Abstract:

Recently, the University Internationalizing process has been considered one of the main purposes for the next development in Spanish University. Moreover, multilingual communication capability has been marked in the Engineering Education field as a competence that students must have in their curriculum. Then, different considerations may be established in relation to the way that Engineering students will have to achieve the multilingual communication capability: external idioms courses and subjects taught in foreign language. Logically, English is commonly accepted in Scientific and Engineering fields as the main international language.

The possibility to teach subjects in English Language is analyzed in this paper and previous experiences in this field are taken into account. Students of bachelor Engineering degree have been polled about their English Language knowledge and about several possibilities to improve their level of English. Their point of view related to adopt English as the main language for imparting several subjects in their university curricula has been also considered.

Previous experiences reveal some problems for teaching subjects in English Language for Spanish people. These are confirmed from the questionnaire results. Other difficulties related to internationalizing education are indicated: sometimes the different organizing system between universities is the main problem to interchange students.

Keywords:

multilingual competences, engineering, bilingual higher education.