An Assessment of English Language Needs of Undergraduate Engineering Students: The Case of the Institute of Technology at Hawassa University.
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Date
2024-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Previous research in the field of engineering has showed that English language is essential in the academic and professional lives of engineering students, and thus they need a good proficiency of English to become effective in their academic study and future workplace communication. However, engineering students at Hawassa University (HU) were observed to have pressing problems of English language proficiency and showed little interest in English courses taught to them. In principle, English courses at university level should be designed in a way to address the immediate and target needs of the specific groups of students. Nevertheless, at HU based on the Nationally Harmonized Modular Curriculum the same kind of general English (Communicative English Skills I&II) courses were offered to all first year students irrespective their disciplinary differences. The researcher strongly feels that among other things this could have significantly contributed to the lack of interest of engineering students in English courses at HU and to curb this problem a needs assessment study be carried out.
Hence, the main objective of this study was to assess the academic and work-related English language needs of engineering students at HU and engineers at Hawassa Industrial Park (HIP) and to establish a syllabus framework that can better address their needs. To achieve the intended objective a cross-sectional survey research design was employed in order to identify the English skills and the target tasks needed for engineering study and workplace communication particularly at the foreign companies of HIP. Five instruments of data gathering were used to elicit the necessary information: namely, questionnaire data were collected from randomly selected 258 final- year engineering students, 87 engineering instructors, and 70 engineers working at HIP; semi-structured interviews were conducted with purposively selected 5 final year engineering students, 5 engineering instructors, 3 English instructors, 3 engineers and 3 foreign employers; IELTS test was administered for randomly selected 100 final-year engineering students from the four engineering faculties (25 from each), classroom observations and a brief evaluation of the currently in-use English course modules.
Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of data, the following findings were identified. First, while all major English skills were important for engineering students’ academic study and
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workplace communication, reading and writing skills were of particular importance for engineering study at HU, and listening and speaking skills were especially required for engineers’ workplace communication in the foreign companies of HIP. Second, the most common and highly needed tasks for engineering study in each skill were: reading lecture notes, textbooks, lab manuals, project manuals and research materials; writing library assignments, lab reports, exam answers, design reports, internship reports and research reports; making the presentation and defense of their internships and research/project reports, presentation of course work assignments, asking and answering questions; listening to lectures, questions and answers, presentations and discussions, and online resources such as You tube videos. In the same way, the most common and highly required tasks for engineers’ workplace communication were: reading product manuals, safety signs and notices, training manuals, project documents and reports, business letters and e-mails; writing performance reports, job applications, product descriptions, project proposals and reports; speaking making technical conversations, making presentations, participating in meetings, giving trainings/seminars and talking on the phone; listening to instructions or advice, meeting discussions, and trainings or seminars.
Regarding the English language problems, engineering students at HU had the most difficulty to carry out speaking and writing tasks particularly giving well-organized presentations of their works in class and writing coherent internship and research reports, and the engineers at HIP experienced more difficulty in writing formal business letters and formal reports and listening to English from native and hard-accented foreigners. Finally, the evaluation of the English course modules in-use was found to contain topics and tasks of general academic English and appear to address the identified academic and work-related English language needs of engineering students at HU and engineers at HIP only to some extent. Finally, based on the findings and conclusions, implications for English classroom use and syllabus design have been made.