Background: Our teaching case reports on a fieldwork assignment designed to have master of arts students experience first-hand how entrepreneurs write for the globalized marketplace by examining public displays of language, such as billboards, shop windows, and posters. Research questions: How do entrepreneurs use English to “style” themselves? What is the status of English in public displays? Which relationship with customers is cultivated by using English (among other languages)? How does English, or lookalike versions thereof, create a more innovative business? Situating the case: We use linguistic landscaping (LL) as a pedagogical resource, drawing on similar cases in a local English as a foreign language (EFL) community in Oaxaca, Mexico; EFL programs in Chiba-shi, Japan; francophone and immersion French programs in Montreal, QC, Canada and Vancouver, BC, Canada; and a study of the entrepreneurial landscape in Observatory's business corridor of Lower Main Road in Cape Town, South Africa. How this case was studied: We interviewed 36 students about their learning process in one-to-one post hoc interviews. Recurrent themes were increased self-monitoring, improved professional communication literacy, and expanded real-world understanding. About the case: The teaching case follows a three-pronged approach. First, we have students decide on a survey area, determine their empirical focus, establish analytical units, decide how to collect data, collect (sociodemographic) information about their survey area, and determine the degree of researcher engagement. Next, students conduct fieldwork, documenting the linguistic landscape in small teams of three to four students. In the third phase, students have returned from the field and discuss their initial findings, ideas, and observations during a data session with the instructors. Students decide whether they still stand by the decisions they made before they entered the field and are then asked to qualify how language is used in public space. Results: The main takeaway of the assignment is that students were more aware of the degree of linguistic innovation, rhetorical creativity, and ethnocultural stereotyping of entrepreneurial communication in their cities. Conclusion: As a pedagogical tool, LL offers possibilities for exploring entrepreneurial communication in all of its breadth and variety, providing access to perhaps the most visible and creative materialities of entrepreneurs and service providers: shop windows and signs.

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.

Thus far, professional editing has not been researched extensively in writing research. This article zooms in on sub-editing in newswriting as a form of professional editing, addressing three research questions: (a) What are the ways in which a news article’s text is altered?, (b) Are some types of news article altered more significantly than others?, and (c) Are certain news article sections more prone to alterations? Merging the contextualized insights of fieldwork with a corpus-based discourse analytic research perspective, we trace the differences (viz. additions, deletions, translocations, replacements) between the “initial” (right before sub-editing) and “final” (published) version of six different types of news article, (frontpage, headline, long, medium, short, and news wire article) in a corpus sample of 30 broadsheet articles. Our findings are first that—contrary to popular belief that sub-editors mainly “hack away” at news stories, or merely “trim the fat”—additions prevail. Second, we found that most interventions occur in high-stakes articles. Third, we discovered the largest number of interventions in the “entry points” of an article, that is, where—according to eye-tracking research—readers stop scanning and start reading. We discuss our findings in the light of training for professional newswriters.