Abstract:

It is a known issue that English is the official language in the field of the engineering. However, is reasonable that each country teaches Engineering degree in their mother tongue. Tricky and novel topics comprise these studies and understanding the lectures is already hard enough. Therefore, we aim that English must be a skill to reinforce in engineering degrees but by means of tools other than bilingual lectures. We propose some techniques in order to promote the writing, reading and listening skills. This paper is focused on Computer Engineering degree, and the experiment was carried out in a subject called “Computer design techniques”. In this module students are taught to design digital circuits related to Computer Architecture targeting to FPGA by means hardware description language. Many technical documentation is required to design and program. Reading is the easiest skill to work since all the technical documentation is provided in English: bibliography, reference manuals, datasheet and so on. Writing skill is reinforced advising the students to comment the software programs writing in English. Commenting a code is a mandatory requirement in the subject and making the extra effort to write them in English, was awarded with a better mark. Finally, our main proposal, how to work the listening skill without teach in English. We have created some video-tutorials where the same lecturer explains the same lessons taught along the term. The most innovative feature for these video-tutorials is that they have subtitles in English. Subtitles offers the student a best understanding and achieve they relate the read technical words in the documentation with their pronunciation. The students are recommended to watch the video-tutorial in order to hear the pronunciation of the new technical words learnt along the lesson. Also, video-tutorials are useful when some student miss a class or need additional explanations to understand some topic. The professor cannot dedicate much time explaining the same contents once and once again during a face to face class. But at home, the students may watch the lecture as times as they want and even, the video may be played slowly. In this way, the listening skill is worked also at the same time they learn the lesson and how to pronounce the new technical words. A survey was filled up by the student at the end of the term. Questions such as what were their opinion about the video-tutorials, either about contents and the subtitles, or about the effort to write comments in English, were included. Most of them liked the video-tutorial and said the subtitles were helpful to understand the topics. Some students recognised that they only have watched the video-tutorials to learn how pronounce the new technical words.

Keywords:

CLIL, English, Listening, Engineering, Technical words.