Abstract:

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is a student-centred method in which students are often called to have an active role in their learning process. CLIL has a dual focus on both the study of a subject domain in a foreign language and the development of the students’ linguistic skills and competence in a specialized area of their interest. Teaching Engineering through a CLIL approach thus requires innovative instructional design strategies to teach and learn content and language forms and functions simultaneously while keeping learning relevant and authentic through a task-based approach. Commonly, both language and subject lecturers collaborate on the design of such strategies in order to facilitate the teaching-learning process, working in tandem, planning lessons jointly or using other collaborative strategies envisaged to support learners.

For engineering students, proficiency in English is key, as in a globalised world where technology adopts English as the reference language, the majority of students feel that they need to improve their communication skills in such domains. For engineering, being able to use the subject specific terms to explain and demonstrate in their mother tongue and a foreign language is a basic competence that needs to be mastered.

Local experience shows that the CLIL approach has relevance in Higher Education (HE) engineering courses as an alternative to teaching English for Specific Purposes, as this approach integrates the foreign language learning into concrete Engineering tasks for learning and thus learning a foreign language (English) becomes a means rather than an end in itself. Furthermore, there is one aspect of specialised language learning that is of particular relevance: the terms used in a specialised area of knowledge are the most important means to access and acquire knowledge and competences, which will then be further developed. Thus, the acquisition and use of a specific terminology corpus related to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and other engineering areas is a key concern in the CLIL approach.

Silva and Albuquerque (2014) argue that terminology appears as the link between the two dimensions of CLIL: knowledge and competences (concepts and know-how) and language (discourse on the knowledge). Together, these dimensions can result in non-ambiguous and efficient communication about specialised knowledge since there is no term (language) without a concept (knowledge). Therefore, one of the aims of terminology is to organise, structure and classify discourse and knowledge (Morgado et al., 2014).

As knowledge can be organized by both students and lecturers as they construct their own competences in a specific domain, it was the aim of the current study to have both students and the two teachers involved co-construct a bilingual glossary of terms for engineering design technologies as part of their learning. Following a full semester using a CLIL approach in 3D Modelling and 3D Printing, students were invited to construct their own personal glossary about the subject with the aim of contributing to a full class glossary of terms guided by both the foreign language and the specialist lecturers.

As a result, a bilingual glossary of terms on 3D Modelling and 3D Printing for engineering design was created and made available for forthcoming students to use in subsequent school years and can be exhibited as an output of a CLIL approach.

Keywords:

CLIL, ESP, Technology, Glossary of terms.