Abstract:

Nowadays, mobility grants for undergraduate students are leading to increase the number of foreign students enrolled in many Universities. Normally, European students receive an Erasmus grant provided by the European Commission, which contributes to exchange students between European countries. Many times, the receiving (host) university does not offer the chance to attend lectures in English, and the same goes for labs. Usually, foreign students just have individual tutorial sessions and assessments in English. In the present paper we show a methodology to conduct lab sessions when teaching a multilingual group of engineering students. The group under consideration consists of Spanish students and some non-Spanish speaking students. Lab lectures are taught in Spanish, but the methodology proposed allows teaching the aforementioned foreign students. This methodology is based on performing a previous homework, which will prepare students to fulfill successfully laboratory activities. Video lessons have been recorded in order to show step by step how to perform each lab, and English subtitles have been added. Videos are enough well explained so that students that demonstrate a basic level of English can easily understand the activities proposed. Several videos have been recorded and some of them included in this work to illustrate the teaching process. These videos show typical practice lessons taught in various subjects at the mechanical faculty of the University of Jaén: thermodynamics, metrology and manufacturing engineering. One of the reasons why this methodology has been proposed is to unify the bilingual teaching methodology for several subjects. Another one is related to students whose mother tongue is not English. Currently, those students must acquire skills that allow them to work in a multilingual group. So we will propose activities to integrate Spanish and foreign students. Finally an opinion survey and a test are developed in order to determine improvements in learning process.

Keywords:

Teaching methodology, multimedia, labs, foreign students and Erasmus.