How pedagogical blogging helps prepare students for intercultural communication in the global workplace

Abstract

Employees in the global workplace must be able to communicate effectively with interlocutors from different cultural backgrounds. To do this, they must be aware of the similarities and differences between their own and other cultures and of cultural biases that they and other people may have. This paper reports on the use of pedagogical blogging in a professional communication module to encourage students to reflect on their awareness and application of intercultural communication skills when working on group assignments inside and outside the classroom. The elective module attracted mostly second- and third-year Science and Engineering undergraduate students, and a few other students from first and honours years and other degree programmes such as Business and Computer Science. Also, although the majority of the students were Singaporeans, the module also attracted Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian, Chinese, western European and Korean students. As the module aimed to help students hone their verbal and written communication for the professional arena, it incorporated intercultural communication, a subset of professional communication competence and skills necessary for the global workplace today. This paper discusses students' reflective blog posts on their own as well as their peers' intercultural interactions in group learning tasks and assignments.

简介: 在全球性的工作场所, 员工们必须与来自不同文化背景的人们进行有效的交流。要达到有效交流, 他们必须熟悉自己的文化和其他文化之间的异同之处 及其他们自己或他人可能抱有的文化偏见。 本文论述了一门专业交流课程上使用教学博客鼓励学生反思他们的文化意识和在课堂 内外做小组课题时跨文化交流技巧的使用。这门选修课程主要吸引的学生群体为二三 年级的科学和工程系本科生, 一小部分一年级或四年纪的学生, 和来自其他学科系如商科和电脑科技的学生。虽然大部分的学生是新加坡人, 但也有部分来自马来西亚, 印尼, 印度, 中国, 西欧和韩国。由于此课程的目的为帮助学生培养他们职场所需的口头与写作技能, 课程也融入了跨文化交流,这一属于专业交流能力的, 为今日职场所需的技能。本文分析讨论了学生独立完成的反思博客和他们与同学在完 成小组课题过程中的跨文化交流。

Keywords:

• intercultural competence
• global workplace
• pedagogical blogging

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank my dear friend and colleague, Yang Ying, Senior Lecturer at the Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore for helping me with the Mandarin translation despite her busy schedule.

Notes on contributor

Radhika Jaidev is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore. She teaches Professional Communication to graduating Science and Engineering students as well as Science Communication to first-year Science students. Her research is in group learning processes in higher education as well as content and language-integrated learning (CLIL).