Proc. 2017 Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA17) Conf.
Integration of English Language Modules into the Introduction
to Engineering Design Course in the Vantage College 1st Year
Engineering Program at the University of British Columbia
Saloome Motavas, Liet Hellwig, and Vladan Prodanovic
University of British Columbia
Vladan.Prodanovic@ubc.ca
Abstract – Vantage College at the University of British
Columbia (UBC) offers a unique undergraduate first-year
program to international students, built around the
integration of English language education with academic
degree-focused courses. The particular emphasis of this
program is on creating an effective learning environment
for students with varying levels of English language
proficiency and diverse cultural backgrounds. In the
engineering design course, which demands a high level of
student engagement and collaboration, this Academic
English support in an adjunct course is tailored towards
the improvement of presentation skills, verbal and written
literacy, and group work. This paper provides an
overview of the partnership between the engineering
design course and its linked language-enrichment course.
Some of the language-based practices are described and
their successes are evaluated based on observations and
student feedback through a survey. The overall student
response on the effectiveness of language activities is
found to be positive and oral presentation exercises are
considered to be particularly helpful in improving the
students’ experience in the design course.
Keywords: Engineering Design, English Language
Education, International Students, First-Year Engineering
Curriculum, Communication, Student Engagement,
English for Academic Purposes, CLIL
1. INTRODUCTION
A lack of English language proficiency is known to be
one, if not the greatest, barrier experienced by
international students [1-3]. Language difficulties not
only affect international students’ academic performance,
but also often hinder the interactions and engagement
with their peers. Linguistic challenges may be especially
distressing for international students with high academic
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achievement in their home countries, and can, in turn,
negatively impact their psychological adjustment.
With the growing demand for globalization and
international education [4], significant effort has been
made in attracting international students to engineering
programs in Canadian universities. Many of these
international students, however, face academic difficulties
due to language and cultural barriers, in spite of their
strong technical background. It has been shown that
international students particularly face challenges in
courses with emphasis on conversational English and
classroom participation [5]. Hence, one would expect that
the negative impact of linguistic gaps on the performance
of engineering students would become further
pronounced in engineering design and project courses,
where student engagement and collaboration, group work,
oral presentations, writing reports, and class discussions
are key elements of the course.
The mandate of the Vantage College is to assist
international students with strong academic competencies
in discipline specific curriculum but insufficient English
language capability to adapt to required university-level
instruction standards at UBC. This is addressed by
providing 11 months of intensive first-year discipline
specific instruction (in Arts, Science, Engineering and
Management) combined with English language support in
the Academic English Program. Students who
successfully complete the Vantage College program
qualify for a second year standing in their respective
faculties at UBC.
Vantage College Engineering Stream is a fully
integrated first-year engineering program which is
comprised of relevant mathematics, physics, chemistry,
and introduction to programming courses as required for
accredited engineering programs. These courses are all
tied with additional English language, content based
support. In addition, students are required to complete 6
credits of English language courses, an engineering
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Proc. 2017 Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA17) Conf.
communication course and introduction to engineering
design.
Our experience shows that international students may
have significant difficulties grasping the engineering
design terminology, which may, in turn, significantly
affect their ability to comprehend the materials covered in
these courses. Although several methods and approaches
have been implemented in North American universities to
help the international students overcome language and
cultural barriers [6, 7], no previous work, to our
knowledge, has specifically addressed the obstacles faced
by first-year international students in engineering design
courses.
This paper provides an outline of a pilot project for
integrating Academic English instruction with a first-year
engineering design course. In this approach, in addition to
attending the course lectures and tutorials, students
participate in a series of language-based modules, closely
linked to the design course topics, but aimed at
developing their communication skills and group
interaction. In the following sections of this paper, the
nature of the language-focused modules, examples of
activities and practices, and their model of delivery are
presented. The impacts of these integrated learning
activities on the performance of students in the design
course are discussed and a summary of the results is
presented.
2. METHODOLOGY
Sustainability and Engineering Design, VANT150, is
a first-year course with focus on the introduction of
principles of engineering design, project based learning,
and sustainable engineering practices. Learning outcomes
for this course include general understanding of
engineering systems and their interaction with emerging
global issues, understanding of communication paths
between stakeholders, and application of the engineering
design process, such as the transition from the
identification of the problem statement, through different
stages of conceptual to final design, to well-defined
engineering design problems. Most of the work is carried
out by student design teams in the form of group
assignments and mini projects. The inherent language
obstacles to reaching the learning outcomes are addressed
by providing additional language instruction in the
corresponding English for Academic Purposes (or EAP)
course.
The EAP courses at Vantage College, UBC, are
designed to run parallel with their disciplinary content
courses. Through such adjunct courses, this EAP
instruction provides the linguistic support needed for
international students to deal satisfactorily with the creditbearing programs of their specialization [8]. Since the
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EAP teaching is based on Systemic Functional Linguistic
(SFL) principles, the communication of meaning is
central. This implies that the teaching focuses on helping
the students to express themselves appropriately and
accurately in and for academic tasks (which is very
different, for instance, from the old-fashioned and
traditional teaching that focuses on the correct forms of
grammar at the expense of meaning and context).
Running concurrently, the EAP adjunct courses and their
disciplinary counterparts are closely connected, with, for
instance, EAP instructors attending content courses and
vice versa. In this particular case, the engineeringlanguage tandem courses consist of the Engineering
Design course at UBC, with a one-hour lecture and a onehour tutorial every week, and a weekly, one-hour adjunct
course in EAP, called VANT140. Sections in the English
classes are relatively small, with a maximum of 25
students, which facilitates pair work or group work to
practice a given skill.
3. LEARNING ACTIVITIES
For the English classes the entire engineering cohort is
divided into 4 relatively small sections of 20 to 25
students each. The EAP learning activities always aim to
incorporate active learning. Tasks, whether in-class or
out-of-class, are varied and develop or reinforce skills
required in the Engineering Design course. A brief
description of some learning activities is given below.
The described learning activities which, upon observation
of student success in the previous year, take priority in
this pilot project include: Oral Presentation Practices;
English Cause-Effect Practices; Technical Vocabulary
Practices, Short Reading Practices and; Academic
Vocabulary Practices.
3.1 Oral presentation practices
One of the aspects of an engineer’s career, of which
most international students seem to be unaware, is the
frequent need for oral presentations. Considering that
international students usually lack the fluency and
confidence to speak about engineering topics, the EAP
course has incorporated regular oral practice. Talking in
pairs or small groups was practiced in theVANT140
weekly sessions. One type of oral practice in English was
closely related to an assignment in the content course,
dealing with an engineering failure. For the Engineering
Design course, an example of this topic was chosen and
researched by small groups and described in writing, but
it was also adapted for the EAP assignment. The same
engineering failure case – be it the Titanic, the
Hindenburg, the Samsung phone or any other instance
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chosen – was first practiced in the EAP class through
small group presentations. Next, each individual student
had to prepare an oral presentation of the failed project in
a video clip, which had to follow a number of prescribed
stages (for example, the need for the engineering project,
the approach, the design weaknesses, the consequences of
the mistakes and the lessons learned). This videorecorded presentation was evaluated, not for the content
of the engineering project, but for aspects of oral
performance. The rubrics utilized were the stages of the
presentation, clarity of description, rapport with the
listener, comprehensibility (such as pronunciation,
intonation, word stress, pace and tempo) and adherence to
assignment instructions.
3.2 English cause-effect practices
One quintessential function in Academic English
relates to the expression of cause and effect. LowBeginner level English teaches the simple conjunction
“because” followed by a clause containing the cause. In
order to expand on this, students need to learn and use not
only other conjunctions with clauses, such as “since” and
“as”, but also other expressions. These alternatives
include prepositions followed by noun phrases with
causes, such as “because of”, “due to” “owing to”, “as a
result of” or “on account of”. They also include sentence
connectors of effect, such as “therefore”, “consequently”,
“as a result”, “thus” and “hence”. Students also need to
expand their knowledge of cause-effect verbs, for
instance, “to cause”, “to bring about”, “to contribute to”
or “to account for”. This entails some understanding,
practice and use of opposite meanings, so that they can
distinguish between “to cause” versus “to be caused by”;
or between “to result in” versus “to result from”. To
practice this cause-effect function, a short text given at
the beginning of class dealt with some devices in a car
that can distract the driver and therefore contribute to a
traffic accident (for example, cell phones or GPS
navigation systems). First, groups of students had to come
up with as many cause-effect expressions as possible, and
then classify them according to their grammatical form.
Next, they wrote their expressions on the board in
different grammatical categories. Corrections were then
made with the whole class guided by the teacher. Finally,
students could paraphrase parts of the text using a variety
of cause-effect expressions.
but also one of the lecturers requested to incorporate
words for shapes in the EAP course, after she had
discovered during an exam that many students could not
answer the test item that contained the word “cylindrical”.
The EAP lecturer then designed a couple of lessons to
cover this semantic field, the first lesson containing 1dimensional and 2-dimensional shapes (e.g. “diagonal”,
“oval”, “diamond-shaped”, “hexagon”, “crescent”), and
the later lesson teaching 3-dimensional shapes (e.g.
“cone”, “cylindrical”, “hemisphere”, “tetrahedron”,
“wedge”). To check which words were familiar and
which were not, a simple exercise was done in class. Each
student was given a large sheet of paper to draw the shape
that the instructor dictated, with a total of about 30 words.
Then students could consult with each other for peer help,
after which the instructor dealt with the new words. The
structure of this lesson was the same for the 1- or 2dimensional words, as for the 3-dimensional words. To
make sure that the vocabulary was reinforced, the
students had to show in a quiz that they remembered all
the shapes, for instance, by describing the flags of 4
countries (Greece, Tanzania, Malaysia and Tunisia).
3.4 Short readings
The general theme of sustainability and renewable
energy in the Engineering Design course was integrated
in the EAP course in order to give the students much
needed skills practice, such as reading the difficult genre
of academic writing. It became clear that they even
needed extra practice with non-academic, and therefore
more accessible genres of reading and speaking. For this
purpose, some short articles about different experiments
and projects related to alternative energy were selected
for class use. A small number of popular scientific articles
was distributed in class using the so-called jigsaw
technique, whereby a group of students received the same
article and, after reading it, had to discuss its contents.
Next, everyone was assigned a new group of different
peers all with different articles and, in turn, had to give
the new group members a short, oral presentation about
the content just read. This exercise offered the practice of
talking in a small group, rather than the more daunting
and nerve-wrecking task of addressing a much larger
audience. Presenting students received immediate
feedback from either the EAP or the Engineering
instructor, both of whom rotated through the class.
3.3 Words for shapes (sub-technical vocabulary)
3.5. Academic vocabulary
The lessons on the vocabulary for shapes were
organized on the basis of two experiences. Fist of all, it
was clear that many international students had missed
some references to shapes during an engineering design
lecture about drawing (“isometric”, “dash-dot-dot line”);
Engineering students need to develop the skills to
acquire any necessary vocabulary, be it of the general, the
highly technical or the sub-technical type. When given a
textbook chapter on the engineering profession, many of
our international students showed a lack of reading
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Proc. 2017 Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA17) Conf.
comprehension based on their unfamiliarity with
frequently occurring academic words. In order to devise
an assignment for the students to learn specialized
vocabulary, unknown words were extracted from their
textbook readings. All these words belonged to the socalled Academic Word List (or AWL). Each word was
assigned to one student, who had to investigate it with the
aid of dictionaries and record its 12 different aspects,
such as its meaning, pronunciation, part of speech, and
use in an example sentence. After each student’s
information about a given vocabulary item was revised
and corrected, the words with their 12 aspects were then
collected for the creation of a collaborative class wiki.
This task stressed the importance of adequate dictionary
skills and a raised awareness level of a particular word’s
collocation patterns. Once the collaborative wiki was
finalized, a written test was given to make sure that the
students had learned all these AWL items and could use
them in a variety of contexts.
engineering design course, with some expressing special
appreciation for small-group presentations, which gave
them a chance to exercise and improve their skills in an
intimate setting.
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
4.1 Student Feedback
An anonymous course exit survey was conducted at
the end of the second term to obtain students’ feedback
on the learning activities performed during the languagebased tutorials and seek their input on potential
improvements for the future. As part of this survey,
students were asked to what extent they agreed with the
effectiveness of the language-based practices outlined in
the previous section.
The results (collected from 53 out of 80 students) are
demonstrated in Figure 1. The green, red, and blue colors
indicate the percentage of students who agree (or
positive), neither agree nor disagree (or neutral), and
disagree (or negative) with the helpfulness of languagebased activities, respectively. For all 5 learning activities,
more than half of the students agreed that the EAP
practice had been effective in improving their
performance in the design course. Considering that this
was the pilot year for such partnership between the design
and language course, these results are very promising.
Also very encouraging is the fact that only a small
percentage of students (4% - 8%) disagreed with the
benefit of such practices.
Based on this survey, it was found that students
particularly appreciated the oral presentation practices.
This was reflected in the collected data (more than 70% in
agreement), as well as in the comments provided by the
students in the survey. Most students indicated that they
greatly benefited from the presentation practices to better
prepare for oral presentation assignments of the
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University of Toronto; June 4 – 7, 2017
Fig. 1. Student Rating of Effectiveness of Language
Activities
Several students also commented on how other
English-based activities helped them with specific design
course assignments. For instance, short reading practice
was mentioned to be helpful in reading and understanding
sustainability-related articles, while vocabulary and
grammar exercises were indicated to improve the quality
of their writing for creating posters.
In the “suggestions for improvement” section of the
survey, many students expressed the need for more oral
presentation exercises during language tutorials, and
some suggested practices that involve presenting to the
whole class, in order to simulate the same presentation
atmosphere as in the actual oral presentation of the design
course. Some students also asked for adding more
modules on engineering vocabulary and readings.
4.2 Student Performance
The students’ presentation skills were compared
during two major assignments of the design course that
involved oral presentations. The first one was an oral
presentation on alternative energy sources and the second
one was a poster presentation on sustainability. For the
majority of the students, a significant improvement was
observed in the delivery of the second set of presentations
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compared to the first one, which in our opinion, can be
attributed mainly to a series of presentation practices that
were implemented in the language tutorials between these
two design course presentations. A quantitative measure
of the improvement could not be achieved, as the setting
and nature of the two presentations were different. To
better gauge the success of our language modules,
presentations activities that run in the same setting and
are evaluated with the same rubric, will be designed for
subsequent years in order to attempt a direct comparison
of students’ presentation skills before and after the
presentation practices.
5. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
Integration of language-based modules with our firstyear engineering design course is considered to be
successful in improving the performance of international
students in the course. Students reported improvement in
their oral presentation skills, writing, and reading
comprehension as a result of these modules. Assessment
of students through different course deliverables also
confirmed the effectiveness of these practices. The
English-related activities described in this paper create a
solid foundation for designing more diverse languagebased tutorials in the future. A systematic way for
comprehensive evaluations of the effectiveness of the
practices will also be implemented. Successful integration
of academic-English instruction with engineering design
courses has global implications on teaching effectiveness
and intercultural education across all engineering
disciplines.
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