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Re: If you were asked to design a course for undergrad engineering students...

Subject: Re: If you were asked to design a course for undergrad engineering students...
From: "Sandy Harris" <sandyinchina -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 08:41:00 +0800

Tissa Salter <tissa55 -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

... I teach Technical Communication, a generalist
sophomore/junior level required English class.

My first concern would be whether your Arab students have
good enough English for that. If they're below about IELTS
band 6 [http://www.ielts.org/default.aspx] or whatever the
TOEFL equivalent is, then no matter what you do, your
course is going to be mainly ESL (English as a Second
Language).

If that's the case, then your design methods should largely
come out of the ESP (English for Specific Purposes)
style of English corse development.

The better their English is, the more your course can
look like what you'd teach in Texas.

Issue: It has been mentioned by some engineering faculty that this
class should be tailored to separate the students and teach
industry-specific documentation to each of the four engineering
specialties.

Without biasing your opinion, I would like to know how you would teach
technical communication to this student body if you could design the
course.

I'd start from "what are they going to do with these skills?". Will their
jobs involve writing manuals, etc. in English? Or just providing SME
input to writers? Or perhaps marketing in English? Or will they only
need to read English manuals well?

Would you design a course to serve as a broad overview that
yields the core competencies the students will need in most any field,
or would you support an industry-specific approach? Why?

Broad overview, but using exercises and case studies drawn from the
specific disciplines.

--
Sandy Harris
Quanzhou, Fujian, China
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References:
If you were asked to design a course for undergrad engineering students...: From: Tissa Salter

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