Teaching writing within forestry

In 2005 faculty in the Northern Arizona University School of Forestry initiated a project to replace the required sophomore-level writing course taught by the English Department with a new course, “Writing in Forestry,” taught within the School. The goal of the course replacement was to improve students’ experience and competence with the types of writing emphasized in upper division forestry courses as well as by professional forest managers. The School collaborated with graduate teaching assistants from the Department of English to develop and teach the new course. Our presentation will explain the learning outcomes, approach, and content of the new course which has been taught successfully for two years

Linguistic characteristics of AAC discourse in the workplace

This study examines linguistic co-occurrence patterns in the discourse of individuals with communication impairments who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices in the workplace by comparing them to those of non-AAC users in similar job settings. A typical workweek (≈ 40 hours) per focal participant (four AAC; four non-AAC) was recorded and transcribed to create a specialized corpus of workplace discourse of approximately 464,000 words at the time of this analysis. A multidimensional analysis of co-occurrence patterns along functional linguistic dimensions, following Biber (1988, 1995) [Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], reveals differences in the macro discourse characteristics of AAC vis-a-vis non-AAC texts. Results indicate that AAC texts make use of more informational, non-narrative, and explicit textual features of discourse than their non-AAC counterparts. Implications to improve the capabilities of AAC devices to produce speech that matches baseline expectations of co-workers in the workplace are discussed. © The Author(s) 2013

Learners and Business Discourse Learning Outcomes

This chapter will:; ; ; Identify different types of learners and how to evaluate their needs;; ; ; Discuss how to define a set of learning outcomes and how to assess them;; ; ; Show how to move from the workplace to the classroom using a research-based approach aimed at understanding more about a set of learners and how they engage with business discourse;; ; ; Provide a case study that illustrates how to approach specialized professional discourse, together with a set of tasks related to learners and learning outcomes, and a set of further readings