Comics provide a promising platform for technical communication, but there are limits to their affordances. This article demonstrates some of the limits using Robert Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions, a graphic adaptation of Apple’s iTunes Terms and Conditions. Using discourse analysis, it argues that Sikoryak’s adaptation, while an impressive piece of art, is not an example of accessible user agreement as media reports claim. The article concludes with practical implications on producing comics-style technical communication.

Police officers do a significant amount of high-stake writing in police reports, but report writing is given little attention in policy academies, and prevailing guidelines treat the task as a mechanical process of recording facts. As a result, officers are ill-prepared for this essential and inherently complex task. In this study, we interviewed officers to study what makes for a good police report. Our findings reveal that police reports are goal-directed genre actions. This understanding peers through the positivist emphasis on factual details to emphasize the social function of police reports in the criminal justice system.

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of Halliday’s Sydney School genrebased approach in teaching Chinese written composition to South Asian ethnic minority students in Hong Kong. Chinese language, with its heightened status in Hong Kong, holds a key for South Asians with low socio-economic status to obtain upward mobility (Shum, Gao, Tsung, and Ki, 2011). However, South Asian ethnic minority students, as a disadvantaged group of second language learners, lack sufficient parental and institutional support in Chinese language learning. The genrebased pedagogy derived from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was applied in this study to improve Chinese language performance of South Asian ethnic minority students for a better chance to participate in mainstream society. The SFL approach is primarily concerned with language choice in social situations and has been widely applied in sociolinguistics (Hyland, 2007, 2012). Its latest model in language teaching methodology, the ’Reading to Learn, Learning to Write’ (R2L) pedagogy, is a genre-based teaching strategy which is designed to guide students to experience different levels of language through extensive classroom reading and writing activities with selected texts. The current study is intended to extend the approach to teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. The employment of genre-based pedagogy aims to support South Asian students with their learning of Chinese written composition in the senior secondary curriculum. The Chinese teachers involved were first provided with appropriate training in the genre-based approach to language teaching focusing on the genres of Narration and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use theand Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the genre-based teaching approach, by means of pre- and post-tests after and before genre instruction. Text analysis based on SFL was then employed to analyze the students’ written composition in both pre- and post-tests in order to understand the effectiveness of the genre-based pedagogy in teaching Chinese as a second language. The finding shows that the students at the high, medium, and low levels improved both in the construction of schematic structure and the variation of lexicogrammatical choices from the whole-text, sentence and word levels respectively in their writing performance. Hopefully, the findings will help curriculum development and teacher education for teaching Chinese as a second language to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong and beyond.

Research problem: The purpose of this study is to examine US engineering students' intercultural competence and its pedagogical implications. Three research questions are addressed: (1) What are engineering students' levels of awareness and sensitivity toward intercultural communication? (2) What are their perceived needs in learning intercultural communication? (3) Given these findings, what are some useful approaches and methods to teach intercultural communication in the engineering communication service class? Literature review: The literature review examines current studies on US engineering students' intercultural competence and establishes the scope of the study: intercultural awareness and sensitivity. The researcher consulted literature in intercultural studies, international education, and engineering education. Methodology: The researcher conducted a mixed method study, using surveys, textual analysis, and interviews. Two-hundred seventy-two engineering undergraduates at a Midwestern public university participated in the study. Participants were recruited from an engineering communication class. Data were collected through survey instruments, written responses to cross-cultural dialogs and critical incidents, and interviews. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed. Results and discussion: Participants exhibited vague and passive awareness of intercultural communication, average to high intercultural sensitivity (subject to self-assessment and social desirability bias), and partial acceptance of intercultural communication education. Based on these findings, the researcher suggests a cultural-general approach to teaching intercultural competence in engineering communication service classes. The study is limited to research participants at one institution and two aspects of intercultural competence. Future studies can involve diverse research participants, address more aspects of intercultural competence, and examine the use of cultural-general teaching methods in the classroom.

The field of technical communication has made notable progress in researching and teaching intercultural issues. Not enough discussion, however, is available on assessing students’ intercultural competence. This article attempts to start this discussion and invite further research. It suggests a working definition to conceptualize intercultural competence and draws upon diverse disciplines to review different assessment methods, including their strengths, drawbacks, and potential applications in technical communication classes.

This study examines the visual rhetoric used in Chinese and American promotional business communication. Comparing banking and financial product brochures published in the two countries, the study finds similar as well as different visual strategies. Most importantly, the Chinese samples frequently use visual metaphors, whereas the American samples hardly do. Prompted by this finding, I review relevant literature on visual metaphors and examine their structures and rhetorical functions. In addition, the study suggests that buyer images and cartoon images are used differently in the two countries, whereas product-related images are used similarly. I explore the contextual and cultural roots of these findings and offer suggestions on how to visually communicate with the Chinese audience and other international audiences.

Engineering programs in the US made notable efforts to develop students' intercultural competence, but they tended to overlook the teaching of intercultural communication. Technical communication teachers can fill this gap by addressing intercultural issues in the service class. This proposal faces challenges: the lack of class time, teacher training, textbooks, and teaching methods. To address these challenges, this tutorial uses various materials and genre-based instruction to integrate intercultural communication into the service class. This approach helps to raise students' intercultural awareness and sensitivity as they learn engineering communication genres. This tutorial may be used in service classes for other majors.

Previous research has suggested the need for developing technical communication education in Chinese universities. Following this suggestion, this article examines the possibility of integrating technical communication into China’s English major curriculum. Based on findings from two universities, the article discusses the design of China’s English major curriculum and Chinese teacher and student perspectives on technical communication. The author suggests that China’s English for Specific Purposes (ESP) education provides a promising home for integrating technical communication and that this integration can enhance China’s current ESP education. The author presents three integration models and discusses questions for future research.

Existing literature argues, in general terms, that China has a growing need for technical communication and technical communication education. Following up on these studies, this paper more closely examines China's needs for technical communication education. Based on interviews with industry professionals and reviews of their writing samples, this paper seeks to find out who among the industry professionals in China needs technical communication, what their communication practices are, the areas in which they need education, and what US technical communication professionals can do to help develop this education. Preliminary findings and suggestions as well as topics for future research are presented.

To teach students how to write for the workplace and other professional contexts, technical writing teachers often assign writing tasks that reflect real-life communication contexts, a teaching approach that is grounded in the field's contextualized understanding of genre. This article argues to fully embrace contextualized literacy and better teach workplace writing, technical writing teachers also need to contextualize how they assess student writing. To this end, this article examines some of workplaces' best assessment practices and critically integrates them into an introductory technical writing classroom through a method called student-centered assessment instruments. This method engages students, as workplaces engage employees, in the assessment process to identify local requirements for writing tasks. Aligned with theory and practice, this method is not only an effective classroom assessment method, but becomes an integrated part of students' genre-learning process within and beyond the classroom.