| International business and technical communication has been largely concerned with identifying cultural differences affecting communication, paying only minor attention to language. Moreover, the focus has been on the U.S. worker going abroad or on communicative situations of relatively short duration. However, as the workplace becomes more international and as foreign workers are sent by their companies to the United States to work in U.S. branches or subsidiaries, the communicative situation becomes long-term and the role of language becomes central. This project is a case study of a French native, employed at a U.S. branch of an international company and identified by his company as a poor writer. Functioning as a participant observer, I tutored him in writing and English as a second language for 11 months and collected data about his writing. In a contextualized analysis of his writing, I found problems in organization, content, style, and document design. In an analysis of errors at the sentence level, I found a high number and wide variety of errors, the most common being lexical. While the participant could identify and correct many of the errors, others represent language-learning problems, indicating fossilization and cessation of learning. Influences on the writing include the French language and culture, thinking and communicating preferences, and competing discourse conventions. Influences on the level of English proficiency include motivation, social and psychological distancing, and a strong desire to maintain an identity as French. This case study offers a microcosm of the role of language in an international workplace where English is the dominant language and also provides a site for reconsideration of the role of English in international communication. I argue that a new model of communication will be needed, a model already being developed outside the United States, which begins not from perceptions of difference and miscommunication but from a framework of interactive, jointly constructed, multiple viewpoints. |
