Addressing Written Communication Apprehension in Tax Students

• In Event: Innovative Teaching Techniques

Abstract

Both accounting and tax academics and professionals have noted the importance of communication skills to the career success of students. Further the general consensus from the academic and practitioner literature is that these communication skills are an area in which many students could use improvement. One factor that has been shown to impact the improvement and development of these skills is communication apprehension.

In this submission, we describe a pedagogical method we employed in tax classes at two universities to reduce the written communication apprehension among tax students. More specifically, we draw ideas from communications research that suggest that increased writing opportunities, the use of models and examples for study and comparison, and trying to make feedback more effective may help to reduce written communication apprehension. We implemented this suggested approach by using a series of assignments that incorporated writing components.

Results suggest that the writing apprehension reduced from the beginning of the semester to the end of the semester for native English-speaking students while writing apprehension remained unchanged for students for whom English is their second language. However, all students generally reported that the pedagogical approach we used increased their confidence in their ability to write tax-related communications.

Authors

• Timothy J Rupert, Northeastern University

• Tracy Noga, Bentley University