Language professionals in engineering faculty: Cross-cultural experience

Communication courses are often given low priority by engineering students and faculty alike. This is mainly because they are perceived to be, and often are, divorced from the realities of the engineering world. Credible and relevant communication courses demand the integration of language and engineering content so that the tasks reflect the sort of problem solving that students will face in real-life engineering contexts. One problem that language specialists face in designing such courses arises from the fact that they hail from a discipline very different from engineering in purpose, subject matter, and pedagogical approach. To work effectively in the different "subculture'' of engineering, they need to assimilate and attain the cultural literacy of the discipline. In our institution, the "acculturation'' process of language specialists has been helped along by the fact that they are based in the engineering school. This provides greater opportunities for assimilation into the discipline and allows the interfacing of communication skills and civil engineering to take place more effectively. This paper describes how this setup has been instrumental in providing a communication course that students perceive to be relevant and therefore an integral part of their engineering studies.