Case Study: Partnering Intercultural Communication Students with Campus Co-Cultural Student Groups to Develop Intercultural Competence, Allyship, and Curiosity

The question I analyze in this case study is how might one use civic engagement to foster campus/community relationships in this polarized era? I describe a teaching challenge in intercultural communication. Students have consistently reported that they arrive to this university from rural, majority-White communities where they have not experienced opportunities to communicate with culturally diverse groups. To address this challenge, I developed a semester-long assignment that provides a structured partnership between students in my Intercultural Communication course and campus co-cultural student groups. To assess this assignment’s benefit to the pedagogy surrounding polarization across cultural differences, I qualitatively analyzed themes in students’ reflection papers (N = 128 papers) from the last five sections of the course (2016–2020). Students addressed how these partnerships helped them develop (1) intercultural competence, (2) acceptance or appreciation through allyship, and (3) curiosity about other cultures. I conclude with implications, including how colleagues might use this assignment in other rural, land-grant public university settings.

RHETORICAL ANALYSIS AT THE SERVICE OF BUSINESS COMMUNICATION: GENDER-BASED DIFFERENCES IN STUDENTS' PERCEPTION OF THE SPEAKER

The paper points out the benefits of rhetorical analysis and rhetorical criticism in developing business communication skills. At Zagreb School of Economics and Management, both the American and the European approach to business communication have been combined, with LSP courses taught in the first year and business communication and rhetoric courses taught in the second year. An experiment was conducted on a sample of 99 students, including 57 female and 42 male participants, who were asked to assess the teenage activist Greta Thunberg and her speech at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019. The research focused on the role of the gender in perception of quality, attractiveness of the speech, the use of ethos, pathos and logos, persuasiveness and the influence potential. The results showed that male students gave lower grades to Greta and her speech, unlike the female students, who would also be more willing to change their behavior as the result of listening to Greta’s speech. Nevertheless, these differences were statistically significant only for a limited number of questions. The potential gender bias to speakers should be addressed in the rhetoric and business communication course design. Exposing students to a diverse set of speakers increases their critical thinking skills, ensuring higher objectivity and bias-free assessment of speakers including their peers.

Media Literacy Facilitation as Service Learning and Public Engagement

This chapter offers insights from a 15-year partnership between a public university and local K-12 schools to explore how the facilitation of media literacy education (MLE) programs by university students can offer rewarding outcomes for both research and learning. The MLE program that serves as the case study for this chapter takes place at local elementary schools each spring in conjunction with an undergraduate communication course and includes interactive media analysis discussions as well as a culminating creative production activity. Reflections and written feedback from participating graduate, undergraduate, and elementary students emphasize the strengths of this pedagogical model for collaboration and learning while also acknowledging the practical constraints of such a partnership. By detailing the institutional-level support, instructional design, and practical implementation of this MLE program, the chapter enumerates the benefits and challenges of engaged research and service learning for advancing media literacy goals.

Reimagining Engagement

This article explores how to successfully adapt simulations developed for traditional classrooms for synchronous platforms. Acknowledging the importance of the co-construction of knowledge and the impact of active learning in classrooms, this article explores instructional design approaches, logistical issues, and pedagogical considerations for translating successful in-person simulations to online synchronous learning environments. An example from a graduate level intercultural communication course is described as a platform for addressing lessons learned and sharing best practices. By reimagining five areas of adaptation, including materials, technology, grouping students, communication, and the role of the facilitator, faculty can examine critical junctures at the intersection of content knowledge, technology know-how, training pedagogy, and instructional design to conduct successful synchronous simulations.

Predicting Students’ Achievement in a Hybrid Environment Through Self-Regulated Learning, Log Data, and Course Engagement: A Data Mining Approach

With the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, many universities adopted a hybrid learning model as a substitute for a traditional one. Predicting students’ performance in hybrid environments is a complex task because it depends on extracting and analyzing different types of data: log data, self-reports, and face-to-face interactions. Students must develop Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) strategies to monitor their learning in hybrid contexts. This study aimed to predict the achievement of 82 undergraduates enrolled in a hybrid English for Business Communication course using data mining techniques. While clustering techniques were used to understand SRL patterns through classifying students with similar SRL data into clusters, classification algorithms were utilized to predict students' achievement by integrating the log files and course engagement factors. Clustering results showed that the group with high SRL achieved higher grades than the groups with medium SRL and low SRL. Classification results revealed that log data and engagement activities successfully predicted students’ academic performance with more than 88% accuracy. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature of SRL and hybrid classrooms by interpreting the predictive power of log data, self-reports, and face-to-face engagement to predict students’ achievement, a relatively unexplored area. This study recommended practical implications to promote students’ SRL and achievement in hybrid environments.

PRONUNCIATION ERRORS AMONG MALAYSIAN UNDERGRADUATES IN ENGLISH FOR ORAL COMMUNICATION COURSE

In a country where there is a diverse range of races and cultures, the influence of the first language comes almost naturally when using English as a second language. This influence has created a negative transfer which has affected learners’ communicative competence as well as performance. This study intends to investigate the pronunciation errors among undergraduates in a Malaysian university and explain the mispronunciations by comparing the phonetic system of English and Malay It is hoped that the results of this study will eventually provide some insights to producing effective strategies for teaching pronunciation that can help ESL learners to improve their oral proficiency skills and thus meeting their personal and professional needs.

Towards a CEFR Framework for Workplace Communication: Students’ Perceptions of the Sub-Skills, Use and Importance of Language Productive Skills (LPS)

The ever-changing demands of the workforce due to current trends have led to the need for universities to equip their graduates with the necessary soft skills to increase their employability. As a result, the implementation of CEFR in language curricula was emphasised to address this matter. However, research on how CEFR could be implemented into a university''s workplace communication course is severely lacking. Moreover, there is room to further enhance existing CEFR frameworks for workplace communication. Thus, this preliminary study was conducted to investigate students’ perceptions of the use and importance of language productive skills (LPS) at the workplace towards developing a CEFR framework for workplace communication. The study adopted the quantitative approach through questionnaires to gauge students’ perceptions of the use and importance of LPS at the workplace. A total of 354 students from various faculties under the clusters of science and technology, business and management, and social sciences and humanities participated in the study. The responses were analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The study’s findings show that, generally, students’ perceptions regarding the use and importance of speaking skills in the workplace are congruent to the CEFR scale for formal discussions. However, the use and importance of writing skills do not match the current available scale under CEFR to cater to workplace communication. Thus, future research calls for curriculum developers to identify relevant descriptors needed for written workplace communication.

Enhancing Thai EFL Students’ EFL Vocabulary Knowledge through the Use of Task-Based Language Teaching and Storytelling Technique Adopting Thai Folktales

This study aimed to examine the development of EFL students' vocabulary knowledge adopting a task-based method with 32 Thai students who enrolled in an English for Communication course at a university in northern Thailand. This study emphasized improving the Thai EFL students’ English vocabulary knowledge by requiring students to retell six Thai folktales in English translation to their group members. The pretest-posttest design, as well as an interview, were employed to indicate the students' vocabulary improvement after retelling Thai folktales. The findings showed that the students' post-test scores were statistically higher than their pre-test scores, and the students felt that the folktale tasks helped them enhance their vocabulary knowledge. The results of this study indicate that the students learned English vocabulary in an engaging and meaningful way through storytelling; therefore, the students’ vocabulary retention is likely high.

Theatre as TBLT: The implementation of theatre in a high school EFL Oral Communication course in Japan

<p>Task-based learning and teaching (TBLT) has garnered growing interest from educators in EFL contexts around the world, particularly in East Asian classroom contexts such as Japan where prominent entrance examinations can exert a strong influence on pedagogy (Wada, 2002; Stewart, 2009). Aiming to increase communicative practice during class in such contexts, implementation of TBLT has yielded mixed results and some have questioned the ability of TBLT to achieve its objectives given the institutional constraints present in those contexts (Carless 2004, 2007, 2009; Butler 2011; Sato 2010, 2011). Most of these studies explore pedagogical tasks of a more conventional nature and overlook how holistic activities from other disciplines outside of language teaching can function as legitimate examples of TBLT. The current study nominated theatre as one such holistic activity and examined the implementation of theatre as a form of task-based pedagogy, following the study of Carson (2012). The theatre tasks were designed to fulfil the criteria for creative tasks, as described by Willis (1996) and the present study investigated to what extent theatre could promote language learning within such a task-based approach (e.g. Ellis 2003, 2009; Shekan 2003; Samuda & Bygate 2008). The main study was quasi-experimental in design and investigated whether two types of theatre tasks could function as viable instructional packages. The theatre tasks were either a theatrical adaptation of an existing story (Adapted Play) or an original story based on one of three provided themes (Original Play). These two tasks were distinguished by the different amounts of conceptual creativity that they required, with the Original Plays identified as more difficult due to their greater creative demands. Three aspects of these tasks were analysed: 1) the process of collaboratively devising a play; 2) the effects of task difficulty on the language produced in the task performance; and 3) the students’ reflections on their engagement with the tasks. The implementation of these tasks occurred during regularly scheduled Oral Communication (OC) classes at a high school in Japan. With a counterbalanced design, groups of six to seven students performed one of the tasks in the first study and then, after a period of ten weeks, performed the other task. Either task consisted of approximately 100 minutes of planning and rehearsal, spread out evenly over four class periods, and culminated in a staged performance during a fifth lesson. The data compiled for analysis was taken from audio and video recordings of both group work in class and the final performances of each group, as well as post-task surveys administered to each student individually after each study. The main findings of this analysis were: (1) students in the Adapted Plays produced more fluent and syntactically complex language while students in the Original Plays produced less complex but more accurate language; (2) the Adapted Plays featured more use of overt narration which influenced the fluency and complexity of those plays; (3) student reflections from their post-task surveys indicated that the collaborative element of the tasks increased intrinsic motivation for completing the task; and (4) less initial demands on conceptual creativity in the Adapted Plays appeared to free up time later in the process to compose longer stories, though the frequency and quality of language related talk did not differ noticeably between the two play types. Based on these findings, two points can be argued. Firstly, the Original Play tasks put increased demands on students’ conceptual creativity. In relation to this, the provided content of the Adapted Play tasks acted as an ‘embedded scaffolding’ (Shapiro, 2008). Secondly, theatre, envisioned as a creative task within a TBLT framework, satisfied the criteria for a task (Ellis, 2003) but raised issues regarding the constructs of planning and report found in the ‘task cycle’ of Willis’ (1996) pedagogical framework.</p>