IMPROVING COMMUNICATION AND PRESENTATION SKILLS IN ENGLISH FOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS FOR SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract

Improving communication skills in English becomes one of the primary engineering education outcomes. Engineering students should be aware of this fact and put this outcome as one of their targets while pursuing their bachelor’s degree and even after graduation. Instructors find some challenges achieving this goal when teaching humanity courses like communication skills and oral presentation skills. In the current approach we use a student survey along with experience obtained from teaching undergraduate engineering students technical and humanity courses. Experience from teaching in English in different universities makes this study more valuable. Case study analysis was done on the second year engineering students during the course of Academic Oral Presentation Skills. This analysis helps in uncovering some of the sources of communication difficulties in English and further helping tackling the problem in different ways. Results can be generalized to a global scale making it more applicable even though some of the difficulties are related to the local society in which engineering institution exists. Results from data analysis recommend allowing undergraduate students to give more presentations in English during their course work and team presentation at the final project of a course. Actually, this may require modifying the syllabus of some courses and allow utilizing new communication technology products. Also, a mathematical scheme to measure students’ improvements at the end of the course is proposed.  

Keywords

• engineering education,oral presentation skills,communication skills

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