Abstract:

In many universities and colleges across the world, undergraduate Engineering classes are taught in a language which is not the native tongue of many of the students, in most cases this language is English. One unique case exists in Israel where over 20% of the population speaks Arabic as a native language while almost all academic studies are conducted in Hebrew (those that aren't are in English, not Arabic). The situation is even worse in the case of students who come from East Jerusalem to study in Israel. Those students do not study any Hebrew lessons at school, and they also have a different matriculation system than the one used in Israel. This may pose a problem for talented students who need to struggle not only with the complexity of studying Engineering but also with a language that they do not use on a daily basis, or at all, prior to their academic studies. In this paper, the author inspects the differences between students' achievements in Undergraduate Engineering studies in the past 10 years in three different disciplines: Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Software Engineering. The database contains 1520 students in an academic college of engineering, 255 of which are not native Hebrew speakers. The work inspects how these students cope with different courses and compares the more linguistic courses to the more graphic/ mathematic courses and the introductory courses to the more advanced courses to find where the language posed a bigger problem. Analysing the data shows that a change conducted by the college before the academic year that started on October 2017 increased the potential of non-Hebrew speakers to succeed and that there are significant differences between students who study Electrical Engineering and those who study Mechanical Engineering or Software Engineering. The analysis also indicates that courses with more graphic content (e.g., electronic circuits) are, not surprisingly, easier for the students than courses that are more verbal (e.g., signal processing). Finally, the author suggests ways to make engineering education more accessible by analyzing the different courses' statistics.

Keywords:

Foreign languages, Engineering Education, Equity.