ABSTRACT

Workplace writing refers to writing required or associated with the daily workplace environment and typically produced for in-house consumption by co-workers at the same work site, such as a factory, or within the same business. Workplace writing is thus to be differentiated from, for example, scholarly writing (discussed in chapter 7), which is associated with a profession rather than a worksite and is directed to other professionals within the same discipline but typically operating in physically dispersed work settings, such as universities or scientific laboratories internationally. L2 studies have a long history of attending to writing in the workplace, including writing for science and technology, industry, business, and the medical fields; other research has considered oral L2 interactions, including on the factory floor (T. Goldstein, 1996; Harper, Peirce, & Burnaby, 1996; Peirce, Harper, & Burnaby 1993). For the most part, the research in this area has focused on needs analysis (Cameron, 1998; Duff, Wong, & Early, 2000; Huckin & Olsen, 1984; Katz, 2000; Lepetit & Cichocki, 2002), that is, identifying what kinds of writing are required at particular job sites; cross-linguistic text analysis (Connor, 1988; Dennett, 1988; Jenkins & Hinds, 1987; Maier, 1992; Selinker, Todd-Trimble, & Trimble, 1978; Sims & Guice, 1992), that is, how L1 versus L2 writers respond to the writing demands at these sites or how the demands differ from each other across language and cultural groups; and materials development or other pedagogical issues (Hutchinson & Waters, 1987; Myers, 1988; L. Olsen & Huckin, 1983; Platt, 1993; Selinker, Tarone, & Hanzeli, 1981), that is, the kinds of instructional programs that might best be generated from the research findings to be used in writing courses, often ones sponsored by the company or worksite itself. Less attention has focused on the L2 writers producing the workplace documents or on their writing contexts (Parks & Maguire, 1999). The findings of those few that have focused on writers and contexts (Belcher, 1991; Parks, 2000, 2001; Parks & Maguire, 1999) are provocative in their repeated findings that writing in these settings is heavily embedded in the social dimensions of the workplace.