TEACHING DRAWING IN ENGINEERING DEGREE IN THE UNIVERSIDAD POLITECNICA MADRID

Linguistic diversity has been promoted in the European Union as one of the main educational goals. This is an element which facilitates student mobility and student exchanges between different universities and countries and enriches the education of young undergraduates. In particular, a higher degree of competence in the English language is becoming essential for engineers, architects and researchers in general, as English has become the “lingua franca” that opens up horizons to internationalization and the transfer of knowledge in today’s world.
The Integrated Approach to Contents and Foreign Languages System is an option that has certain benefits over the traditional method of teaching a second language which is exclusively based on specific subjects. This system advocates teaching the different subjects in a language other than one’s mother language, without prioritizing knowledge of the language over the subject.

We began this project in the 2009/10 academic year and it has been continued until now as the Second Language Integration Programme (SLI Programme) at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Edificación before Arquitectura Técnica in the Universidad Politécnica Madrid (ETESEM-EUATM-UPM). This was just at the beginning of the new Building Engineering Degree, which had been adapted to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) model. Now the experience continues in this course 2014-2015 with another name and other items but with similar goals.
During the 2012/2013 academic year the level of acceptance and the results of the SLI Programme were monitored. Tools were designed to aid interdisciplinary coordination and to analyze satisfaction, such as coordination records and surveys. The results are currently available referring to the first and second year of the Degree and they are divided into specific aspects of the different subjects involved and into general aspects of the ongoing experience.
This program is an interdisciplinary initiative for the set of subjects taught during the semester and it is coordinated through the Assistant Director Office for Educational Innovation.
The SLI Program has a dual goal; to familiarize students with the specific English terminology of the subject being taught, and at the same time to improve their communication skills in English. A total of thirty lecturers are taking part: eleven subjects in the first year and twelve in the second year, with around 120 students who have voluntarily enrolled in a special group each semester.
In this course 2014/2015 Universidad Politécnica Madrid has provided an Innovation Project called “Enseñanza de asignaturas en lengua inglesa en los estudios oficiales de la Escuela Técnica Superior de Edificación” with others Professors.
We will summit the experience in Architectural drawing. We will explain how the Drawing experience takes place.