This article reports on the current status of client projects (CPs) in business communication courses, provides a scaffolded model for implementing CP, and assesses student learning in CPs. Using a longitudinal mixed method research design, survey data and qualitative materials from six semesters are presented. The instructor survey indicated need for a model for CPs, assistance identifying community partners, and advice on tailoring CPs to course objectives, all of which are provided here. Results from assessing the model’s application indicate that students expressed higher levels of confidence as communicators and felt better prepared to engage in workplace communication.

The purpose of this study was to explore what corporations with good reputations communicate on social media. Based on a content analysis of 46 corporate Facebook pages from Fortune’s “World’s Most Admired Companies,” this study found that corporations communicate noncorporate social responsibility messages more frequently than corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages. When communicating CSR activities, corporations employed an informing strategy more often than an interacting strategy and included internal publics’ activities more than external publics. This study also found that publics engage more with noncorporate social responsibility messages than CSR messages, which may reflect public cynicism of CSR communication.

Two business communication faculty share the story of teaching a 780-person business writing class. The article discusses the challenges of teaching such a large writing class. Challenges ranged from adopting a hybrid course model to hiring adjunct faculty for help with the task of grading. The article offers lessons learned, and recommends that one proceed with caution when considering a superlarge format for writing instruction. Both theory and experience are used to support this position.

Many communication instructors make allowances for grammatical error in nonnative English speakers’ writing, but do businesspeople do the same? We asked 169 businesspeople to comment on three versions of an email with different types of errors. We found that businesspeople do make allowances for errors made by nonnative English speakers, perceiving these errors as less bothersome than those made by native speakers. We also found that businesspeople perceive pragmatic errors of politeness and tone as even more bothersome than grammatical error—a finding we share with our students to persuade them of the importance of polite and professional email correspondence.

The value of experiential learning is widely acknowledged, especially for the development of communication skills, but students are not always aware of their own learning. While we can observe students practicing targeted skills during the experiential activity, the experience can also color their explicit understanding of those skills. Transfer of applied knowledge to managerial contexts requires an explicit grasp of the skills as appropriate solutions to the problems they encounter within the experiential team. This article reports the adaptation of assessment processes to encourage the reflection steps necessary for developing the desired managerial perspective on team communication.

Much research shows that students do not transfer learning well from one class to the next. This study was designed to investigate if students were transferring rhetorical strategies from their disciplinary courses to advanced writing courses. The findings suggest that business majors not only transferred rhetorical knowledge from their other courses, but they did so in a way that is invisible to both themselves and their own writing instructors.

In the redesign of a professional communication course for real estate students, a workplace simulation was implemented, spanning the entire 12-week duration of the course. The simulation was achieved through the creation of an online company presence, the infusion of communication typically encountered in the workplace, and an intensive and integrated approach to task design. An analysis of students’ and tutors’ perceptions of the changes shows higher student engagement, with the redesigned course resulting in learning that is both relevant and meaningful to workplace communication, which has implications for the teaching and learning of professional communication skills in higher education.

This research establishes the role of communication education in employability by determining how employers of graduates view communication, identifying communication skills that employers view as relevant, and establishing whether these skills are included in communication courses. To achieve these aims, local businesses were surveyed, and the results were compared with communication course descriptors. The research shows, consistent with worldwide trends, that local employers value communication competencies highly when recruiting new graduates, and specific communication skills required in an industry reflect course content. However, some skills are still lacking, and the research questions where the responsibility lies in developing these skills.

This study investigates the meaning of communication skills from employers’ perspectives. Students enrolled in a business communication course were asked to contact potential employers in their fields of interest, requesting information about important communication skills in those fields. Using content analysis, two coders familiar with business communication analyzed 52 of the resulting open-ended responses. The analysis of 165 skills suggests employers recall oral communication more frequently than written, visual, or electronic communication skills. Of oral communication subskills, interpersonal communication was mentioned more than other workplace communication skills.

PowerPoint presentations are often criticized for the excessive use of text on the slides. In a study of 97 academic scholars, we found that presenters indeed used substantially more text than is advised. Speaking anxiety was found to be related to the time spent on preparing and rehearsing, and time spent on rehearsing is related to the number of words on the slides. Anxious presenters appear to use PowerPoint slides as speaking notes. Presenters should be trained to overcome their speaking anxiety by means other than the abundant use of words on their slides.

This article, the second of a two-part series, presents 10 teaching innovations from the 2015 Association for Business Communication’s annual conference. Innovations include fresh approaches to teaching cross-cultural communication consulting, creating promotional material with graphical software, a Pecha Kucha approach to oral presentations, email skills, creating digital résumés and LinkedIn profiles, promoting flash-mob events via social media, rapid message packaging, and writing 140-character mission statements. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on these websites: http://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and http://www.salesleadershipcenter.com/research.html#mfa16 .

Students raised with pervasive technology are believed to have developed skills and ways of thinking that require new approaches to education. Often, social media is lauded as the answer, but a large gap remains in understanding student preferences regarding social media in courses. We uncover those preferences with data obtained from an anonymous survey of 368 students in large lecture classes. Our research focuses on social media preferences as well as differences in major, gender, and experience with social media for coursework. We discuss three lessons that can be applied immediately and suggestions for future research.

Although research has explored employees’ organizational identification, few scholars have investigated liminal workers’ identification. This gap is problematic because nonmembers represent organizations and their attachments may influence their work. To understand this poorly understood phenomenon, we conducted interviews with agency social media writers who were not employed by organizations they represented online. Contrary to practitioners avowing that only internal employees can communicate via social media, we found agency writers adopt multiple identification lenses, which lead to different work practices. These results contribute to organizational, stakeholder, and consumer-company identification research and help social media writers better communicate on behalf of organizations.

This article presents findings of a 2014 survey of 72 U.S. employers asking: Which oral communication skills are most utilized daily by new hires? Which oral skills are most important to company success? The study utilized Qualtrics to administer a mixed-methods, 12-question survey to employers of various sizes and across various industries. Findings show that employers rank (a) proper grammar use, (b) team communication, (c) ability to engage in conversation, (d) meeting participation, and (e) ability to speak well using the telephone as the most valued oral competencies for new hires as a factor in company success.

Recent reports have suggested that many employees in the workforce today lack essential soft skills. This research analyzes the effectiveness of multiple classroom assignments for teaching soft skills in a Business Communication course. Five distinct pedagogical strategies were used in an effort to teach soft skills, including a self-analysis, an interview, a guest lecturer, a journal article, and a soft skills video. Results offer insights into students’ perceptions of the most helpful pedagogical approaches for teaching soft skills.

Business, like many other programs in higher education, continues to rely largely on traditional classroom environments. In this article, another approach to teaching and learning, the flipped classroom, is explored. After a review of relevant literature, the authors present their experience with the flipped classroom approach to teaching and learning in a postsecondary business communication course. Instructor and student experiences with the flipped classroom are presented. Readily available tools that made the implementation of the flipped classroom approach more feasible are discussed.

This study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of a soft skills employee training program. We examined willingness to learn and delivery methods (face-to-face vs. online) and their associations with the training outcomes in terms of learning and behavioral change. Results showed that neither participants’ willingness to learn nor delivery methods affected comprehension. However, both variables had significant effects on the reported behavioral change. This training is effective in teaching employees how to “flex” their personal styles and to improve their relationships with each other. Implications for business and professional communication training and directions for future research are discussed in detail.

This study investigates cooperativeness, assertiveness, group satisfaction, leader grade, and leadership negotiation in a collaborative assignment conducted in a small group. Researchers manipulated the assignment of team members who reported on measures of group satisfaction and original scales of assertiveness and cooperativeness. Respondents also responded to open-ended questions regarding active leadership, leadership traits, and leadership negotiation, which resulted in the emergence of multiple themes. Assertiveness, cooperativeness, and group satisfaction were found to predict the grade given to the leader.

This article presents a case-based exploration of the complex interactions between learning, research, and practice in the field of business and professional communication. It focuses on a student research project in the area of corporate social responsibility in the biopharmaceutical industry. Adopting an autoethnographic approach, we aim to document the students’ development from researchers to insiders or even consultants. The findings reveal that while the students feel confident in their roles as researchers, they fail to live up to some of the commissioning practitioners’ expectations. The study concludes by providing guidelines to strengthen interaction between students and practitioners.

Popularity is growing for flipped classroom instruction, which replaces lectures with out-of-class delivery of streaming video, reading materials, online chats, and other modalities. Face-to-face class time is spent on instructor-student and student-student interaction, including small group problem solving and discussion. Classroom flipping has its advocates and critics. Because of the theoretical and applied aspects of business and professional communication instruction, courses in the discipline seem ideally suited to flipped instruction. This research reports on perceptions from instructors who have employed the instructional model, summarizes the insights gained, identifies best practices, and makes recommendations for future research and application.

This article describes the use of problem forums in undergraduate professional writing courses as a technique for facilitating and sustaining learning from increasingly complex, messy, and wicked problems that are characteristic of 21st-century work. Problem forums are designed to scaffold project team discussions of rhetorical, technical, or collaborative difficulties that have unexpectedly slowed or halted their work. Problem forums are thus intended to facilitate and sustain continual learning on project teams.

This article, the first of a two-part series, presents teaching 10 innovations from the 2015 Association for Business Communication’s 80th annual conference. The creative new assignments offered here include building listening skills by journaling, oral interpretation, positive message framing, storytelling, delivering bad news, persuasive messages, and learning by teaching. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on these websites: http://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and http://www.salesleadershipcenter.com/research.html#mfa16 .

Business communication evolves and adapts to suit the times, and today’s workplace documents are increasingly multimodal. Therefore, business and professional communication specialists need to adapt to a new media workplace ecology—one that requires proficiencies with technologies such as video production, digital animation, and sound. Business and professional writing teachers, in turn, need to adopt teaching methods that include working with evolving technologies and be willing to teach multimodal skills to students. In this article I offer a case study of a flipped learning pedagogy to teach multimodal skills in the professional writing classroom.

Business and professional communicators increasingly rely on visual thinking and design strategies to create effective messages. The workplace need for such thinking, however, is not readily accommodated in current pedagogy. A long-running study abroad short course for American students taught in London provides a model for meeting this need. Addressed to students in art and design and framed through principles of discovery learning, the course approach and assignments can be productively adapted to enhance the visual competence of students of professional communication.

Although digital environments already play a vital role in the flipped classroom model, this research project shows that in university writing classrooms, innovative content design and delivery systems can extend the walls of the classroom to areas beyond, in which students transfer and connect course content with the professional world. In this article, we describe the incorporation of video learning modules into three professional communication classrooms for just such a purpose.

This article explores the value of using embedding to extend the notion of first exposure learning in flipped classroom practices. It describes a preclass assignment for a meeting and negotiation skills course, in which students are instructed to observe an authentic business meeting, interview participants of the meeting, photograph the boardroom, draw a sketch of the seating arrangement, and write a reflective account. Its main argument is that immersion in corporate culture before class makes business communication training not only more authentic but also produces richer in-class discussions, ultimately leading to a level of metacognition associated with deep learning.

Flipping originated in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, where didactic transmission of conceptual knowledge has been the standard pedagogy. Flipping has resulted in additional focus on procedural knowledge within class meetings. This article argues that business and professional writing pedagogy, which already focuses largely on procedural knowledge within class meetings, would benefit from flipping because it could create an additional focus on conceptual knowledge outside of the classroom. The article explains why we need to teach conceptual foundations, why video is a good choice for that teaching, and what challenges we face in creating those instructional videos.

This article examines how Web 2.0 technologies can be used to “flip” the online classroom by creating asynchronous workshops in social environments where immediacy and social presence can be maximized. Using experience teaching several communication and writing classes in Google Apps (Google+, Google Hangouts, Google Drive, etc.), I argue that flipping the classroom online with Web 2.0 technologies can maximize student participation and engagement, while also helping students develop flexible strategies for writing collaboratively and publicly in online spaces.

This article argues for a flipped learning approach to business and professional communication composing processes. Flipped learning sequences can scaffold more robust engagement with prewriting activities and support opportunities for in-class collaborative and facilitated drafting exercises. These types of learning experiences offer numerous pedagogical benefits, including more conscious control of messaging strategies and the development of more creative, rhetorically informed communication products. The effectiveness of this approach is explored through a case study of a flipped learning sequence and collaborative drafting workshop designed for an employment communication and résumé-writing assignment.

This article describes a flipped classroom activity that requires students to integrate research and audience analysis. The activity uses Twitter as a data source. In the activity, students identify a sample, collect customer tweets, and analyze the language of the tweets in an effort to construct knowledge about an audience’s values, needs, and attitudes. The article first presents an overview of audience analysis frameworks. It then presents a step-by-step tutorial for integrating the activity. The authors also provide business communication instructors with resources for implementing the activity including video lectures, handouts, and instructional guides.

This article reports a discourse analysis of journals from adult learners during a 1-week residency in Cape Town, South Africa. The theoretical posture is a critical dialogic perspective, making use of a postcolonial understanding of intercultural interactions. The purpose of the study was exploratory. The analysis suggests that demographic variables (e.g., race), prior international travel, and experiences during the residency influence the amount and pace of cognitive change. Results include both questions for future research and suggestions for educators.

With increasing demand for accounting professionals, audit firms are banking on universities to provide graduates equipped with technical know-how and critical English skills. This explains heightened employer concern over the business English skills of new hires, prompting questions on adequacy and relevance of English taught in universities. Hence, this study probes into English skills necessary for new accountants in audit firms. Human resource directors of top audit firms in the Philippines describe the relevant skills in the workplace tasks of entry-level employees. Findings present a model of key English skills that provide leverage to accounting graduates in the Philippines.

Written clarity and conciseness are desired by employers and emphasized in business communication courses. We developed and tested the efficacy of a cueing tool—Scribe Bene—to help students reduce their use of imprecise and ambiguous words and wordy phrases. Effectiveness was measured by comparing cue word usage between a treatment group given the tool and a control group without the tool. In written assignments, the treatment group used 16 of 23 cue words significantly less than the control group and this effect persisted over time. Implications for using automated cueing tools in teaching written communication skills are discussed.

Aspects of research and pedagogy from the public relations discipline can benefit the business and professional communication instructor seeking new dimensions for the business and professional communication classroom. Elements of public relations (PR) found in Association for Business Communication articles and journals may be incorporated in the business and professional communication curriculum, but we lack a systematic overview of the overlaps between PR and business communication theory and practice. This article is a practical guide for instructors wanting to add PR content to their curriculum. It presents respective theoretical origins, media reliance similarities, common perspectives, overlaps of academic challenges for legitimacy and respectability, and potential classroom applications.

This article considers how professional writing courses can prepare students in various disciplines for the workforce. Specifically, I argue for Writing in the Disciplines (WID) internships where students learn to write documents relevant for their careers while participating in practical work experiences. In the WID internships I describe, instructors collaborate with coordinators across campus to establish writing-intensive internships that focus on the needs of students and the community partner. This article illustrates the collaborative endeavors of three internships, highlighting the challenges and lessons learned from WID internships.

This study examines previously untested variables that influence social loafing in professional and technical communication group projects by determining the influence of communication quality and task cohesion on social loafing. A set-up factors model, which included group size, peer review, project scope, and method of team formation, was also tested for means of comparison. The results indicated the communication quality and task cohesion model significantly reduced social loafing, explaining 53% of the variance in social loafing. The model of set-up factors only explained about 4% of the variance. The article discusses instructional strategies that foster quality communication to reduce loafing.

PowerPoint is a dominant communication tool in business and education. It allows for creating professional-looking presentations easily, but without understanding its constraining qualities it can be used inappropriately. Therefore we conducted a systematic literature review structuring the literature on PowerPoint in three chronological phases ( Early Criticism, Heated Debate, and Scientific Take-Off) and identifying 18 constraining qualities classified into three categories: cognitive, emotional, and social. This article provides implications for educators’ and practitioners’ use (and nonuse) of PowerPoint through synthesis and description of such constraining qualities. Directions for future research are developed by identifying theoretical gaps in literature on PowerPoint.

Supervisor communication competence and leadership style were used to predict specific employee outcomes. In the study, 276 participants working in various industries completed measures of communication competence and leadership styles about their direct supervisor along with measures of their job satisfaction, motivation, and organizational commitment. As predicted, effective and appropriate communication were both positively related to satisfaction, motivation, and organizational commitment. Furthermore, task- and relations-oriented leadership styles were both positively related to all three employee outcomes as well. Finally, regression analysis determined that effective communication and relations-oriented leadership were the best predictors of satisfaction, motivation, and organizational commitment.