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Applied ResearchA <strong>Technical</strong> Communication Program in a <strong>Chinese</strong> Universityamounts of materials” (Upton, 1989, p. 21). In fact, thisemphasis on memorization in <strong>Chinese</strong> education datesback to ancient China, when students were taught torepeat Confucius’s teachings in order to memorize them(Beamer, 1994). Similarly, in modern China, the teacherplays the same role of imparting knowledge and thestudent plays the same of role of mastering it (Beamer,1994). Even the tradition of <strong>Chinese</strong> culture has to betransmitted by teachers to students so that it can “serveChina’s modernization drive.” In other words, a teacher’sresponsibility is still to disseminate the correct messagesfrom texts to students and then to ensure that they learnthem through memorization, while students’ role is stillto “master what has been imparted” (Beamer, 1994,p. 16). To assess students’ learning outcome, teachersadminister tests in which students are expected to repeatverbatim what they have learned from their teachers. Nowonder the five technical communication instructorsfirmly believed that they could impart the correctinformation from the textbook to their students and thatexams could effectively make students learn.Surveying <strong>Technical</strong>Communication StudentsI also surveyed my <strong>Chinese</strong> students, 200 graduatestudents and 100 undergraduate (sophomore) students.One might argue that because the undergraduatestudents had not taken any technical communicationclasses before and thus they were not very knowledgeableabout the field of technical communication, theiropinions are probably not very significant. Thus, Idiscuss only the data obtained from the 200 graduatestudents.Survey DesignThrough the surveys, I wanted to learn the students’attitudes toward technical communication. In additionand more important, I needed to find out the students’perceptions of the main concepts I would focus onin class. To get to know the students’ attitudes, Iformulated five questions based the concepts most of thetechnical communication textbooks we use in the States(Anderson, 2010; Burnet, 2005; Lay, Wahlstrom, Selfe,Selzer, & Rude, 2000; Markel, 2001) cover in the firstchapter or part: definition of technical communication,role of technical communication in industry, technicalcommunication and your career, audience and purpose,and ethics. Thus, I generated the following five openquestions:1. How do you define “technical communication”?2. What role does technical communication play indecision-making?3. How do you see the relationship betweentechnical communication and your career?4. How do you define audience and purpose?5. What is “ethics” in technical communication?To learn the students’ perceptions of the concepts Iwould teach in class, I chose the following nine topicsto be rank-ordered by the students on the survey frommost important to least important, with 1 as the mostimportant and 9 the least important:1. Paragraph structure2. Sentence structure3. Audience analysis4. Writing purpose5. Correct spelling6. Correct diction7. Vocabulary8. Ethics in writing9. Document designI picked the above nine topics for two majorreasons: First, these were the topics that the universityand I had agreed that I would cover in my sabbaticalteaching. Second, they were the same concepts Ihad used on the surveys the first time when I taughttechnical communication in China, which would allowme to compare and contrasts the results, though thisarticle does not address the comparisons or contrasts.The 200 graduate students represented 45 programsin 19 academic colleges and departments, such asEnglish, chemistry, physics, materials, civil engineering,surveying engineering, business, medical science,<strong>Chinese</strong> medicine, pharmacy, nursing, electronics, law,hydraulics, geology, environment, biology, mechanicalengineering, and botany. All of them were working orhad working experiences, and all of them had takenat least one technical communication class before. Idistributed the surveys among all 200 graduate studentson the first day of class.40 <strong>Technical</strong> Communication l Volume 58, Number 1, February 2011

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