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Course1: Engineering Communication Skills for Internationally Educated Engineers
Description
Moving up the promotion ladder in a professional engineering career demands effective technical communication skills. Coupled with technical expertise, a confident command of the English language helps engineers negotiate a raise, deliver strong oral presentations, write clear memos and business letters, offer detailed definitions of engineering concepts to non-engineer clients, write clear answers to their Professional Practice Exam questions and so on. According to a Statistics Canada study there is a clear correlation between individuals’ economic prosperity and their language skills. Then, improving your communication skills is shown to be paramount in ensuring sustainable engineering careers and professional growth.
The Engineering Communication Skills for Internationally Educated Engineers is designed to address this pressing need. This course is an English as a Second Language (ESL) course aiming to improve the workplace technical English communication skills of internationally educated engineers. It encompasses the basic and advanced communication skills that employers look for in engineers. Some communication areas the course helps engineers practice are: giving precise definitions of engineering concepts, describing objects and processes, verbalizing mathematics and engineering problems, delivering oral presentations in a structured audience-friendly way, business writing including letters, meeting minutes, and memoranda, and attending business meetings. By the end of the course the engineers will have significantly improved their technical communication skills and thereby enhanced their employability.
Objective
By the end of the term you will have successfully practiced the English language forms and structures to effectively communicate in various engineering situations.
Who should attend
Internationally educated engineering technicians, technologists, and engineers who aspire to give their technical communication skills a significant boost and move up the promotion ladder, and are already at an intermediate level (or higher) English language proficiency (Canadian Language Benchmark 6).
Program outcomes
The participants will be able to do the following under each topic:
Tactful Disagreement/Agreement
- Learn how to politely and tactfully express disagreement/ agreement.
- Identify and use the three-step process to politely disagree.
- Separate the problem from people and practice the language to address the issue.
Technical Definitions
- Identify the three main parts a classic definition.
- Recognize more complex forms of definition.
- Learn terms for classes of tools.
- Offer definitions for technical terms in participants’ technical field.
Technical Descriptions
- Identify phrases used to describe physical dimensions of objects, tools, mechanisms, etc.
- Identify nouns and adjectives to describe geometric shapes.
- Describe objects by stating their shape, materials they are made of and their dimensions.
Oral technical presentations (beginning)
- Identify the structure of the beginning of a presentation.
- Identify the characteristics of a good presentation: planned, structured, logically sequenced, etc.
- Identify the causes of a bad presentation: lack of rapport with audience, poor audio-visuals, unrehearsed, etc.
- Identify the structure of the beginning of a presentation: lay out the structure and time allotted for each part.
- Prepare a one-minute beginning to a seven-minute presentation.
- Introduce the parts of the middle using proper sequence markers
Oral technical presentations (middle, end)
- Identify the techniques used to hold the audience’s attention: listing and numbering items, signaling the end of one item and the beginning of another, repetition.
- Be aware of the limited capacity of audience to retain information.
- Divide the talk into logical segments.
- Link the parts together.
- Indicate the sequence of the parts.
- Use words and phrases that “signpost” the speech for the audience.
- Signal the end of presentation.
- Learn language to invite questions.
- Handle questions by the audience.
- Make an effective use of audio-visuals.
Verbalizing Math Problems
- Recognize the English phrases to express mathematical operations.
- Recognize the terms for algebraic theorems.
- Say decimal and common fractions, equations, inequalities.
- Say calculations out loud, e.g. carry-overs, raising a base to a power, taking the nth root of a quantity.
- Verbalize engineering formulae and problems.
- Discuss engineering problems involving equations, diagrams, etc.
Negotiations
- Learn how to negotiate to win:
- Distinguish between bargaining and negotiating.
- Differentiate between negotiating on merit versus bargaining over positions.
- learn to separate the problem from the individual.
- Salary negotiations
- Sources for salary information for engineers
- Language techniques to defer the issue of money
- Practise negotiations in different settings.
Business writing-memos
- Identify the use of memos v. other forms of business correspondence.
- Identify the format of a memo and its informal style.
- Read some memos and answer questions based on them.
- Write memos to their co-workers stating a design problem, proposing a solution and calling a meeting.
Business writing-fax
- Differentiate between a fax, memo, and letter.
- Identify the format of a fax cover sheet.
- Study a fax and locate specific information in it.
- Design a fax cover sheet.
- Write a fax to a client, sub-consultant, job owner, etc.
Business writing-letters
- Identify the parts of a letter: address blocks, salutation, body (beginning, middle, end), subscription, signature, etc.
- Identify the formal language of letters.
- Read a letter and analyze its features.
- Write a letter of complaint to a supplier.
Meetings
- Discuss the features of an effective meeting: an agenda, prepared participants, a chair who exercises control, speaking exclusively on topic, etc.
- Learn how to table a motion, speak in favour of/ against it, take a vote, and announce if it carries or is defeated.
- Learn how to chair a meeting ensuring everybody participates and adheres to agenda, introducing the agenda, welcoming participants, summarizing main points, adjourning the meeting.
- Practice phrases to do the above.
- Recognize the function of technical meeting minutes.
- Recognize the components of minutes: comments by, discussions, owners of actions, agenda for next meeting, etc.
- Listen to a recorded meeting and take minutes demonstrating knowledge of components above.
- Participate in a meeting of four engineers including a chair and a secretary taking minutes.
English in Civil engineering
- Discuss the calculation of moment of inertia and shear force of a simply supported beam with a uniformly distributed load.
- Verbalize formulae for beams with different end conditions.
- Practice with locating and applying information in design codes.
- Discuss the solutions to some civil engineering problems.
English in Electrical Engineering
- Identify how ideas are connected with conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs in engineering texts.
- Say formulae in electrical engineering.
- Describe the shapes of electronic elements.
- Explain the workings of an electronic circuit.
- Describe how a mechanism, e.g. a circuit breaker, works.
English in Mechanical Engineering
- Discuss degrees of freedom of an object.
- Describe the components of a machine, e.g. a drill machine.
- Explain how the machine works.
- Classify engineering materials.
- Say mechanical engineering formulae.
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