Reading,Writing,and Research: Pedagogical Implications

Abstract

This article identifies some recent research findings in disciplines related to business communication-linguistics, educational psychology, reading in struction, and compositional research—and explores their relevance to our field, especially as they relate to teaching and subject matter. It seeks to determine whether our conventional wisdom about written communica tion is being affirmed or denied and raises fundamental philosophical ques tions about our proper subject-matter domain. It ends with a plea for broadening our base by incorporating into courses and textbooks the re sults of research from closely related fields, which will lead to a more com prehensive and theoretically sound pedagogical paradigm for business communication.