How pedagogical blogging helps prepare students for intercultural communication in the global workplace

Abstract

Employees in the global workplace must be able to communicate effectively with interlocutors from different cultural backgrounds. To do this, they must be aware of the similarities and differences between their own and other cultures and of cultural biases that they and other people may have. This paper reports on the use of pedagogical blogging in a professional communication module to encourage students to reflect on their awareness and application of intercultural communication skills when working on group assignments inside and outside the classroom. The elective module attracted mostly second- and third-year Science and Engineering undergraduate students, and a few other students from first and honours years and other degree programmes such as Business and Computer Science. Also, although the majority of the students were Singaporeans, the module also attracted Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian, Chinese, western European and Korean students. As the module aimed to help students hone their verbal and written communication for the professional arena, it incorporated intercultural communication, a subset of professional communication competence and skills necessary for the global workplace today. This paper discusses students' reflective blog posts on their own as well as their peers' intercultural interactions in group learning tasks and assignments. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.