Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, we explore research article abstracts created by generative artificial intelligence (AI). These synthetic genres—genre-ing activities shaped by the recursive nature of language learning models in AI-driven text generation—are of interest as they could influence informational quality, leading to various forms of disordered information such as misinformation. We conduct a two-part study generating abstracts about (a) genre scholarship and (b) polarized topics subject to misinformation. We conclude with considerations about this speculative domain of AI text generation and dis/misinformation spread and how genre approaches may be instructive in its identification.

Due to the economic sluggishness seen in Japan over the past few decades and the shrinking inward investment market, the Japanese government has introduced educational reforms in order to foster “global human resources” able to compete with overseas talent. One key area of emphasis has been communication education with a special focus on English. In this article, after reviewing the government’s reform plans, the author will analyze (1) how Japanese universities have incorporated these policies into their organizations, with an emphasis on the country’s internationally top-rated universities, and (2) how individual instructors have modified them for their own classes, with reference to a specific case of a successful partnership with an overseas university. Based on the analyses, future opportunities for communication studies will be highlighted in “Discussion” section, including stronger and more flexible ties with overseas universities, in particular among the Asia-Pacific Region, and how a country of non-native speakers of English could show initiative in developing collaborations with overseas universities.

The architecture of Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), set up under Her Highness Sheikha Moza Al-Misnedd and the Qatar Foundation, spatially embodies new possibilities because AIA Gold Medal award-winning architect Ricardo Legorreta designed buildings that both challenge and encompass Gulf Arabian tradition. The buildings exemplify, enact, and embody new ways of experiencing gendered educational identity that also honors traditional local values. This architecture is important because TAMUQ is a U.S. institution that serves several different international student populations. This article emphasizes how TAMUQ functions as a heterotopia, one which creates embodied experiences of gender, education, and identity and requires what Rogoff termed “a curious eye” to discern how these educational spaces reflect changing identities in the Gulf states.

Visual sign systems have become an essential means of communication in places where large numbers of people of different nationalities gather, such as at international airports and the Olympic Games. That they can effectively increase accessibility among users not necessarily sharing a common language speaks to their potential usefulness in other situations. A homeless shelter in a western North Carolina community received funding to build a new facility. With the clientele's widely diverse communication abilities, including those who are illiterate or have limited reading skills, those who are non-native speakers knowing little to no English, and those who are coming from different cultural contexts, a visual sign system was designed to facilitate navigation for all visitors. Using Peirce's theory of signs, Neurath's ISOTYPE, and the least action principle borrowed from physics as a framework, this case study shows how the signs were designed and usability tested to ensure increased accessibility.

Building on the authors' prior studies that investigate uses and perceptions of online social networks, this study critically explores the emerging social networking culture. In doing so, the research seeks to identify possible constructs that can be used to predict social networking behavior that may then be tested in a future study. The study relies on multiple user perspectives, drawing its participants from international students at two universities, one in Australia and one in the United States. Throughout this process, the utility of using the lens of national culture versus using other lenses is also examined. While the qualitative data suggests somewhat divergent approaches to social networking in different countries, a number of common themes were also identified. Two themes which appeared across national boundaries were changes in use over time and privacy and trust.

The self-service nature of today's society means that technical communicators are needed more than ever before since users may find themselves struggling to make sense of online documentation with minimal support from the institutions that provide it. Certain demographics within the user population (older adults, disabled persons, non-native speakers) may face serious challenges when trying to use self-service documentation. Technical communication educators should prepare students to function as user advocates for members of these groups. Technical communication students need a thorough understanding of the challenges that may interfere with an audience's ability to use websites and other online documentation. This article suggests ways to help students gain this understanding through course content and by structuring service-learning and virtual team projects in which students can put their newly-developed understanding into practice.

This article explores how the English language contributes to cross-boundary communication failure and establishes that there is an “English language problem” that has not been adequately addressed in preparing United States native English-speaking students for international technical communication tasks. For example, U.S. technical communication scholars are still grappling with the problems of using English in software internationalization and translating technical communication products across boundaries of national culture and language without privileging Western values and beliefs. The tendency is to assume American culture and American Standard English as the norm, and to identify cultural and linguistic differences as problems only when there is a communication failure or when non-native speakers of English translate product users' manuals and other documents for use by Americans. The article draws attention to the limitations of the current favored strategies for training native speakers in international audience analysis and calls for a revamping of the curriculum to allow for the integration of language-based methodologies. It suggests the incorporation of the World Englishes perspective into training programs to internationalize students' learning experiences.

This article studies the stylistic variation in the design of administrative forms in three European countries—the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain—through the linguistic analysis of a small corpus of multilingual administrative forms dealing with pension benefits and other kinds of allowances written in four different languages—English, Spanish, Italian, and German. The analysis included both monolingual administrative forms—written in English, Spanish, and Italian—and bilingual Italian/German and Italian/English forms. The purpose of the study was to search for cross-linguistic regularities in the design of administrative forms which would enable their characterization as a genre, both in terms of its staging structure and of the linguistic and formatting features of the elements which configure it as such. The analysis performed on the small corpus yielded interesting stylistic differences and tendencies in the design of comparable administrative forms in the different countries, characterized by different socio-cultural back-grounds. It is suggested that these differences are a reflection of the social attitudes of the different administrations toward their citizens.

While research in international technical communication has flourished during the last 10 years, there has been little published on technical communication programs outside the United States. This article addresses this need by describing 12 representative academic technical communication programs in Germany, including Germany's first master's degree program. While there are no statistics on the number of technical communicators working in Germany, tekom (Gesellschaft für technische Kommunikation), the German professional society for technical communication, estimates roughly 4,400 members. While German academic programs in technical communication share many features with their counterparts in the United States, German academic programs do stress internships, foreign language study, and study abroad exchange programs more than technical communication programs in the United States.

The article outlines the technical writing tutorial (TWT) that preceded an advanced ESL writing course for students of English Philology at the Jagiellonian University. Having assessed the English skills of those students at the end of the semester, we found a statistically significant increase in the performance of the students who had taken the TWT in comparison to the control group who spent the time of TWT doing more traditional exercises. This result indicates that technical writing books and journals should be considered as an important source of information for teachers of writing to ESL students.

Teachers and researchers in the field of Technical English have always been concerned with the nature of this subject, its major characteristics, and its chief uses in Science and Technology. Obviously, less time and efforts have been spent on how technical English is learned, particularly in situations where foreign students have to relate their limited linguistic knowledge to meaningful realizations of the language system in technical texts of immediate concern to their specialist studies. This research is an early effort to show how technical English is learned and, more specifically, what relevant factors are involved in the overall learning process.

Technical writers and editors assume that readers are generally helped when nominalizations and the weak verbs that accompany them are replaced with the verb form of the nominalization. The study discussed here tests that assumption. Specifically, the study assessed the effect of nominalizations, nominalization imageability, and idea importance on readers' recall of technical prose. The results indicate that denominalized text is most effective in helping native speakers focus on more important information. Yet for non-native speakers, nominalized text may work quite well. Conclusions and recommendations for further study are offered.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that using a restricted language called Simplified English (SE) to write procedural documents is the best method to accommodate specific audiences. Providing empirical data to prove or disprove this hypothesis is the point of the experiment reported here. This study examined the effect of document type (SE versus non-SE), passage (Procedure A versus Procedure B), and native language (native versus non-native English speakers) on the comprehensibility, identification of content location, and task completion time of procedure documents for airplane maintenance. This research suggests that using SE significantly improves the comprehensibility of more complex documents. Further, readers of more complex SE documents can more easily locate and identify information within the document. For the documents tested in this experiment, the SE and non-SE documents took essentially the same amount of time for subjects to read and complete the test. Finally, while the difference between native and non-native English speakers could not be tested statistically because of extremely different cell sizes, the comprehensibility and content location scores for the native and non-native speakers appear to be quite different, with the non-native speakers benefiting from SE more than the native speakers.

There are differences of vocabulary, grammar, and usage in American English and British English. As international interchange of information increases, we must alert writers and editors to these differences, and encourage them to find forms of expression common to both versions of English. If they do not, their texts may create difficulties, not only for readers using English as a foreign language, but also for native speakers of American English or British English.

Editing in a bilingual, bicultural environment involves many of the same problems and frustrations as editing in a monolingual environment; however, the bilingual, bicultural environment often exacerbates these problems. Editing is further complicated by linguistic interference among the author's languages. Finally, culturally conditioned attitudes toward the duties and responsibilities of the editor create areas of potential conflicts between editor and author. If technical participation of non-native English speakers is to increase, as hoped for in such endeavors as President Reagan's policy of the Caribbean Basin Initiative, editors must be sensitive toward those problems in such complicated circumstances.

Scientists and engineers have to present technical information effectively. But when they do it, they face language difficulties which are beyond formal grammar as taught at school. To overcome this problem, we designed a systematic course for technical writing aimed at breaking such language barriers by planned channeling of the scientific message. The course was designed to improve the communication skills of scientists and engineers. In keeping with this goal effective writing criteria were defined and formal presentation conventions were described. Because Hebrew is the common language in Israel, problems of Hebrew structures were presented. The massive infiltration of vocabulary and syntactic elements from foreign languages into scientists' Hebrew style were addressed. An evaluation apparatus was also applied and future prospects of the course were discussed.

The concept of shape is commonly conveyed in scientific and technical fields by reference to pre-existing images presumably familiar to both writer and reader. Such images are drawn from a wide variety of sources which include geometrical images, shape images from nature and simple technology, and from familiar arbitrary forms such as the alphabet. Shape images in language continue to be invented, and provide both analogs for expression and analogs for thought. Once a term is established, it ceases to function as an analog. Examination of shape analogs serves as a useful microcosm of language development. Shape imagery is a facet of language that remains quite impervious to computer analysis and translation.

Technical and scientific terms originate from many different sources. Among the most common are foreign language root words, names of originators, inventors and discoverers, names of common shapes, names of functions, acronyms, arbitrary labels, anonymous folk coinages and labels given by advertisers and public relations people. Numerous examples can be found of each of these. The usefulness and viability of technical and scientific terms is dependent upon the amount and kind of information contained within the term itself and the suitability of that information for the situation in which the term is used. The usefulness and viability of such terms is also dependent upon the terms' mnemonic qualities and upon their having the right ring or onomatopoeia. Although such effects are not entirely predictable or controllable, attention to them can nonetheless lead to more effective naming in science and technology.

This paper discusses crosscultural differences in audience analysis, using research conducted during a series of consulting trips in Japanese industries. The paper identifies problems implicit in the way technical writing is taught to nonnative speakers in this country and abroad, and shows how awareness of and experience with audiences in non-American and non-Western cultures can benefit instruction in technical communication classes for American students.

Native and international science, engineering, and humanities graduate students at The University of Texas at Arlington experience real-world communication situations in an interdisciplinary, projected-oriented technical communication course team-taught by a technical writer and a mechanical engineer. The course simulates the writing requirements of industry and helps students prepare theses and dissertations. A special feature for international students is a supplementary weekly laboratory session devoted to intensive review of writing fundamentals. The course, which has been offered three times since 1976 with enrollments of eleven, five, and nine students, has been received well by science and engineering students for whom it was initially designed and by humanities students who now also enroll. Even though in some cases the progress that a foreign student makes in one semester is limited, all students have found the course of great benefit. The interdisciplinary team approach is an effective way of teaching graduate-level technical communication, providing engineers an opportunity to learn to express ideas to humanists and providing humanists an opportunity to learn to communicate effectively with engineers and scientists.

Teaching technical writing to non-native speakers of English is complicated by their special needs. Central to the discussion is the idea that expository writing ought to be a key element of any program purporting to teach English. The nature of proper preparatory training is discussed with specific reference to the language groups American trainers are likely to encounter working in the U.S. or abroad. The justification for specific practices is discussed and should enable instructors to develop further strategies for training. Once the preparatory work is completed, effective technical writing instruction for non-native trainees requires modification of a good program for native speakers. Training is most effective if material is presented in culturally familiar and intellectually compatible ways.

Language study and literary criticism have for many years been separated. Modern developments in critical theory have stressed the study of texts. Structuralism developed a semiotic approach to texts using psychological and linguistic theory to support objective analysis. Poststructuralist theory has further developed these approaches investigating deep and surface significance in textual interpretation urging a deconstruction of texts to yield a full contemporary understanding. The relationship between writer, reader, text, and context is seen anew within the whole communication complex in an approach which regards texts as discourse. Advanced foreign language teaching unites literature and language in a new synthesis stressing communication and conceptualization through language. Technical communication should be aware of new interdisciplinary trends since it is itself at the center of the dominant theme of communication.

Traditional courses and course-books for teaching English as a foreign language are often too general and grammar-orientated for students of technology from overseas. The students are well motivated for learning how to communicate effectively within their technical contexts. To harness their enthusiasm, courses on communication skills need to emphasize functions as well as forms of language.

This article, first of all, describes some of the results of research into the relationship between grammatical choice and rhetorical function in English for Science and Technology (EST). The second part of the paper presents some details about procedures used in EST courses for non-native speakers. We emphasize changes made in these procedures through application of the results of our research. Some unsolved problems are referred to.

Students are selected by a diagnostic essay. They begin simply, by completing job application forms, personal resumes, and letters of application, tasks which require concise expression of facts, which reveal much about the students' backgrounds, and which they must use to get a job. Then they move to the daily writing problems an engineer faces. In every class they also practice exercises that correct the many errors caused by the change from their native language into English.