Teaching and learning research

Teaching and learning research

At the department of professional and intercultural communication, we pursue excellence in teaching and conduct research on teaching and learning within the field of language and intercultural communication for business students.

Our research explores innovative methods that facilitate effective learning and foster student engagement. Our ambition is to continuously adapt our teaching to the ever-changing and diverse reality of future business leaders. 

Research topics

  • Critical approaches to teaching intercultural communication
  • Team-based learning to practice global leadership skills in the classroom
  • Flipped classroom method to engage students in language learning online
  • Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) to combine sustainability issues and second language competencies for business students
  • Student-centered learning in the virtual classroom
  • The use of rubrics for feedback and assessment
  • The use of fieldwork interviews in business education
  • Teaching intercultural pragmatics through international collaborations 

 

 

ongoing research projects

  • How to get more out of fieldwork interviews. The case of an Expatriate in South Korea

    How to get more out of fieldwork interviews. The case of an Expatriate in South Korea

    The motivation for this study began when asking students attending a course on East Asian culture and communication to interview expatriates working in East Asia. We found that the students tended to become a bit star-struck by this older, experienced expatriate and diligently wrote down every opinion he had as ‘the truth’ about East Asians. By using Narrative positioning (Bamberg, 1997) on our own fieldwork analysis of expatriate interviews, this study aims to clarify what we mean when we tell the students that no matter how experienced expatriates are, their opinions must be interpreted relative to whether they are insiders or outsiders to the reality they describe. 

    Contact person: Kristin Rygg 

  • Foreign language and sustainability for business students

    Foreign language and sustainability for business students

    This project starts from the idea that multilingualism is a prerequisite for sustainable development and analyzes how our teaching activity can incorporate this aspect in the classrooms and curricula of business students. Specifically, we examine how sustainability perspectives effectively can be included in the overall study programmes of business schools, and analyze pedagogical strategies used in the classroom to promote the desired learning outcomes for sustainable awareness on the one hand, and foreign languages on the other. Specifically, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) combined with the Flipped Classroom-method are implemented and assessed with regard to the relevant learning outcomes.  

    Contact person: Margrete Dyvik Cardona 

  • International students’ perspectives on multicultural teams and strategies for effective collaboration

    International students’ perspectives on multicultural teams and strategies for effective collaboration

    Working in a multicultural team is often perceived as challenging by students, and cultural differences may affect the collaboration. However, what can students do to make their teams work? The article looks at a case where students overwhelmingly enjoyed working in multicultural teams. Drawing on students’ weekly and final reflection notes, the study explores their perceptions throughout the semester and examines their strategies to foster effective collaboration.  

    Contact person: Annelise Ly 

  • Teaching legal translation: Investigating the effect of student-centered teaching on translation quality

    Teaching legal translation: Investigating the effect of student-centered teaching on translation quality

    Contact persons: Beate Sandvei, Claudia Förster Hegrenæs, Ingrid Simonnæs

  • The best of both worlds: an online intercultural collaboration between NHH and WU Vienna

    The best of both worlds: an online intercultural collaboration between NHH and WU Vienna

    Globalization has diversified the online and offline contexts in which future professionals will operate in their careers. It has also fundamentally changed the ways in which we teach languages: we need to be able to equip our students with communication skills they will be able to adapt to various kinds of intercultural communicative situations. In other words, we need to teach our students pragmatic accommodation skills in addition to language skills. These skills comprise tacit knowledge which cannot be acquired from traditional classroom teaching, which is why realistic activities such as simulations and actual intercultural exchanges are recommended. In this collaborative project between Norwegian School of Economics and Vienna University of Economics and Business, we explore best practices to teach English for intercultural business communication through a genuinely intercultural business simulation, where we bring our students together for a joint negotiation assignment on Zoom. Our aim is to explore meaningful solutions for internationalization at home through cross-institutional collaboration. 

    Contact person: Kaisa Pietikäinen  

completed research projects

  • Team-based learning to develop future global leaders’ competencies

    Team-based learning to develop future global leaders’ competencies

    Future global leaders need to develop global leadership competencies (GLCs) to tackle the complexities of globalisation, not just to learn about them. The chapter reports on a course design that effectively develops these competencies in the classroom using team-based learning (TBL). The course aims to help students practise three competencies deemed essential for global leaders: (1) the ability to demonstrate self-awareness; (2) the ability to communicate effectively when working in multicultural teams and (3) the ability to think critically. The chapter argues that using TBL to develop GLC is particularly effective, as the instruction method offers a fixed, clearly defined set of practice, i.e. weekly individual and group test, team collaboration and peer feedback that works as a semester-long experiential learning teamwork activity where the students practise, reflect and develop their GLC. The chapter provides an account of the course design, activities and assignments implemented and discusses its effectiveness. It aims to be useful for instructors who want to implement an innovative, student-centred course on global leadership.  

    Reference:  

    Ly, A (2022): Developing future global leaders’ competencies in a business school course: A case study of a course design inspired by Team-based learning, Advances in Global Leadership, Vol.14, 227-245 

  • Email in international business settings: Classroom activities for students to practise and critically reflect on their communicative practices

    Email in international business settings: Classroom activities for students to practise and critically reflect on their communicative practices

    Making a good impression by email is an essential skill for future leaders to collaborate and get the job done in international settings. The chapter describes two intercultural email activities and their implementation in the classroom. While many business students have only been exposed to the positivist approach to culture, these activities aim to help students practise, critically reflect on their communicative practices, and question their previous knowledge. In the first activity, students write a professional email and see how it is perceived in international settings. In the second activity, students’ email openings are discussed following two hypotheses. The first one examines if their openings are in line with cultural profiling theories. The second hypothesis tests whether informal greetings would be acceptable in international business settings. This chapter is framed in the context of business school teaching. It details the teaching method and the activities and discusses how these activities may contribute to students’ more critical understanding of culture.  

    Reference:  

    Ly, A (2022): Email in International Business Settings: Classroom Activities for Students to Practise and Critically Reflect on their Communicative Practices, in Interculturality in Higher Education: Putting Critical Approaches into Practice, edited by Mélodine Sommier, Anssi Roiha and Malgorzata Lahti, Routledge 

  • Student Engagement and Oral Practise in an Online French Course with the flipped classroom method

    Student Engagement and Oral Practise in an Online French Course with the flipped classroom method

    Effective foreign language learning requires students to be engaged and to interact with the teacher and peer students in the target language during class. How can this be achieved effectively when the course is suddenly moved online? This chapter reports on the implementation of a Business French course in a business school in Norway using the flipped classroom method online during COVID-19. The author designed the course focusing on two key elements: fostering student engagement and creating a space for oral practise. Several measures were implemented: grammar and vocabulary lessons were moved out of class time, classes were synchronous and not recorded with activities in breakout rooms, and digital lunches were held to build a sense of community. The chapter provides an empirical case of course adaptation and draws on this experience to offer some recommendations that other foreign language teachers can use to implement an engaging course online.  

    Reference:  

    Ly, A (2021): Fostering Student Engagement and Oral Practise in an Online French Course during COVID-19: Implementation, Reflection and Strategies, in Handbook of Research on Effective Online Language Teaching in a Disruptive Environment edited by Jean Leloup and Pete Swanson, IGI Global,270-287 

  • Challenges of teaching intercultural business communication in times of turbulence

    Challenges of teaching intercultural business communication in times of turbulence

    While business environments are becoming more complex and multifaceted, many courses on intercultural communication still tend to teach and assess students in a traditional way, based on the accumulation of knowledge about different cultures, often reduced to the concept of nations. Although many scholars tend to criticise and reject the traditional approach to intercultural communication, little has been said on how the subject should be taught and what activities should be implemented in its place. This paper aims to give some suggestions in that regard, but also to discuss the challenges involved. It draws on our experiences and reflections of implementing a course on intercultural business communication with focus on East Asia at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). Three objectives were chosen for the course: 1) Develop students‟ skills in observations, 2) Train students to handle complexity, and 3) Encourage students to reflect on and be critical of existing theories and texts. To fulfil the three objectives, we implemented different activities that turned out to be complementary; reflection texts, role-plays and case studies. In this paper, we start with a presentation of our course and its objectives followed by examples of the activities we have implemented. Last, we share our reflections on the process and discuss the outcome in relation to the demand for new approaches in the field.  

    Reference:  

    Ly, A. & Rygg, K. (2016): Challenges of teaching intercultural business communication in times of turbulence, in Intercultural Competence: Alternative Approaches for Today´s Education, Edited by F. Dervin and Z. Gross, Palgrave McMillan, 215-236  

  • Using Rubrics for Translation Assessment: The Case of the National Translator Accreditation Exam in Norway

    Using Rubrics for Translation Assessment: The Case of the National Translator Accreditation Exam in Norway

    As an integral part of translator education, assessment has been addressed in many publications (e.g., Way 2008; Kelly 2014). In higher education in general, there has been a trend in recent years to move from summative to performative assessment. However, this has not yet been discussed to a large extent in the literature on translator education.  The aim of this paper is to describe the transposition from an error-based (summative) to a criteria-based (performative) assessment system using rubrics at the National Translator Accreditation Exam (NTAE) in Norway. Due to a lack of training programs, the NTAE faces particular challenges when it comes to candidate qualifications and thus the assessment itself. We discuss the pros and cons of error-based and criteria-based translation quality assessment models, also regarding often-cited translation competence models and present a first draft of a criteria-based assessment model to be tested in the fall semester of 2019. We highlight the applicability of rubrics as both assessment tool as well as innovative teaching tool (e.g., providing feedback to support the learning process) not only for the NTAE, but for assessment in translator education in general.  

    Reference:  

    Hegrenæs, C.F. & Simonnæs, I. (2020). Using Rubrics for Translation Assessment: The Case of the National Translator Accreditation Exam in Norway. Translatologia 2020, 1-22. 

  • Teaching Specialized Translation: Curriculum design of an online master course in legal translation

    Teaching Specialized Translation: Curriculum design of an online master course in legal translation

    In times of the Covid-19 pandemic, the use of online platforms for teaching purposes accelerated, and remote learning and teaching gained ground in the field of Translation & Interpreting Studies (TIS). In this paper, we discuss the curriculum design of JurDist, a master’s course in legal translation, which has been offered as an online course for the language combinations Norwegian – English/French/German/Spanish since 2013. We describe, in detail, today’s curriculum and discuss modifications to the teaching, implemented in the spring semester of 2021. The modifications aim at improving the students’ performance in accordance with current research in translation theory (i.e., translation competence development) and in line with current approaches to learning and teaching (e.g., taxonomies describing different levels and kinds of understanding). Consequently, the curriculum design and the modified approach to teaching aim at enhancing the students’ professional skills in the field of legal translation. Although this teaching approach is applicable to both online teaching and the physical classroom, we describe its implementation in an online teaching environment only. Online teaching in all its facets has come to stay, also within TIS. We contribute to this development with our experience in teaching specialized translation online since 2013, which predates the recent pandemic.  

    Reference: 

    Hegrenæs, C.F., Roald, J., Sandvei, B., & Simonnæs, I. (2022). Teaching Specialized Translation: Curriculum design of an online master course in legal translation. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 9, xx-xx. 

  • Fostering Complex Understandings of International Business Collaborations in the Higher Education Classroom

    Fostering Complex Understandings of International Business Collaborations in the Higher Education Classroom

    The study investigates the learning outcomes from the use of a case study in three culturally diverse classrooms in business studies in higher education in Norway. The case study is based on data from a shipbuilding project in South Korea where the Norwegian Navy had a logistic vessel built. The present Norwegian Navy project manager described the collaboration between the Norwegian Royal Navy personnel and the South Korean shipyard personnel as ‘the world championship in misunderstanding’.  

    By removing the focus from the essentialist view that misunderstandings on intercultural collaborations must be due to cultural differences, we provided the learners with a space in which to consider other interpretations, making more explicit the various communities to which an individual belongs. The extent to which the classroom session delivered on its aim of fostering a more complex understanding of international business collaborations is assessed based on learners’ reflection notes and classroom discussions. 

    Reference:

    Rygg, K., Rice, P., Løhre, A. L. (2021). Fostering Complex Understandings of International Business Collaborations in the Higher Education Classroom. Journal of Praxis in Higher Education 3(2), 128-152.  

  • Intercultural Training: Learn to avoid treading on other people’s toes or walking in the other person's shoes

    Intercultural Training: Learn to avoid treading on other people’s toes or walking in the other person's shoes

    This study raises the question of whether the traditional approach in intercultural training focusing on knowledge to avoid threading on other people’s toes is sufficient in order to prepare for dynamic and psychologically demanding multicultural environments. Inspired by the concept of mentalizing from the psycho-therapeutic method called Mentalization-based treatment, training that encourages imaginatively “seeing the other from the inside and oneself from the outside”, that is, trying to walk in other people’s shoes, is suggested as better able to prepare for complex intercultural realities.  

    Reference:

    Rygg, K. (2014). Intercultural Training: Learn to avoid treading on other people’s toes or walking in the other person's shoes. FLEKS- Scandinavian Journal of Intercultural Theory and Practice, volume 1