This article explores the cross-cultural teaching and learning environment of a graduate course in a master’s degree programin teaching English to speakers of other languages (MA-TESOL) offered by a U.S. university in Brazil. The authors analyze the experience of a U.S. professor teaching diverse adult students in Brazil to illustrate and further illuminate what is known about teacher immediacy, communication accommodation, and cross-cultural adjustment. They also raise ethical and pedagogical concerns related to international education endeavors. In this case study of teacher praxis, critical and feminist pedagogical theories are used in conjunction with intercultural communication theory in the development of a culturally flexible pedagogy appropriate to cross-cultural learning environments like this one. Although the context is Brazil and the professor and researcher are from the United States, the broad conceptual strokes of the analysis may be applicable to other intercultural teaching and learning contexts.
The purpose of this empirical study is to explore expectations of industry insiders and identify how student interns are performing in relation to those expectations as defined by 11 performance areas. The results of a survey of 238 industry supervisors were collected over a 5-year period in the departments of English and communication at a private university in the Northeast. While the results suggest that student interns tend to meet their supervisors' expectations in many areas, performance categories such as initiative, writing skills, and oral communication skills require increased attention in the ways we prepare students for their internships and post-graduation employment and, perhaps, the ways we help onsite supervisors develop expectations for and evaluate our interns.SO MUCH OF what we think we know about our students' state of readiness for post-graduation employment is assumed. We give our students exams, listen to their class presentations, and grade portfolios of their academic work. But the reality often is that, until it is too late, we know very little about how our students will perform professionally in relation to what industry expects. Rarely do we have the opportunity to incorporate feedback from industry insiders in order to facilitate our students' transition to full-time employment. Occasionally, we conduct alumni surveys or obtain feedback in program reviews or accreditation reports, but most of the time, the information available to us about our students' performance outside the classroom is either anecdotal or based on a small sampling of student work. Thus, we can only assume and hope that the careeroriented education we provide as business writing and communication teachers will translate into successful job performance.
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