EFL Tech - France a Site for Teachers of English ( as a Foreign Language) for  Engineering

 
 PART III - CLASS ACTIVITES

 In this part, you will find a few suggestions for WRITTEN and also for ORAL class activities as well as a few tips for ADVANCED STUDENTS.
 
 
 
 Most of the activities that are suggested are simulations of actual engineering work.But they also include :
     hosting,
     introducing production plant/company,
     meetings and negotiations,
     trade fairs,
     demonstrating a product,
     giving technical presentations.
 
 

WRITTEN WORK
 

     It mainly consists in writing  reports, summaries, technical descriptions, instructions for use, describing processes, summarising  technical articles in English into L1.

 
WRITING SPECIFICATION SHEETS

    The aim is to extract precise technical data from a document and select the most relevant material. The sheet itself can be written either in English or in the sudents' L1. You  start with an extract from a catalogue describing a product and hand out a specification sheet to be filled in.
    Here is a (very) simple example based on a short text:
"Health Ring.
A battery-powered light-emitting diode and wireless transmitter, wrapped around the ring finger, may one day monitor patient vital signs. Here's how:
The LED emits light into the finger; a photo diode captures light reflected back from the blood. Because blood vessels expand when the heart beats, the amount of reflected light corresponds to the pulse rate.
Embedded circuitry "cleans" and amplifies the signals, which are transmitted to a remote receiver. Rhythm and shape of the pulse rate, processed on a home computer and available to doctors via Internet, indicate cardiac condition.
Elizabeth Thomson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Room 5-111, 77 Massachusetts Ave.,  (etc...)"
(The text comes together with a drawing representing the ring and indicating the position of the batteries, circuitry, radio transmitter and LEDs)
(Reproduced from Design News, November 1997, page 34)

The students would  have to fill in the following entries:
Name of the product - Type of product - Country - Manufacturer/ Designer  - Address - Whom it concerns - Uses - System description - Main advantages.
 
    Some other activities can be found in the Contents of the Databank section of this site, particularly a contribution about the use of Legos to teach English for mechanical engineering.
 

ORAL WORK

    While a lot of material has been published under the form of case studies, role-plays and simulation of business meetings, the EST teacher often lacks such documents which could be useful in classes of technicians or future engineers. It is true that there exists a (limited but sufficient) number of documents for written exercises but they are very rare for oral work. This means you will have to devise most of them yourself!

VISUALS.

    Since students should be able to read formulae, describe graphs, tables, plans, sets-ups, processes, etc, they can be trained to do so using visuals.
    Each student is given a (different) visual and he is allowed a few seconds / minutes to look at it and prepare himself. The students, in turn, describe their visuals to the rest of the class who has to draw / reproduce the visual.(They can ask for clarification.) Of course, the visual has to be simple and sketchy enough to be easily described and reproduced. You can, if necessary, provide few key words beforehand.
    The visuals can represent : a mathematical formula, a graph, a flowchart, a set-up, a (simple) process, a plant, a workshop, a procedure, etc. You will find most of these things in your students' textbooks.

ORAL PRESENTATIONS.

    A presentation of the students' work experience for instance in their industrial training periods. Most of the time, the students are used to doing it with their subject teacher(s) : the same can be done in English, even if it can be rather simplified, and the teacher may provide some structures or words in advance.

    Another way is to hand out a student a document (article or visual) about a new product, for instance a catalogue of electronic gadgets or an article from the technology section of a magazine. Each student will read the article at home, later he can ask the teacher for clarification. Then he will prepare an OHP transparency reproducing the info ha wants to convey, as well as his notes. During the presentation, the teacher will pay attention not only to the language that is being used but also to the professional quality. Keep some time at the end for questions.

    Another suggestion : the Open University's distance learning programs (See Part I - Videos & Media). First of all they are remarkably well done and interesting. Our colleague even adds : "Any program that can take non-Euclidean geometry or Multiple Integrals in Mechanics and make it accessible as well as INTERESTING deserves special merit! " The students have found them interesting for listening, specialized vocabulary, and an insight into Anglo-Saxon teaching methods. They often like seeing these lectures twice, once while working on a worksheet (comprehension questions or vocabulary) , frequent stopping, etc. and then once straight through.
 
    One contributor adds that "students also enjoy summarising short technical newspaper or magazine items orally from their mother tongue to English." - the most difficult (technical) words provided by the teacher.

     You may also find yourself in a situation in which the level of English that students have when they leave secondary schools is not very high. So the instructor is obliged to teach general English (using general English textbooks) to get the students to a high enough level to be able to deal with specialist material.
    Thus a contributor advises to continue "to teach general English but each lesson I asked them to tell me about what they had been doing or learning about in their engineering classes. They explained processes to me and so on. This was done using quite basic English but gave them important practice at describing without having all of the technical terms. Then I suggested that each student should bring to class a few specialist words each week and we spent time discussing them, they used diagrams to explain to me and all of the students took notes."
 

ADVANCED STUDENTS

    With advanced students, the general English side of the teaching will become less time-consuming and more time can be devoted to field-specific activities, very much akin to those native speakers are used to practising.

The following resources have been mentioned :

1. The Association for Teachers of Technical Writing with its website at http://english.ttu.edu/ATTW/.
It is recommended that teachers of Eglish for engineering have contact with the Association. The Association's journal, Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ), is useful, but very specialised. A contributor's favourite text is a Canadian one by Cecilia Mavrow called Communicating in Engineering.

2. An engineering writing site: http://www.ecf.toronto.edu/~writing/

3. Books:
- John Harris's Teaching Technical Writing: A Pragmatic Approach (available through the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing).
- Useful background reading for anyone in the field is Dorothy Winsor's Writing Like an Engineer, an excellent and accessible case study of engineering students at GMI.
- Weissberg and Buker's Writing Up Research. It's quite comprehensive and useful for engineering students who need to know how to organise and write parts of a technical report.