Coordinator: Mr. Simon Boynton
Course Description
This six credit English-in-the-Discipline course is offered to final year Civil Engineering and Year 3 or 4 BEng(EngSc) Environmental Engineering students. It runs alongside Civil Engineering core project courses. The course aims to provide students with training on effectively communicating technical information with civil engineering professionals and related personnel in a coherent, engaging and professional manner through technical report writing and oral presentations. Students will develop their technical report writing and presentation skills through extensive textual analysis, drafting and revision of their final year project progress report, along with in-class discussions, rehearsals and peer feedback. They will also carry out self-directed communication enhancement by identifying and critically reflecting on areas for improvement. Assessment is wholly by coursework.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Produce informative, coherent and professionally structured technical writing for civil engineering professionals and related personnel
- Present technical information in a coherent, engaging, and professional manner for civil engineering professionals and related personnel through integrated spoken, visual, and technical communication.
- Evaluate solutions to engineering problems and options available, and make convincing justifications and claims based on real-life disciplinary contexts
- Carry out self-directed communication enhancement through critically reflecting on presentation performance and identifying areas for improvement
- Develop digital fluency by engaging in responsible and sustainable digital practices
Strategies
- A genre approach to written work is employed emphasizing on acquiring the discipline specific genre through consciousness raising, analysis, and application
- Student's written work is closely related to their own discipline project
- Video recording of oral presentations is conducted to add a critical element of tension and to facilitate performance improvements through self-reflection
- Compulsory attendance of rehearsals is required in order to gain feedback from the teacher and peers for improvement before the assessments
- Assigned readings and tasks are set for out-of-class and independent learning
Assessment Methods
(with breakdown of percentage weighting of the various methods)
- Project reports (55%)
- Oral Presentations (35%)
- Independent learning work (10%)