Janne Morton

Selling Your Design: Oral Communication Pedagogy in Design Education

Good design skills are the main focus of assessment practices in design education and are evaluated primarily by drawings and models. In some settings, design studio pedagogy tends to reflect only these content-oriented assessment priorities, with minimal attention paid to the development of oral communication skills. Yet, in many professional contexts, architects need both sets of skills: design competence and the ability to articulate designs for an audience. This paper explores two approaches to oral communication pedagogy in design education—a public speaking approach and a genre-based linguistic approach—and then applies one particular linguistic approach to novice design studio presentations. Based on the findings of this study, we argue that the linguistic, genre-based approach can best offer language-based, discipline-specific description of performance strategies, rhetorical structures, and the linguistic realizations of such structures. Such information can contribute to improved pedagogical practice in the design studio.

Persuasive Presentations in Engineering Spoken Discourse

Abstract Oral communication skills are now recognised as fundamentally important in engineering workplaces. This recognition is reflected in recent graduate attributes in which “effective communication skills” is included alongside more technical disciplinary knowledge. This paper examines how this graduate attribute – “effective communication skills” and, more specifically, oral presentation skills – is embedded into the teaching and learning of a capstone engineering subject. An analysis of spoken presentations given by students in this subject suggests that being convincing includes students making choices about both the structure of their talks and their use of personal pronouns. The study found, for example, that it was possible to highlight the role of the researcher and establish a strong rapport with the audience through the use of personal pronouns in a talk that followed a traditional Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion structure. We conclude by suggesting that an awareness of these choices and of their disciplinary significance may be of benefit to students.

Students’ Accounts of Their First-Year Undergraduate Academic Writing Experience: Implications for the Use of the CEFR

ABSTRACT This article addresses the suitability of the CEFR as the basis for decisions about the readiness of individuals to engage in academic writing tasks in undergraduate university courses, and as a guide to progress. The CEFR offers potentially relevant general scales and subscales, but also more specific subscales for writing in the academic context. However, recent challenges to traditional views of academic writing have potential implications for assessment frameworks such as the CEFR when they are used to identify readiness for, and progress in, academic study. In this article we explore the views of students on what it means to “do” academic writing. Questionnaires, interviews, and short reflective texts were used to investigate the changing perceptions of first-year undergraduate students at an Australian university. The analysis of student data confirms the reality of the more complex view of academic writing suggested by the recent literature. The article then considers what implications this has for the adequacy of the definitions provided in the CEFR. It suggests that the CEFR descriptors underrepresent the complexity of the challenges of academic writing, particularly its cognitive demands. A new and rather different approach will be required to inform assessments used to manage the admission of students in`to academic writing contexts and the monitoring of their progress.