Bringing the World: Capitalizing on Multilingual and Multicultural Resources in a Technical and Professional Communication Classroom

Abstract

As internationalization of higher education is becoming a commonplace, we frequently find ourselves situated in a “world” with students from different countries and -with different cultural backgrounds. Such a changing landscape in higher education opens up some opportunities for pedagogical design in technical and professional communication. Scholars have argued for teaching technical and professional communication as a humanistic, communalist, and interpretative process. Drawing on the prior scholarships, I propose a cross- cultural team project in a technical and professional communication class with native English speakers, multilingual students, and international students. In this team project students are not expected to land on cultural generalizations. Instead, students are encouraged to apply, appropriate, and “amend” existing linguistic and cultural theories in the decision-making of designing product description and instructions for a foreign audience. The ultimate goal of this intercultural communication practice is to guide student to understand and connect a cultural audience with information in a specific time and place.