Abstract
Language teaching for engineering students needs to be engaging and adapted to the specific needs the students will meet in their future professional lives. Our experience has shown that a blended learning course design as well as student-owned learning are especially well suited for these language courses. Further, a language course strongly based on online-meetings and digital resources, is part of a global trend where universities offer an expanding range of online-courses.
In this presentation, we will describe our multidimensional teaching model, which combines three dimensions of teaching: online/face-to-face, synchronous/asynchronous and teacher-led/student-owned. A course-design that draws advantage from the potential offered by the combination of these dimensions, provides several pedagogical assets.
We will first develop the pedagogical added-values and will then illustrate how different learning/teaching activities fit in the different dimensions.
As an example, we will also present some international collaborative activities integrated in the language courses for engineers as a virtual mobility experience.
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Notes
- 1.
The department of language and communication is currently teaching courses in French, Spanish, Italian, English, German, Swedish, Japanese and Chinese, as well as courses in communication, scientific writing and rhetoric.
- 2.
When students own their learning, they know how to apply what they are learning in different contexts and take responsibility for their progress and success.
- 3.
The German students are attending a language course in Swedish, thus the overall setup is the classical” tandem”, where students assist each other in learning the other’s language.
- 4.
The trend had of course started earlier: “Aiming to merge the benefits of synchronous interactions and online flexibility in terms of time, place, or even study pace, BL is also becoming increasingly popular in higher education thanks to the progress of digital technologies” (Boelens et al. 2017, 2018; Johnson 2019; Seaman et al. 2018) [4].
- 5.
In the academic year 21/22, the University of Oxford offered 74 language courses online. https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/search#/courses?s=&areas=Languages%20and%20cultural%20studies&subjects=Ancient%20Greek,Arabic,Chinese,Classics,French,German,Greek,Italian,Japanese,Korean,Language,Latin,Portuguese,Russian,Spanish&format=1,3,6&credit=for_credit&sort=availability.
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Kirchmeyer, N., Knauff, K. (2023). Poster: Language Education for Engineering Students – A Multi-dimensional Teaching Model. In: Auer, M.E., Pachatz, W., Rüütmann, T. (eds) Learning in the Age of Digital and Green Transition. ICL 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 633. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26876-2_81
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