Bridging the gaps: Technical communication in an international and multicultural society

Intercultural Competence in Technical Communication: A Working Definition and Review of Assessment Methods

“…Matveeva believed that it is ''more a skill than knowledge'' (p. 396), but one might well argue that it is a skill one practices based on knowledge of intercultural audiences. And again, how is knowledge the same as or different from Barker and Matveeva's (2006) or Thrush's (1993) awareness and information? With these conceptual confusions, we cannot develop meaningful assessment-so it is that in Matveeva's study mentioned earlier, teachers would want students to learn the skill of writing to other cultures but would not use appropriate methods to assess that skill.…”

Teaching Intercultural Communication in a Basic Technical Writing Course: A Survey of Our Current Practices and Methods

“…In this rather diverse body of knowledge, one may identify two traditions in intercultural teaching that constituted one of the scholarly debates in the early 90s: the information acquisition approach (Beamer, 1992;Thrush, 1993;etc. ) and the dialogic approach (Weiss, T., 1992(Weiss, T., , 1993Yuan, 1997).…”

Teaching Technical Writing: Opportunities for International Collaboration

“…However, today's workplace requires workers that adapt quickly to new colleagues and new organizational structures [2], an absolute necessity in a field like engineering where work is often performed internationally and collaboratively. Most instructors in engineering-specific english courses resort to relying on technical communication or other engineering-specific textbooks to address genres, ethics, and the international aspects of the field, but research suggests that these textbooks do a poor job in instructing students in the actual practices of Engineering in general [3] and international communication of Engineering in specific [4]. How can non-engineering faculty and staff overcome these hurdles in order to better prepare neophytes for the field?…”