TASKs | POINTS | DUE DATES |
---|---|---|
Proposal I and Proposal II | 5 | 1 day after session 12 and session 15 |
First Draft | 10 | 3 days after session 19 |
Final Report | 15 | 3 days after session 24 |
Oral Presentation | 25 |
These documents support various in-class activities:
Some Questions to Ask About Culture (PDF)
Intercultural Communication Simulation (PDF)
What Should Walther Do? (PDF)
Language Exercise (PDF)
Cross Cultural Negotiations (PDF)
Cross Cultural Persuasion (PDF)
This first assignment asks you to examine your own cultural identity - to describe how you define yourself as a cultural being - and to show how that affects your communication style. The following questions are to help you construct that definition. You don't need to answer every question, and there may be points you include in your paper that aren't addressed by the questions, but use the questions as a jumping off point.
The paper should also reflect some of the key ideas you have read about and we have discussed so far in class. It should be between two and three typed pages.
Due: Session 3
For this assignment, you may choose a nonfiction work that examines the themes of the course in more detail, or a work of literature in which the author looks at how he/she or others come to know another culture and its peoples. (We will give you a list of books we like and former students have recommended, but you can choose a book not on the list. We would like you to clear the book with one of us, however, before using it for the assignment.)
Please write a three- to four-page essay connecting the book to the ideas and practices you have learned in the course. The essay could:
The goal of this assignment is to go beyond the material presented in class to think more deeply about some aspect of intercultural communication, and to share that knowledge with us. In order to help you develop your ideas, we will give you a set of questions we would like answered in writing. We'll give you feedback on those answers before you write the final draft of the review.
Please give us a full bibliographic citation (author, title, edition number [if applicable], publisher, date of publication) for the book you have read at the beginning of your paper.
List page numbers of any direct quotes you include.
If you quote material from another work (book, article, film), provide bibliographic information for that work as well as in a footnote or endnote.
Grammar, punctuation, and spelling count.
Due: Session 11 (answers to questions); Session 15 (final draft)
The following sets of questions are designed to help guide your thinking about your book, and make writing the essay easier.
If you have read a book of fiction:
If you have read a nonfiction or academic book:
This final assignment will give you the opportunity to synthesize what you have learned this semester, as well as add to your knowledge of how intercultural communication operates in a specific professional setting. Examples of professional settings include:
Working together in (ideally, intercultural) teams of three or four, you will explore how intercultural communication impacts some facet of one of these professions.
You may chose any topic or question that intrigues the team. Your team could consider such projects as:
The suggestions above are very broad; the team's first job will be to narrow down a topic that can be reasonably developed into a 10-page paper and a 15- to 20-minute presentation.
Writing the paper and creating the presentation will be a multi-step process that will take place throughout the semester. It will begin with a short discussion of teamwork, group report writing and group presentations in session 9. On that day, we will also ask you to identify the topics you are interested in. Based on that exercise, we will help you put together your teams, which we will announce on session 10. We will give you some time during that class to meet with each other to get to know one another and begin to settle on a specific topic.
The remaining parts of the process include the following
Proposal I (session 12)
You will write a one-page memo in which you describe concisely the topic of the paper/presentation and an initial list of resources you will use.
Proposal II (session 15)
Resubmit your original proposal based on feedback you were given. Add research sources that you have found in the interim.
First Draft (2 days after session 19)
The draft of the report that you submit should be as close to completion as possible. The more polished this draft is, the better feedback we can give you. We reserve the right to return any draft we don't feel is far enough along to warrant our reading it.
Outline of Presentation (session 20)
We would like a brief outline of the presentation you will be giving. Again, the more complete you can make the outline, the more guidance we can give you on creating a successful presentation. This outline should include what role each team member will take during the presentation.
Presentations (In class session 22, session 23, 2 days after session 16, and session 18)
Give a 15- to 20-minute presentation (every team member must speak, so the length of time will depend on the number of people on the team) based upon your research report. Your presentation should describe your most innovative, interesting, or unique finding and use evidence to further our understanding of that point. Use appropriate visual aids. Allow time for questions and discussion at the end of the presentation.
Final Report (2 days after session 24)
The final report should include footnotes and a bibliography.
The entire report is worth 30 points with each step worth the following:
TASKs | POINTS | DUE DATES |
---|---|---|
Proposal I and Proposal II | 5 | 1 day after session 12 and session 15 |
First Draft | 10 | 3 days after session 19 |
Final Report | 15 | 3 days after session 24 |
Oral Presentation | 25 |