This article argues that researchers can benefit as scholars and teachers by conducting studies in the history of business and technical writing within the framework of the new historicism. It discusses the problems and features of the historical studies literature, explains the legitimizing effects of treating studies as the new historicism, and advocates teaching students to conduct new historical analyses of business and technical texts.

This article describes German correspondence styles in order to assist American managers. In the coming years, more and more American managers will find that they must correspond with their German counterparts either as colleagues within international organizations or as associates representing collaborative and competing businesses. The article explains typical conventions of both memo and letter formats, emphasizing the need to appreciate differences between formal and informal modes of communication. American managers who know and respect these differences can communicate more clearly and persuasively with their German contacts.

This article advocates student learning portfolios as an effective assessment technique and explains how instructors and administrators can devise a process that involves community partners in assessing student performance.Having community experts judge a student portfolio contest helps faculty identify standards for success that can inform decision making about course content and program offerings. The article discusses how to gain and sustain community involvement in program assessment and describes how portfolio assessment led to the creation of a technical and business writing advisory board at an urban university.

As the number of immigrants and foreign students in the United States grows, so grows the population of international students in business communication classrooms. As second language learners, many will suffer both academic and professional setbacks in our linguistically biased colleges and corporations. Unfortunately, many of the most open-minded, well-meaning business instructors are ill-equipped to serve their language learning needs.Understandably, the business communication specialist, who is hired to teach all students how to use language effectively in business, may be unable to help international students acquire business language. To teach English as a second language (L2), he or she has to know something about students' first languages, but the typical non-heterogeneous mix of L2 learners renders impractical, if not impossible, attempts to discover or design an appropriate variety of learning aids. The mind boggles at the prospect of studying Spanish, French, Russian, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Hindi, Farsi, Filipino, Hausa, Arabic, Tagalog, and so on.Too often, specialists who are not formally trained to teach English to speakers of other languages get unnecessarily mired in philosophical misgivings, suffering guilt because they are less adept at hurdling the language barrier than are the students whose &dquo;errors&dquo; they judge (e.g., Iandoli,1987). The notion that language acquisition takes time may partially comfort the instructor as well as the student, but may cause both to slight the importance of the student's immediate needs. A Vietnamese cost accountant who works eight-hour days, attends school at night, and cannot write a coherent memo suffers from a very practical, not philosophical, problem. How can such students write better and faster now?This article describes a lesson designed to meet both the language learning needs of international students and the language teaching needs of untrained ESL instructors in business writing classes. The lesson aims at achieving timely, proficient writing from L2 writers who commit serious errors. By &dquo;serious&dquo; I mean cohesion errors, which research suggests elicit the most negative reaction from native speakers of English and pose the most troublesome pedagogical problems for teachers (Corder

To discover whether there was a significant difference between visual serial search time for Arabic and Roman numbers, a repeated-measurements design was used with a group of 20 undergraduate female Ss. Results demonstrated the superiority of visual serial search for Arabic over Roman numbers across 10 30-sec. trials with 60-sec. intervening between equivalent tasks. This effect was thought to be a function of the heterogeneity of target and field components.