Journal of Business and Technical Communication

This study employs a one-group pretest and posttest design to assess the written and oral technical communication (TC) skills of students in vocational colleges in China. Fifty-nine 1st-year students in automotive engineering participated in a 3-week implementation of a TC module. To measure learner…

This article traces the uncomfortable relationship between writing studies and the concept of learning transfer. First it reviews three stages in the changing attitudes toward learning transfer in writing theory that is influenced by rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and situated learning. …

Third-generation activity theory (3GAT) has become a popular theoretical and methodological framework for writing studies, particularly in technical communication. 3GAT involves identifying an object, a material or problem that is cyclically transformed by collective activity. The object is the linc…