Abstract:

A 21st century engineer has a set of elaborate professional functions based on the system of knowledge and skills obtained at university. However, the gap between an ideal image of an engineer and the real level of engineer’s knowledge and skills is remarkable. One of the most problematic aspects of training a modern engineer in Russia is poor knowledge of a foreign language for specific purposes (ESP) due to long isolation and weak traditions of teaching language at school level. As a result, it is difficult for technical students to master a foreign language for specific purposes, as they do not have fluency in English for general purposes. Still the students need to master English at rather high level to be able to solve professional tasks.

Our solution is in intensification of foreign language studies for specific purposes by means of completing interdisciplinary assignments.

Such assignments show the role of the language in engineer profession motivating its study and trains language skills when fulfilling professional task. The assignments we offered engaged students into production process or imitated real engineering tasks. The team of content and English language teachers created the assignments. The teamwork helped content and English language teachers to accumulate their professional experience in different fields of knowledge. We examined the content of foreign languages, technical disciplines, and mathematics where the interdisciplinary connections are not so trivial.

The paper aims to identify the potential in the development of professional functions of an engineer by interdisciplinary assignments; to discuss assignments’ effectiveness in training engineers for high-tech production.

Interdisciplinary tasks’ signs were deduced from the literature analysis. The effectiveness of the interdisciplinary tasks was tested in a pedagogical experiment. Academic staff and students of the Power engineering, Mathematics and Aerospace departments took part in experiment. The interdisciplinary assignments were prepared by highly qualified university teachers of these departments and were tried in 2019. The scale of the integrated knowledge and skills was designed to measure the quality of the results. The system of control and assessment tools developed by the authors was used.

The results of the pedagogical experiment showed the growth of the integrated skills by comparison with the results in the control groups and proved the effectiveness of the interdisciplinary tasks in engineering training.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinary task, engineers’ training, interdisciplinary communication, English for Specific Purposes, university students.