and conduct research, but my approach is less theoretical and more practical. I want to know what works and what does not, so I can help people build a more tolerant working and learning environments, where people from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds can thrive and communicate successfully with each other.
You can check detailed information about my background at http://humanaccents.com/biography.html. You might have arrived at this blog from that website. If not, you may want to visit humanaccents.com, a website I maintain about the science behind the way we speak. It covers accents, my main research topic in graduate school, in more detail. I also have my own consulting practice in intercultural communication. You can find out more information about Parlez Consulting at parlez-consulting.com.
