Abstract:

Engineering can be considered to be a problem-solving discipline but the problems of the 21st century, such as of climate change, are those of post-normal science. This means that decisions need to be made where uncertainties still exist. In order to train engineers to face such challenges, educators need to understand what knowledge-building practices they should impart to their students. One useful approach is offered by Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), which can reveal different aspects of knowledge-building to help educators understand the various levels of meaning: the principles that try to capture phenomena, their expression as mathematical formulae, their representation as visual diagrams to their modeling or simulation in preparation for their creation as physical phenomena. For example, in civil engineering, the principles of structural forces can be expressed with formulae to enable calculations for architectural drawings to construct a bridge that can withstand a strong earthquake or a powerful hurricane or typhoon. These drawings can be represented as 3D models and tested using simulation software. The final real-world realization will be the building of the bridge itself.

When teaching students, educators should be aware of both the semantic gravity, or degree of abstraction, as well as the semantic density, or degree of complexity, of what they are teaching. In the above example of bridge planning and construction, the abstract concepts of structural forces would have low semantic gravity but high semantic density, while the bridge itself, as a real-world entity, would have high semantic gravity but low semantic density.

By applying these concepts to the analysis of engineering lectures at Japanese and American universities, we were able to reveal that the classroom discourse of instructors reflects their different cultural backgrounds. Being raised in different cultures influences language and thought patterns. Instructors from a Western culture place strong emphasis on abstract concepts while those from an Eastern culture tend to place more emphasis on concrete facts. To reveal the differences, we used the LCT tools of semantic gravity and semantic density to examine corpora of lecture transcripts delivered in the United States and in Japan.

For this work, we added a corpus of transcripts from engineering lectures given at major Japanese universities to a corpus of American university transcripts which we had previously prepared. The analyses revealed cultural differences between the classroom discourse used by the instructors in these two countries. This is one of the first attempts to use LCT to identify cross-cultural differences in engineering lectures.

Keywords:

Knowledge-building, Legitimation Code Theory, Japanese and American engineering lectures.