Developing a CLIL course for mechanical engineering students at an Asian university

Abstract

English has been widely used as an international language in the globalized world. Based on this phenomenon, engineers and researchers in mechanical engineering have been requested for expressing their ideas or findings in English in a professional way (Mudraya, 2006). This study examines a CLIL/integrating content and language (ICL) course for mechanical engineering students at a Korean science and engineering university. The undergraduate course was developed as adjunct CLIL to support a required content course (Greere & Räsänen, 2008). The study attempts to analyze the efficacy of the course following the 4Cs Framework (Coyle, 2008). It examines the course preparation work, course materials and class tasks, and interactions between the language and content professors. Furthermore, a questionnaire survey and email interviews were conducted to examine the language professor’s, content professors’, students’, and teaching assistant’s perceptions of the course. The content professors required groups of students to create autonomous machines picking balls. Each group developed their own machine under supervision of a content professor. Moreover, students were required to give presentations about their progress in English. The language professor met with students weekly and focused on the development of students’ presentation skills. She observed the students’ performances in the content course and regularly communicated with the eight content professors who supervised the students’ projects throughout the semester. Study results show that most of the students and professors found the ICL course helpful for students not only to develop a better understanding of the content in English but also to improve their presentation skills. In particular, the students’ satisfaction levels of the ICL course (4.50) were higher than that of other courses (4.28). However, the language professor found challenges in offering the course. The study concludes with suggestions on how to improve the offering of ICL courses in the future.