Leslie A. Olsen

Point-Driven Understanding in Engineering Lecture Comprehension

Abstract Nonnative speakers have long been known to have trouble understanding academic lectures. ESP researchers and teachers agree that the problem lies mainly at the discourse level, not at the sentence level; accordingly, a body of discourse-oriented teaching materials for lecture comprehension is now on the market. Though a step in the right direction, these materials fail to do justice to the rhetorical, strategic nature of academic lectures. As our study shows, students may understand all the words of a lecture (including lexical connectives and other discourse markers) and yet fail to understand the lecturers main points or logical argument. Our study was an exploratory one. Fourteen NNS graduate and undergraduate students watched an authentic 16-minute videotaped lecture on a topic in mechanical engineering and then were asked to provide immediate-recall summaries, which were then analyzed in consultation with the lecturer. Although the lecture was clerly structured around several main points, most of the students failed to grasp these points. These results are discussed in terms of listening strategies: the successful students used a ‘point-driven’ strategy while the unsuccessful ones used an ‘information-driven’ strategy. We conclude that students should be taught how to listen to lectures in a more rhetorical, strategic way. More generally, if we are to teach students to understand and communicate more effectively, we should help them see how the organization of their discourse fits into the larger goals, agendas, and contexts in their fields.

Computer-Based Writing and Communication: Some Implications for Technical Communication Activities

Most research on writing has focussed on the work of single authors working by hand on prose texts. However, much professional work is collaborative, computer-based, not exclusively prose, and not well studied. Some preliminary research suggests that the use of computers will affect the cognitive activities of individual authors in several domains of immediate relevance to composition and technical communication practitioners: planning activities, editing activities, the writing of novice computer users or poor typists, and writing for electronic mail and other electronic communication. Research reported here suggests that the rapidly increasing capability of computer-based writing systems will force communication researchers to 1) broaden their basic conception of and methods of studying “author” to include authoring teams, 2) broaden the type of material studied from that which is purely or largely textual to that which much more frequently includes other types of information, and 3) track changes in “genre conventions” resulting from the increased capabilities of computer-based systems—in short, to assess the impacts of the medium on the message.

The Need for Professionally Oriented ESL Instruction in the United States

Increasing numbers of foreign students are coming to the United States for university-level studies. Most go on to professional careers where English is needed for sophisticated and complex uses. Unfortunately, these students and professionals seldom receive English language training adequate for this purpose, either in school or on the job. Using engineering as a case in point, this article argues that there is a growing need for professionally oriented ESL instruction in American colleges, universities, and companies. Such instruction should combine aspects of both ESL and ESP in what is here called “generalized ESP.” Two illustrations of this approach—technical communication courses for university students and troubleshooting for technical professionals—are discussed. Since World War II, increasing numbers of foreign students (FSs) have been coming to the United States to pursue university studies. FS enrollments during this time have grown at an average annual rate of more than 10%; at last count (1982-83), it stood at 336,990 (Scully 1983). The American Council of Education’s (ACE) Committee on Foreign Students and International Policy, as recently as two years ago, predicted enrollments of more than one million FSs in American colleges and universities by the early 1990s (Scully 1981). Although the rate of enrollment has slowed since then, it still appears likely that the one million mark will be reached before the turn of the century. Most of these students have studied English for many years and have received satisfactory scores on the TOEFL, Michigan Test, or some other test of English proficiency. Nevertheless, their English is often quite weak, especially in the productive skills. Most FSa are

Social and Cognitive Effects of Professional Communication on Software Usability.

We designed and piloted a technical communication course for software engineering majors to take concurrently with their capstone project course in software design. In the pilot, one third of the capstone design course students jointly enrolled in the writing class. One goal of the collaborative courses was to use writing to improve the usability of students’ software. We studied the effects of writing on students’ user‐centered beliefs and design practices and on the usability of their product, using surveys, document analyses, expert reviews, and user test results. When possible, we compared the usability processes and products of teams who did and did not take the writing class. Our findings suggest that the synergy of this interdisciplinary approach effectively sensitized students to user‐centered design, instilled in them a commitment to it, and helped them develop usable products.

A discourse-based approach to the assessment of readability

Assessing the readability of texts is an important task for many administrative and educational programs. However, current readability measures have serious empirical and theoretical flaws that make their use questionable. In this paper we propose two methods of assessing readability that involve analyzing the referential and cohesive structures of a text. We suggest that such measures are theoretically better motivated and, through reconsideration of some anomalous performance results from Duffy & Kabance (1982), that they promise to be more adequate in predicting actual reading performance.

Improving quality in software engineering through emphasis on communication

We will describe the integration of a communication component into a senior-level design course in software engineering, the structure of the component, and methods for testing its effects. The goal is to improve the usability of the software product, to overcome some problems due to time constraints of a school term, and to bring the course more in step with industry approaches by the following: • educating students on techniques for defining a vision of the product (what is it doing and for whom), • placing greater emphasis on the client’s and user’s perspective, the interface design, and interface’s effects upon the rest of the code, and • conducting iterative usability testing, starting early in the project cycle. From inception to completion of the software, these important issues are addressed by teaching students to write well-reviewed specifications and user documentation, by beginning this early in the term, and by using these documents to inform the design. Problem With Software Design Courses In the computer industry today, it is rare to find a firm or in-house Information Technology department in which the dominant emphasis is not on user requirements, user needs, user involvement, and interactive software. Ideally, students should be prepared for this emphasis on user-centered design and development through their academic courses, especially through their culminating project course on software design and development. Without experience in these activities, students will not be in step with industry approaches. Unfortunately, students rarely leave a software design course skilled in user-centered design. User-centeredness is not an orientation that comes naturally or even easily to most computer P ge 229.1 2 engineering majors. Rather they have to learn it as an alternative perspective on program functionality and flexibility. This learning is hard to come by in a culminating software design course because of the time pressures of a single semester. In such a course, students largely become taken up with developing collaboration skills: how to divide and then consolidate work, how to conceptualize ideas into a focused product that they can create manageably in 10-12 weeks, and how to solve engaging technical issues during coding and testing (issues that motivated them to major in computer science or engineering in the first place). Given the collaboration and technical issues they must deal with, students and professors have traditionally not had the time in one semester to add the activities and resulting documentation that user-centered design requires. These documents include the following: User and task analyses based on contextual inquiry, activity-based planning, and scenarios. A vision statement tying the product to a market niche and what it takes to fill that niche. High level specifications reflecting users’ points of view, including plans for interfaces. User test plans for prototyping to guide the construction of instruction and interfaces that users need. Progress reports on key trade-offs resulting from negotiating technical and user issues and the rationales behind them. Specifications that “grow” with the product to reflect cuts and changes—or iterative prototyping that similarly reveals the evolving product. User documentation aimed at users’ actual tasks, not at descriptions of program functions and features. Overview of Proposed Solution We are adding these activities and documents to the capstone software design course by integrating a communication course with it. The goal is to improve the usability of the software products, to overcome time constraints, and to bring the course more in step with industry approaches. The course described in this paper is designed to train software engineering students in usercentered issues at the same time as they are taking their software design course. This course is a 3-credit Technical Communications course fully coordinated with the pacing and assignments of the Software Engineering Design course, and is restricted to students concurrently registered for the software design class. The course “Technical Communication for Software Engineering” was jointly conceived by technical communication and software engineering faculty, and is based upon the assumption P ge 229.2 3 that writing the documents listed above will help software engineers become sensitive to user requirements and users’ computing perspectives. Software engineering students need to realize that in the real world their program documents present their program not only to their teammates but to users, managers of users, marketing specialists, trainers, and others. The hope and experience is that once students learn to write for the needs and expectations of these audiences, they will transfer their insights about these needs and expectations to their programs and gain greater user-centeredness in their products. “Technical Communication for Software Products” has the following three goals: 1 To improve students’ team product, assuming that a user perspective will help them focus earlier and more sharply on a manageable design. 2 To use the writing of required documents as a means for generating ideas comprehensively and for negotiating tensions between technical issues and user requirements, with a clear sense of their resolution and the rationales for decisions. 3 To write and manage effective project documents as World Wide Web documents which are intended to “grow” with the product and to help keep it focused and unified. (Project documents include specifications, user documentation, progress reports, test plans, etc.) To show how the course strives to achieve these goals, we will first briefly describe the process of its creation and then describe the strategies by which it engages students. We will conclude by presenting our methods for assessing its effectiveness. Process of Creating the Course The University of Michigan’s Engineering College is moving to a comprehensive Communication-Across-the-Curriculum (CAC) program as part of a major curriculum revision, Curriculum 2000. 1 The CAC program targets engineering courses where students write significant documents as part of their engineering work and then works with the professors of these courses to extend and improve the communication that occurs in the engineering course. Typically, a technical communication expert meets several times with a technical professor to assess the professor’s communication goals and needs, and—with input from the technical professor—designs ways in which the communication might be improved. This process was followed in creating the communication course described here. Key Needs: The needs analysis with the software engineering professors identified several areas that required additional attention in the software engineering course: • Team dynamics, negotiating conflicts, and following up face-to-face meetings with e-mail summaries. • Design discussions that were thorough enough to avoid groupthink and to explore a full range of options and criteria for making decisions. P ge 229.3 4 • User documentation that focused on real world tasks, not just on functions, features, and design rationales. • Better program requirements specifications with a sense of real life users and needs. • Talking to actual people who would use the product. • More in-depth analysis in progress reports about problems and issues in the design process and strategies for dealing with them. • More attention to effective World Wide Web documents, especially for texts that will undergo change. These needs reflect those identified in the literature as indicated by the following: Software engineering is “an argumentative process in which the concept of problem and solutions emerges gradually ... produced by incessant judgment, and subject to critical argument...[For instance,] activities mean different things in programmming and in written instruction” “Specification-in-the-large” is an activity in which there are many participants—clients, systems analysts, engineers, domain experts and so on. Each has differing perspectives on and knowledge about the object system, as well as a variety of skills and roles....In some cases, these perspectives may be based on contradictory understandings. To construct a specification the participants must cooperate, that is, contribute to the achievement of a joint goal.” 3 “[I]f only the...features of work are considered in designing... and...the importance of learning is left out, there will be negative consequences in the conception and implementation of design.” “The continuing failure of the software industry to adapt and change is due to a fundamental flaw in the software development model. The flaw is an emphasis on engineering that discourages change and flexibility during development instead of an...attitude that fosters change and innovation during development.” 56 Description of the Communication Course The curriculum in undergraduate computer science and engineering rarely concentrates on integrating effective communication and software engineering for the good of the product. Our curricular efforts strive to achieve this integration in a two-step process: (1) some instruction within the software design course in designing for the World Wide Web and requiring that written documents be published as web documents and (2) a three-credit-hour course in relevant communication activities for software engineers taken concurrently with the P ge 229.4 5 software design course. Each of these two steps includes a series of lectures, workshops, and team reviews of both written and technical student work in progress. The course, “Technical Communication for Software Products,” is based on the assumption that writing things down is essential for managing a software project and for enhancing the usability and conceptual integrity of students’ team-developed products. This integration of writing a