Facilitating Workplace Communicative Competence

Abstract

Many workplace communicative competence curricula are skills-based and rightfully so because the objective is to equip students with, e.g., writing and speaking skills that they can readily apply when they go out to work. However, teaching these skills in atomistic, compartmentalized lesson units in linear progression, as is the case when we teach business email writing followed by proposal writing and then verbal and non-verbal communication followed by oral presentation skills, divorced from a context or overarching purpose, undermines the significance of learning those very skills for the student. Students may not be able to appreciate that real workplace tasks are usually organic in nature and as such, require one to apply a variety of communication skills from start to finish in order to achieve the overall purpose. That purpose could be to investigate a problem and find a solution, research a product or service to persuade a client, etc. In this chapter, we describe the Proposal Communication Project (PCP), an inquiry-based, group research project which required students to be actively engaged in identifying a problem, follow through by investigating and analysing it from different perspectives and then proposing a viable solution- all the while actively applying a range of communication skills within multi-modal contexts from start to finish. In this way, the inquiry-based pedagogy simulated real-world, workplace communication demands within the classroom context to facilitate significant learning.