教學大綱 Syllabus

Description of Assignments

• Participation （30%）:  Based on contribution to classroom discussion and Facebook engagement. Discussion in class will enhance your ability to engage text, ask questions, listen and explore new perspectives while articulating your own. Also, a Facebook group or Moodle platform will be utilized in this course as a means of digital conversation and sharing. You will be required to share one item on the group page of relevancy to course material during the semester, and respond to two of your classmate’s posting at some point in the semester. Facebook discussion will be treated as an extension of class discussion.  
• Presentation and Leading Discussion (10%)

Each week, students will finish assignments and take turns leading group discussions (please prepare two questions for group discussions), followed by the instructor’s comments and further discussions. This is an exercise to sharpen your presentation skills and ability to handle the responses of a multicultural audience.

• Cultural Self-Analysis Essay (10%)

This assignment is a 5-6-page double-spaced paper on how your culture(s) affects your communication. This paper is designed to allow you an opportunity to examine how your own cultural and social identities affect you and your communication behavior. Using course concepts and readings, you will be required to explain how your own cultural, social, and personal beliefs, values, and norms affect the ways you communicate with others. Your paper will be evaluated based on insightfulness and application of course concepts.

• Cross-Cultural Interview Reflection (10%)

This assignment compliments the self-analysis essay, requiring you to select a person that is of a different cultural background than yourself and interview them to learn about these differences and how they affect communication styles. You should create an open-ended questionnaire (1 page) and give it to your interviewee prior to the interview. Upon completion of the interview, a 4-5- page reflection should be written mirroring some of the same topics addressed in your own self-analysis essay such as values, behaviors, and communication patterns with the addition of a section on how this person’s cultural norms compare with your own.

• Critical Media Project (10%)

In this paper, you do either a quantitative (mini) content analysis of media (e.g. using a coding sheet to count frequencies of appearances of people of different diverse groups in a type of media), or a rhetorical analysis of a single mediated text. Regardless of your approach, your summary paper (3-4 pp) should include critical terms discussed in the class.  

• Final Project (30%)

50. Students will discuss in class with the instructor to conduct a (multi-media) story project. The project will be a group project of 4 people and the group should consist of Chinese-speaking students and non-Chinese speaking students in order to facilitate the translation.  This semester’s field site will be Maokong, Taipei. Each group will select a theme (e.g. tea culture, food culture, your favorite hiking experience, local religion) to report the local culture to their target audience (international visitors). During the semester, you will have plenty of time to conduct fieldwork (e.g. participation observations, interviews the local farmers, restaurant owners, cultural workers and so forth).  At the end of the semester, each group should produce an article of 4,000-5000 words and a video (5 minutes minimum). Production of excellent quality would have the opportunity to be published. More details will be announced in class.

• Extra Credit (Up to 10% of total grade): For extra credit, you may attend any out-of-class presentation or engage in an intercultural experience and write a brief report on it (depending on the quality of the report, you may earn 1-5 points for each report). I especially encourage out-of-class experiences tha include civic engagement. Your report must tie the experience explicity lto class concepts. I will try to post ideas and events as we go along.

• LATE work may be penalized 10% for each class day late.

• All papers will be turned in through MOODLE basically. If MOODLE does not function well, submit by email to yclin104@nccu.edu.tw.