A NEW STRUCTURE AND TEACHING APPROACH BASED ON PROFESSIONAL NEEDS FOR THE UNDERGRADUATE COURSE ‘ENGLISH FOR ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING’, A CASE STUDY

Abstract

This paper proposes a new combination of contents and a teaching approach for the ‘English for Electrical Engineering’ undergraduate course. This proposition targets the current and future needs of an electrical engineer, focused on reading, comprehension, and writing, and slightly touches upon speaking and listening as well. The structure of the course is based on in-class delivery of the content in such a way that it maximally attracts the participation and contribution of students. For reading and comprehension, a wide variety of scientific and technical texts are used including textbooks, laboratory instruction manuals, user manuals, catalogues, brochures, and also datasheets. The texts are chosen to cover various subspecialties within the electrical engineering discipline. Captured from the texts discussed in the class, a rich vocabulary is gradually formed comprising numerous word clusters. Feedback of the students on the content and delivery of the course was collected through a questionnaire in three parts. According to the evaluation results, around 87% of the students participated in the class were satisfied with the fulfillment of their English language needs and expectations through the proposed course structure and content, as well as the teaching approach.

Keywords

• course design electrical engineering students content generation english language needs academic purposes language skills