Learner preconceptions in teaching technical writing

Daniel Cassany, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Glòria Sanz, Technical communication trainer

Introduction

The aim of this presentation is to analyse, briefly, the previous ideas about language and teaching of learners in technical writing courses in the context of company training strategy.

We can define previous ideas as the group of beliefs, opinions and attitudes which learners often show through their habits and behaviour in the classroom. Doubtlessly, these attitudinal components have an important role in the learning process and can determine the success of training activities and courses. We will propose a modification to some of these preconceptions as one of the most important aims in teaching technical writing. In other words: learning to communicate effectively in technical situations includes the development of positive attitudes towards language, writing and learning.

Our observations came from two different sources: firstly, our direct experience of teaching, translating and consultancy in various companies; secondly, the information received from colleagues who are working in the same field. We will group the preconceptions uncovered into three main categories, and we will draw some general conclusions.

Context

It refers to courses organised by public or private organisations in some cities of Catalonia (Barcelona, Sabadell, Tarragona) for the last 10 years. Its purpose is to train employees in the company who have to write, mainly to improve the activities of writing and reading of company texts and, consequently, to optimise communication within the organisation.

Attendees of these courses are adults, active professionals who have reached different educational levels (secondary, technical degrees or university). They have shown competence in their speciality, but have only a very general knowledge of language and communication. In many cases, they only have a layman’s view, superficial and elementary. Mentally they associate writing to the grammatical contents which they learnt in their youth and which have very little relation with the specific activities in which they partake nowadays. Rarely have they received special training in communication and many of them haven’t had any training at all about other subjects.

Their activities in the company include writing compositions, checking, reading and eventually, translating technical texts about specific subjects (law, economy, engineering, building, commerce, transport...). They often write reports, memos, minutes, proceedings, etc. As writers, they have a wide knowledge about the topics and the vocabulary they have to use. But they have few resources to analyse the potential reader, to make clear the communicative function of the message, or to choose the model of language that fits the situation. Thus, they also have problems with their attempts to prepare a written text.

Our technical writing courses normally have groups of 10 to 20 people. They are between 15 and 30 hours long, mostly during working hours, and the classrooms are often in the same building as the company. Although the vehicular language is Catalan, the activities can be textual in Spanish or even French or English.

We have classified the preconceptions into three groups depending on whether they are related to:

1.1. Limited expectations about the course contents and aims

Some of the preconceptions originate from the immediate linguistic history of our country. Many adults haven't studied the formal uses of their mother tongue –Catalan–, because they finished their formal education before the end of the dictatorship. Presently, our community is involved in a linguistic normalisation process in which society is increasing the use of the Catalan language in professional environments.

As Catalan is the vehicular language of the course, many students think this training results from these circumstances. They suppose its main goal is to learn doing in Catalan what they are used to do in Spanish, that they couldn’t learn at school. They absolutely ignore that there is a wide field of theoretical and applied studies about technical writing, which include linguistic models, methodological techniques, reflections, bibliographical references, etc.

According to this assumption, learners expect a traditional language course of the same style to which they were accustomed to in their early years at school. They believe they will study the rules of grammar and the activities will consist of checking spelling mistakes or vocabulary. Doubtlessly, they have a confusion between training in technical writing -with no direct relation to any concrete language-, and a prescriptive grammar course.

1.2. Wrong vision of written communication

It is also important to pay attention on the concept of "ideal text" that learners have. Their ideas of a good written document are personal and quite different from those most commonly accepted nowadays.

In terms of the content:

To sum up, the previous ideas about the "ideal text" show that learners have a poor conception of communicative situations. Instead of attending to the reader's needs and adapting to the communicative purpose, they reproduce old habits of composition. Often writers take the text as a vehicle to show their professional competence: they think the reader will judge the author more than the content, by factors like the extension, the documentation or the knowledge they can show and the cult vocabulary they use in it. They believe this kind of text gives them prestige.

1.3. Restricted vision of writing skills

Other previous ideas refer to writing and learning to write. Firstly, many of the learners understand writing to be an individual activity that has to be done alone. They usually do alone all the processes involved in the composition. They generate ideas alone, they organise the information alone and they write alone. The only activity in which co-operation is accepted is in the revision process. Here colleagues may participate as critics to improve a final version of the text.

Paradoxically, this way of thinking contradicts the principle that co-operative working is necessary in an organisation. Often various specialists are involved in the preparation of an important document (for example, a contract or a report). On these occasions, in spite of working together –with simultaneous interaction and negotiation–, they tend to write individually on and adding consecutively to the same text. In the classroom, we can see them working alone and avoiding group activities.

Secondly, many learners have a very "artistic" view of writing. Even when they are working with technical texts –nothing to do with literature!–, they believe in myths like inspiration or artist's innate talent. They are often sceptical about the techniques and resources the course offers them. They think that perhaps they will get to correct their grammatical flaws and believe it is impossible that they will achieve a real improvement in writing clear and effective texts.

This lack of confidence in what they can learn stems from the close relation between writing and literature as used in traditional education systems in Spain. Because the linguistic models commonly offered at school were the most well known literature works, students often think the ideal written text is that of elitist novels, tales or poems. And, of course, they believe they will never achieve this high level!

To sum up, these attitudes about writing limit the possibility of co-operative writing exercises in the classroom and also reduce writers’ expectations about their learning success.

2. Preconceptions related to the role of language and communication in organisations

2.1. Little awareness about the language functions in the company

The most important preconception is the little importance writers -and other professionals- give to the language in their working environments. Very few technical writers have awareness about the relationship between language competence, communicative efficiency and the improvement of the organisation’s processes.

For example, there is evidence that, if a writer can produce very understandable and brief instructions, he will enable the reader to execute them efficiently (thus saving time and avoiding mistakes). As a result, he will improve the organisational process (saving money, enhancing quality). On the other hand, if there are composition or linguistic problems in the instructions, probably the reader will misunderstand the message and the process will contain errors and confusions that will require time and effort to be identified and corrected. Therefore, a good level of technical writing will facilitate the job the organisation must do.

In spite of the above, most writers have little awareness about this relationship. They believe that language is just a grammatical subject and they consider that it refers only to the message form. Therefore, during the written revision activities, they rarely accept the whole reformulation of the text when looking for more coherence and clarity. They believe that linguistic knowledge refers only to the document’s surface (spelling, typography and so forth) and to local fragments (letters, words, sentences).

Paradoxically, technical writers really don’t take care about questions of grammatical style or format, because they can usually ask for the help of clerks and secretaries who can do the job for them. They often think that editing and other issues of style are the responsibility of these clerical staff members. Therefore, they show only relative interest in those aspects.

2.2. A conservative attitude about language evolution

Technical writers often show resistance to the renewal of written language. They are very loyal to the habits, the formulae and the company’s linguistic clichés. It doesn’t matter if these are standard conventions, external influences or specific features of the company culture. They are reluctant to changes and to the new linguistic forms which are different from the ones they usually read and write.

Some of the linguistic changes they don’t always accept are the following:

2.3. An exclusive interest in written practical questions

Adult interests refer exclusively to the professional activity of the company and to the more practical and concrete writing issues like explicit presentation rules, stylistic advice or rhetorical and persuasive techniques. The study of the more theoretical information that sustains and justifies these points doesn’t interest them and may also create impatience or reluctance. The causes of this fact may be the poor linguistic training of the learners and the organisational culture, which only accepts professional training focused on the company’s immediate profits.

In general, learners expect that the course will give them the recipes that will solve all the difficulties they have when writing. Reflection about language and communication, general linguistic theories, specific terminology or bibliographical references seem to scare them as if it were a very specialised discipline, far from their day to day work. On the other hand, they also expect to see all the contents (sentence construction advice, discourse structures models, vocabulary selection...) exemplified in real documents.

3. Preconceptions related to the teaching and learning processes

3.1. Traditional teaching model

In general, the educational experience of an adult is reduced to very traditional models. At the time adults were educated, at primary or secondary school –or even at university–, education focused on data accumulation and on memory based learning. The most common methodology used lectures and was based on single solution exercises. Therefore, this is frequently the kind of experience that adults bring into the training courses.

The influence of these educational models may be found in learner expectations before the beginning of the course and in the behaviour shown in the classroom. With regard to expectations, learners hope that sessions will repeat the traditional models they know. For example, they think that:

3.2. Teacher functions

Another preconception refers to teacher functions and their responsibilities in the course. Adult technical writers tend to believe that teacher only have these three duties:

3.3. Reluctance to peer and small group activities

Adult learners didn’t learn at school to work co-operatively in peer or small groups -even now children don’t learn! So commonly they have the habit of working individually, even in a company where it is assumed that all members have to collaborate, in order to achieve the same purpose.

In the classroom, adults usually don’t accept peer group activities like revision, comments or discussions. They feel uncomfortable and anxious. If the teacher encourages them to work together, after some hesitation, they will do the job alone. Only after finishing the activity, they will begin to share their work with classmates. Even if there has been some kind of group interaction, at the end, during the feedback interaction, learners rarely speak on behalf of a work group. In conclusion, the most common interaction in the classroom occurs between the whole group and the individual learner.

Conclusions

We can draw the following conclusions: