While societies struggle with the implications of text-based generative artificial intelligence (TGENAI), businesses are embracing the technology. Using framing, this original activity unit prepares business communication students for professional TGENAI use. Activities emphasize the need for an effective cognitive frame, as well as introduce…

Speakers in conversation often tailor referring expressions in ways that reflect beliefs about the knowledge and perspectives of specific addressees. In this study we examined whether such audience design can influence speakers' conceptualizations of referents beyond the conversation. In a Wizard-of-Oz paradigm, participants identified novel…

In recent years, research in multimodality has established the benefits of using multiple semiotic modes like image, sound, and text in digital second language (L2) communication. However, researchers have yet to investigate how L2 learners make meaning through embodied modes--or gestures and facial expressions. Grounded in the social semiotic…

Studies have shown how social media, including Facebook and Twitter, are reshaping communication, news, and information. It is therefore important to explore the role social media plays in student protests and campaigns in order to determine to what extent social media allows participation and audience inclusion during #FeesMustFall and other…

Data-driven decision making has now moved beyond its traditional domains--operations research, business economics, computer sciences, and business statistics--to "softer subjects," such as human resource management, organization behavior, and business communication. In this context, teaching with technology encourages students to…

This article reports on two quasi-experimental studies that investigated the possible development and transfer of audience awareness in novice EFL writers as they engaged in online writing tasks through a Social Networking Service (SNS). Japanese students from two universities were asked to write, read, and comment on other students' writing once…

This study explores the writing of Wikipedia articles as a form of authentic writing for learners of English in Hong Kong. Adopting "Second Language Socialization and Language Learning & Identity" approaches to language learning inquiry, it responds to an identified shortage of research on computer-mediated language socialization.…

The increasing availability of recording technologies makes it easier to include usability testing projects in business communication courses. Usability testing is a method of discovering whether people can navigate, read, and understand a print or electronic communication well enough to achieve a particular purpose in a reasonable time frame.…

The international project described in this paper has been inspired by the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Projects (TAPP). By 2013, the TAPP network had connected classes in writing, usability testing and/or translation at three universities in the US and several partner universities in Europe, Africa and China. The pedagogical import of these forms…

The purpose of this interpretivist qualitative study is to discover what factors influence first-year college students as they construct their text messages. Using grounded theory methodology, 11 first-year college students at a university in the Southeast were interviewed one-on-one and through text messaging in order to gain insight into…