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SIGDOC Newsletter
December 2005
:: Volume 6, Number 4
Features
- "How Document Design Helps English Learners Master Science" by T.
R. Girill
- "Meeting Your Audience and Gaining Customer Insight, Part I by
Rob Pierce
How Document Design Helps English Learners Master Science
T. R. Girill
Literacy Outreach Project
East Bay Chapter, Society for Technical Communication
and
Computation Directorate, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
trg@llnl.gov
Students for whom English is a second language (ESL) often struggle
to understand otherwise standard technical text and instructions in science
classes. Also, ESL students often cannot adequately express what they
know on written science assignments, in presentations, or during tests.
Overt lessons in document design, with explicit exercises on the very
basic techniques that make nonfiction text more effective and more usable,
offer a remarkably appropriate response to this problem.
The benefits of grade-appropriate technical communication lessons for
ESL science students are twofold:
- Document design activities implement very well the known
mainstream strategies (summarized below) for building general literacy
among English language
learners.
- These same activities strongly supplement standard ESL support in
innovative ways. They go farther, directly addressing several residual
problems
that often undermine ESL student success with science.
Building General ESL Literacy
Blending overt communication design work into their science classes
helps ESL high-school students in three familiar ways:
- Explicit Skill Development.
Even routine requests (explain a project to a classmate, deploy warnings)
can overwhelm or intimidate ESL students. Document design lessons
convert that threat into a skill-building opportunity (e.g., through
paced,
explicit analysis of good and bad lists or instructions).
- Self-Editing Support.
ESL students often lack adequate self-editing skills. Guided practice
using overt document-design guidelines reveals to such students just
the nonfiction text-revision techniques that they tend to neglect.
It thus promotes the disciplined review of their own drafts that is vital
for literacy independence (Beam and Burke, 1994, pp. 100-102).
- Scaffolded
Practice.
Scaffolding academic (especially science) language is a well-known
way to help ESL students cope with and gradually master "science
talk" in
English. Because it is naturally reflexive, technical writing work
nicely amplifies any teacher's competence with the usual scaffolding
methods
(Galguera, 2003, pp. 3-7; Gutierrez, 1995, p. 30):
- Modelling ("cognitive apprenticeship").
- Bridging
(connecting school work to real life).
- Contexturalizing
(framing the new with the familiar).
- Schema building (managing
expectations with signals and cues).
- Text representation
(exposing genre rules and norms).
Addressing Neglected Literacy Problems
Cognitive Maturity. Because of their prior language
limitations, ESL students often arrive in high-school science class without
the
cognitive
maturity to handle scientific reasoning and communication comfortably
(Duran, Revlin, and Havill, 1995, p. 2). Furthermore, many ESL students
are scientifically illiterate in their native language, so going
forward in English is really the only path open to them. Fiction
reading and
writing generally assume cognitive maturity (in constructing interpretations,
for example) but often do little to actually develop it.
Carefully structured technical communication exercises address this
need directly. Example elaboration--consciously inferring the reasons
for
or the role of each step in sample instructions or descriptions--develops
transferable cognitive sophistication (as summarized in Girill, 2001).
In addition, when they work document design exercises, ESL students
practice just the same analytical skills regarding text that they
need for all
science projects: attention to detail, concern for the effectiveness
of technique and for the ability of others to understand what they
have done (or said), openness to revision, and a desire to improve
based on
evidence rather than whim. In fact, technical communication work
to build cognitive maturity in science actually flows back into improved
literary
analysis as well: "Explicit teaching of science process skills
[including science communication]...pays off in EL (English learner)
growth in both
science and English" (Dobb, 2004, p. 44, italics added).
Undemanding Practice. Most U.S. ESL students (85%) were born in the
U.S. of immigrant parents (Public Policy Institute, 2005). Nevertheless,
their "academic
literacy" skills are low and those skills often do not develop
over time. One study found that the verbal SAT scores for Hispanic
test takers
are 1/2 to 1 standard deviation (50-100 points) lower than verbal
scores of "non-Latino white students," and that this has
changed insignificantly since 1976 (Duran, Revlin, and Havill, 1995,
p. 1). Duran blames this
partly on too-easy remedial materials: "exposing Latino students
to cognitively and linguistically undemanding activities does not
equip them to acquire the communicative competence needed for advanced
academic
learning," especially in science (Duran, Revlin, and Havill,
1995, p. 3).
Studying document design provides a new alternative here to copying
text by rote or filling in worksheets. Experienced practitioners
can fairly
easily adapt authentic documentation cases for classroom use. Yet
even simplified recipes, whose domain (food) and familiar entry vocabulary
(kitchen tasks) make them broadly accessible to students, still demand
the exercise of "hard" linguistic skills (assessing usability,
trying alternative ordering or phrasing, and persistent iterative
refinement). This is the mix of topic familiarity with procedural
challenge needed
to enrich ESL student skills.
Text Signals. Attending to the signals that (good)
writers provide is one key aspect of successfully understanding and using
technical
prose.
Proleptics ("on the other hand," "secondly")
and connectives ("but," "because") are crucial
signals in standard scientific text. Yet ESL students often ignore
these text
signals when they read and underuse them when they write (Duran,
Revlin, and Havill, 1995, p. 4). Empirical studies by Goldman and
Murray (1992,
pp. 516-517), for instance, found that ESL students had much more
trouble than native English speakers in supplying connectives intentionally
omitted
from text (cloze slots) and indeed that ESL students had "relatively
little understanding of [the] differences among additive, causal,
and adversative connectors" (516).
Fortunately, promoting awareness of proleptics and connectives is
a standard aspect of document design. The more they work with technical
communication
overtly, the more ESL students learn how to notice these clues, assess
their contributions, and edit them for suitability. Such exercises
usually have scientific content too, so they strongly reinforce the
relevance
of text signals to understanding or producing good science prose.
Note Taking. ESL students often struggle in science classes because
their language limitations prevent writing well for themselves as
well as for
others. Technical subjects usually demand reliable note taking. When
ESL students fail to produce effective notes, their content knowledge,
test performance, and collaborative project work all suffer.
But note taking is really just one very specific case of effective
description writing (where the author is also the only audience and
a lecture or
textbook is the item to be described). ESL science students who study
description writing thus get an immediate benefit from applying (in
their own notes) the same techniques that will pay off later in their
lab reports
and presentations. Tip sheets for and models of sound notes can quickly
focus language learners on writing better for their own use (e.g.,
Barrass, 2002, pp. 8-17, 127-129).
Science Idioms. Whether in classroom summaries, user manuals, formal
reports, or refereed articles, English technical text relies on hundreds
of widely used idioms ("break up," "blow up," "look
up") to convey key concepts, actions, or distinctions. The nonliteral
character of these phrases in usually invisible to native speakers,
but it can paralyze the smooth reading or meaningful writing of ESL
science
students.
Specific attention to science idioms, in their context of appropriate
use, is the only way build them into an English learner's vocabulary.
Technical writing practice, with its stress on audience needs,
always exposes these phrases to scrutiny. Some technical writing books,
tailored to ESL readers, give these expressions special emphasis
(one even includes
a comparative, explanatory idiom glossary for easy reference (Huckin
and Olsen, 1983, Appendix B)). This approach enables every science
student, ESL or native speaker, to notice and gradually adopt relevant
science
idioms as they improve their general science literacy.
back to top Conclusion
Document design, when thoughtfully adapted into age-appropriate
practice materials (as suggested here and in Girill, 2004),
offers a second
harvest of techniques that improve (and enrich) both the science
and the literacy
performance of ESL high-school students.
This work was performed in part
under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by the University
of California, Lawrence
Livermore National
Laboratory under Contract W-7405-Eng-48. Special thanks for
support go to Virginia Shuler and Dona L. Crawford.
References Cited
- Barrass, Robert. (2002).
Scientists Must Write, 2nd. ed. London: Routledge.
- Beam, Paul and Burke, Diane. (1994).
Learners as authors: helping ESL employees in a Canadian bank
prepare customer relations and documentation materials.
In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Conference on
Systems Documentation
(pp.
96-104). Banff, Alberta, Canada: Association for Computing
Machinery.
- Dobb, Fred. (2004).
Essential Elements of Effective Science Instruction
for English Learners, 2nd ed. Los Angeles: California
Science
Project
(UCLA), 69 pp. Available
at http://csmp.ucop.edu/csp .
- Duran, Richard; Revlin, Russell; Havill, Dale. (1995).
Verbal Comprehension and Reasoning Skills of Latino
High School Students. Research Report RR13 (13
pp.). Santa Cruz,
CA: National
Center for
Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language
Learning. Available at http://repositories.cdlib.org/crede/ncrcdsllresearch/rr13
- Galguera, Tomas. (2003).
Scaffolding for English learners: what's a science
teacher to do? FOSS Newsletter, (Spring) no.
21, 1-8.
- Girill, T. R. (2004).
Documentation as problem solving for literacy
outreach programs. UCRL-CONF-205156. In Proceedings
of the
2004 Region 8 Conference
(7 pp). University of
California, Davis, CA: Society for Technical
Communication. Available at http://www.llnl.gov/tid/lof/documents/pdf/309320.pdf
- Girill, T. R. (2001).
Example elaboration as a neglected instructional
strategy. In Scott Tilley (Ed.), Proceedings
of the Nineteenth
Annual Conference
on
Systems Documentation
SIGDOC01 (pp. 39-46). Santa Fe, NM: Association
for Computing Machinery. Available at http://www.ebstc.org/TechLit/TL_ExElab.htm
- Goldman, Susan, and Murray, John. (1992).
Knowledge of connectors as cohesion devices
in text: a comparative study of native English
and
English-as-a-second-language
speakers. Journal
of Educational Psychology, 84(4), 504-519.
- Gutierrez, Kris. (1995).
Unpacking academic discourse. Discourse Processes,
19, 21-37.
- Huckin, Thomas, and Olsen, Leslie. (1983).
English for Science and Technology: A Handbook
for Nonnative Speakers. New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Company.
- Public Policy Institute of California.
(2005).
The Progress of English Learners in California
Schools. Research Brief Issue 99 (April).
2 pp. Available
at http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/RB_405CJRB.pdf
Meeting Your Audience and Gaining Customer Insight, Part I
By Rob Pierce
robertp@us.ibm.com
If the first lesson in technical communication is to know your audience,
then the first great realization is to understand that meeting the customer
and getting their input may be or appear to be quite challenging or not
possible.
This article is the first part of a three part paper that covers some
experiences and thoughts about seeking out customer input and some ideas
on how you can create opportunities to visit customers. After describing
some of the ways to gain customer insight without actually visiting customers,
this article presents some thoughts on meeting customers and includes
some example scenarios.
If you are not in product management, sales, or a customer support
or technical specialist representative in a software development organization,
then you likely do not get opportunities to meet the customers. And while
one of the keys to good technical communication is to identify your audience
and write with that audience in mind, most technical writers do not get
the opportunity to meet their audience.
And yet, meeting the customer – the audience – is invaluable.
The benefits of getting customer input is multifaceted and certainly
provides the opportunity to better understand defined roles and use cases
related to how your product is used in the real world instead of in your
development organization. There may be a different terminology from the
terms you use. Understanding pain points, configuration issues, integration
with other products, troubleshooting and workarounds are just some of
the areas where a writer can gain insight. Some of this information can
be acquired by looking at your Support organization’s technical
notes, both for the content of specific tech notes and for review of
the most common issue categories and their resolutions.
A very important version of meeting your audience can be gained from
internal reviews and use of the information or documentation you provide.
For example, if you are documenting an API that is used internally, perhaps
to create an integration between two products or services that your company
or your company and a partner develops, there is a ready and available
internal audience that can assist you in developing the doc deliverables
that will ship with the product.
Just as a customer may use a product, your own organization may have
similar roles and responsibilities and if a developer lets you know
that they could not find a particular piece of information, you can bet
the
same pain point will be apparent to customers. Thus, the internal audience
can help resolve many potential issues.
Another audience is the partner companies that build solutions using
your products that may be industry-specific. For example, there are several
companies that use existing products to create software solutions for
the automotive, healthcare, and banking industries. The software that
incorporates or provides the link between user input and business logic
and its associated database transactions is called middleware. And the
biggest audience of middleware documentation may be the application development
companies that create industry or company-specific solutions. While not
exactly an internal audience, the partner companies is another good channel
for gaining insight on how your product is used and what information
is required in your documentation.
There is also a large audience within the IT departments of companies
that create software for their own companies. This may be your target
audience. And while the company may have thousands of potential users
of a solution, the audience of the technical information for developing
that solution may be quite limited, perhaps to a small development group.
But how do you get customer feedback from that group?
It may be a rare opportunity for most information developers to gain
audience insight by actually meeting with customers. Customer visits
for technical communicators are likely an infrequent occurrence and it
can be difficult to initiate them. However, such opportunities can be
initiated with thought, planning and persistence. And while some customers
may not be interested to invest the time away from their real responsibilities
to provide you with feedback, visits can be well received and provide
you and your company an opportunity to be closer to the customer and
show that you are focused on serving them.
Some companies may
have an organization that is responsible for setting up such visits.
In other companies, this may be something that individuals
must do themselves. When setting meetings up yourself, it is important
to know the players in the picture and their relationships to each
other, both in your organization or company and in the customer’s
organization. For example, while you may know your product manager, you
need to make
contact with the people who are the representatives to the customer
account. There may be an account manager, an account representative,
and a team
of technical support specialists, who all work closely with the customer. You may already know some of these individuals but you will likely
need to work with them to help identify the right people to meet with
in the
customer’s organization.
If you already have a reviewer who works
with customers, then you could start by contacting that person. Such
an individual may be a good reviewer
and offer much useful input to your documentation. That person may
be able to help you set up a customer or partner meeting.
You should make it clear what the goals of the visit you are proposing
are. Customers are busy and need to know in advance what you plan
to do. For example, it is useful to let the customer know that you want
their input to help enhance the user experience by meeting with them
and enabling them to express, in their own terms, how they use the
product and what they need or would like to see. For example, you
can
let them
know that you would welcome the opportunity to describe your new
role-based Help system for your product that will be delivered in the
next full
release.
You could try contacting a product manager, a customer account manager,
or a technical specialist to see if they can assist you in making contact
with customers or perhaps your company has a partners’ group that
interfaces with their customers, your ultimate end users. If your company
has such a group, you could work with your company’s partner program
to see if they can set up customer meetings to help demonstrate and promote
the product, and gather feedback for the documentation for which you
are responsible.
Some of your potential contacts may be the:
- Field specialist who may already be a reviewer of your documentation.
These individuals can be invaluable resources for enhancing your
product documentation and they can help identify the primary roles
and use
cases for the product.
- Technical manager who manages the field specialists who support
customer solutions.
- Technical representative who supports the technical
manager and who can
offer more insight into the technical details for a given account
or solution than the technical manager.
- Account representative who manages the
customer accounts and is the liason to the technical specialists and
the customer contacts. The account
rep. is often best able to identify the names of the appropriate specific
customers with whom to meet and from whom you can gather feedback
on the documentation.
- Account manager who manages the customer account and may
be best able to identify the right customer accounts to approach
for visits
or gathering of input.
Anticipate that one of the first questions or requests that you will
get from all the above individuals is for you to state your intentions
or goals for customer input or actual visits.
In the next installment of this article, the goals of the trip and how
to present them to the different contacts will be presented. Part III
will include some sample scenarios of customer visits and a summary.
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