English Teacher’s Classroom Language – An Empowering Tool For Engineering Students

Abstract

The aim of the research is to identify the characteristics of the English teacher’s classroom language likely to encourage engineering students to improve their knowledge of English and endow them with a currently highly empowering tool – prerequisite for their multicultural professional mobility. The goal of an English teacher is to develop communication competences and implement a type of language that will better fit into the engineering students’ framework of professional needs and assist them in improving not only their linguistic social and emotional skills but also raise the quality of instruction in technical higher education. The research is a comparative study between two Romanian technical universities: University Politehnica of Bucharest and University Politehnica of Timisoara and was conducted on 234 engineering students studying electronics, mechanics and electrical engineering, between 2014-2016. A questionnaire was devised and students had to mention and identify their English teacher’s language characteristics likely to endow them with linguistic skills and ensure linguistic performance. Hence, the type of language to be used by the English teacher in technical higher education must be accessible, scientific/academic, correct/ fluent and accurate/expressive and specialized, flexible and adapted to students’ different levels of knowledge.