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

Year 2017, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 1 - 12, 30.12.2017

Mohammed Ghazy

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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