LANGUAGE AS AN ENGINEERING LEARNING TOOL: INTEGRATION OF LANGUAGE AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION FOR FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS TO IMPROVE BOTH TECHNICAL LEARNING OUTCOMES AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS

Abstract

Vantage College (VC) at UBC offers innovative specialized first-year programs for international students that integrate core content courses with complementary language education to allow participants to hone their communication skills while meeting their regular academic requirements. In the Applied Science stream of VC, each engineering course is linked to a complementary language course and the instructors collaborate closely. In this paper, three examples of writing tasks are presented that deal with the intersection of language training and technical engineering content, all in the context of writing lab reports for two engineering chemistry courses. A description of each task is provided, and the benefits to students both in terms of improved communication skills and enhanced understanding of technical content is provided from the perspective of language and engineering instructors, as well as from students based on feedback on each activity collected through surveys. The integrated approach was found to be quite effective in improving learning outcomes.