I’ve been conducting my research over this semester, and I’ve been very interested in what I’ve found. To recap, this semester I’ve been working on interviewing technical writing students about intercultural communication. I specifically wanted to learn their perceptions about it. I wanted to see how they define it, what significance it plays in their life, and how they think it fits in with technical writing.
For this study I conducted a semi-structured interview with students in my course. There haven’t been studies that have analyzed students perceptions of intercultural communication, and it relates to their coursework. There was one similar study You (2012) who interviewed engineering students about this topic, but I wanted a more holistic view of the students who take technical writing. The students I interviewed had varying majors such as pre-vet (which were several majors), child and family studies, engineering, etc. For the interview, I asked eight, open-ended questions that were based on Yu’s (2012) study. Yu’s study focused solely on engineering students, so I broadened the questions to make them more applicable to other majors. I stuck to the three objectives, and made questions that surrounded those objectives, as illustrated in the below figure.
Each interview lasted 20-30 minutes. I recorded the interviews via the quickTime Player on my computer. After interviewing the participants, I transcribed the interviews and them coded them several times to find emerging themes and patterns.
I found that students had varying degrees of understanding intercultural communication. 30% didn’t know what it was; 30% had a very simplistic view of it; 40% had a more nuanced view of it. Those who had a simplistic view of intercultural communication defined intercultural as nationalities and ethnicities, whereas those who had a more nuanced view were able to see cultures as different levels and not specifically stating it was more than just race/ethnicity.
Students were also very interested in learning more about this topic, but they didn’t know how it would relate to technical writing. This makes sense because of the difference in understanding of the term.
Many of these students viewed culture as the big vs. small phenomena that Holliday (1999) discussed. Big culture is the ethnicity and nationality view, whereas small culture also takes into the smaller cultures within a doctors office, a classroom, a sports team, etc. I found this very interesting because this could be a starting point for technical writing teachers. We can teach our students that culture and intercultural communication has more depth than they may initially realize. One of my students left me with this comment, and it has resonated with me since, “[This is a] very important topic. It needs to be taught because America has grown a little ignorant toward cultures. We are only intrinsically focused. Our mindset needs to change”.
Well why does all of this matter?
It’s all about audience.
When I am teaching technical writing to my students, our program teaches through a genre-based lens, which is really helpful to students. But, one thing they tend to struggle with is audience analysis. All audience members seem the same to them and there shouldn’t be changes to accommodate different audiences/cultures. If we can find a way to teach audience in a more nuanced fashion, we may be able to teach them a more humanistic way of looking at their audiences and how to adapt different documents to meet those needs and expectations of the members.
I’m going to do a little more digging on this topic and continue this topic in the next post.
Katie Rieger, Portfolio 