KEYWORDS: Engineering education, university teaching/learning, digital user’s reading competence, customized learner’s dictionary.

ABSTRACT: This paper deals with the phenomenon of engineering education, its needs and problems. The authors introduce the concept of the “digital user’s reading competence.” They point out the advantages of its development in future engineers and describe a technique for making a customized learner’s dictionary to increase the efficiency of the teaching/learning process.

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Part 1. An introduction

Traditional engineering education relies on creating a strong base of fundamental science training and is focused on delivering specific knowledge in a narrow field of study. On the one hand, it seems natural to teach students only those technical things they will definitely need in their future jobs, but, on the other hand, this issue poses a pedagogical problem because what today’s teachers think is important does not always remain true for tomorrow’s specialists.

Technology changes rapidly. It becomes almost impossible to predict what specific knowledge engineers will need in their careers even in the nearest future. That is why the scientific education community searches constantly for the means to help their budding members to avoid frustration and survive the avalanche of information coming their way.

Support is available to them, however, from the academic humanities sphere. In spite of the fact that the amount of academic hours in the particular science is limited and a lot must be taught and mastered during the relatively brief time that a student is in training, the humanities should neither be overlooked nor underestimated. The humanities as an aid to the sciences must be included in the engineering curriculum and planned out as carefully as the other subjects in this professional domain.

After a rigorous analysis of the humanities subjects included in engineering education [1; 2; 3], we discovered four main aspects that are especially vital for an aspiring professional of any technical field. These four are:

1. Collaboration in every kind of activity.
2. Reading ability in order to learn the most relevant data.
3. Foreign language skill in order to be competitive in the global economy.
4. Life-long learning habits in order to maintain relevance.

Although a careful reader may reproach us for being trivial in uniting four completely different concepts without a seemingly obvious purpose, we are going to prove in this paper that they are essential for any modern student seeking career success; that they can be taught in a consistent, even scientific way; and can be interwoven into any university curriculum.

We will describe the concept of the “digital user’s reading competence” in part two of this paper and explain why its development is important for future engineers. In Part three, we will introduce a specific technique for creating a collective process for managing the pedagogical tool we call a “customized learner’s dictionary” which is a powerful activity for training and assessing student competency in the four skills we described above.

Part 2. Reading as an Engineering Competence

A. Why does a future engineer need to be a skilled reader?

By definition, engineering’s objectives are the creation of new technical projects and the development of new solutions to problems both new and old. The engineering professional needs creativity and a constant stream of information. To get this, he or she must read avidly. The simple concept of reading actually comprises a lot:

1. Reading provides knowledge which has always meant power. It is in danger of becoming an extinct value as many who function in the digital world resort to “clipping.” A thorough and voracious reader is absolutely precious in any professional field.
2. Regular reading supplies the reader with understanding and opportunity. Today, as always, information is a most important commercial asset. One’s professional development and standing are dependent on reading. The habit of life-long learning is chief among the necessary skills of a true professional. Formerly, a college degree was sufficient for one’s career. Today, due to the rapid expansion of information and technology, professional people tend to earn several degrees, diplomas and/or certificates in order to maintain and grow their competence. Life-long learning and reading go hand in hand.
3. Reading is vital to the communication process. One must read social or business messages in order to respond adequately. The web’s environment encourages a wide variety of communication. Most of it is in written form and must be read in order to be understood. Reading is interactive. One reads to learn and then act. One reads in order to be linked socially in the world.
4. Especially in the realm of the internet, foreign language skill demonstrates its importance. Nowadays, knowing English is a must but it is not everything. It has become natural for Russian professionals to speak at least three languages and use them in their work. One’s native tongue, English and one or more other languages have become vital since information in different countries varies. To be competent professionals, people need to understand and effectively use information that exists in the professional environments of different nations.

Thus, reading, in our contemporary reality, means to know, speak, learn and collaborate. That is just the beginning of reading’s importance. Reading competence in particular is not just the privilege of a linguist, historian or psychologist. It is extremely important for an engineer. Only a broad-minded person can make creative decisions dealing with the complex and seemingly impossible problems of the modern world. When problems like these arise in the field of modern engineering, they invariably contain concealed “rocks and shoals” that are extremely difficult to overcome by engineers with low levels of “digital user reading competence.”

B. Digital User’s Reading Competence

Reading competence is the part of one’s personality that represents the willingness and ability to utilize the skills of “text-surfing,” reading and strategy generation adequately [2]. A competent reader is able to: formulate a reading purpose; find an appropriate text; utilize reading comprehension skills; and subsequently, generate a required textual product.

A digital user’s reading competence, nowadays, is considered to comprise all the characteristics peculiar to the text in a computer-mediated environment. That is why it implies taking into account:

1. The factor of resources (using the advantages of computer technologies to read, surf the internet effectively to find appropriate material, and evaluate the various texts, and so on).
2. Psychological factors (the abilities to decide on a variety of reading strategies appropriate to the reading purpose like “clipping” as well as thoughtfully reading long informative texts).

An ideal engineer with a fully developed “digital user’s reading competence” would possess the following set of skills:

1. Web literacy; 2. Reading literacy; 3. Information-gathering skills (for finding and evaluating appropriate resources, for determining the reading strategy appropriate to the reading purpose and the material selected); 4) Reading comprehension skills (for finding, sorting, interpreting, and drawing conclusions concerning the relevance of gathered materials to the task at hand); 5) Interaction skills (for the composition of a secondary text product to be used in the future by other people).

If the second, third, and fourth skill sets described above are traditionally associated with reading and reading competence, the first set corresponds to the digital competence. The fifth skill set is unique. Its nature lies in the social character of the internet as it exists today. On the one hand, people express their opinions on what they read. On the other hand, only collaboration and, in particular, collaborative research, works successfully for big and technically complicated projects.

Therefore, a “digital user’s reading competence” represents a powerful ability for survival and success in our contemporary environment which is full of uncontrollable information flows that require engineers to deal with new data constantly and almost force educators to develop new strategies for assisting students in learning efficient methods for dealing with the flow of information vital to their career success.

Part 3. A Customized Learner’s Dictionary

In our research, we not only described the notion of a “digital user’s reading competence” and proved its significance, but what is more important, we introduced a tool for its development and assessment [3].

A. Collaboration in Dictionary Management

Our pedagogical inspirations lay in the field of professional lexicography and its method of organizing the lexicographer’s efforts which is to create a specialized dictionary. Teaching this technique to aspiring engineers takes several steps.

What students must do first in this process is to make up a search list. That is a compilation of the websites where they will search for materials to read on a specific engineering problem. Next, they must share responsibility for making a collection of the new terms they meet in their readings by posting them on individual cards that contain the new word or phrase; its meaning; any other pertinent information; and the source of the new entry. This method is repeated with each piece of material read.

The final product of this activity we call a “customized learner’s dictionary.” This means that it is a dictionary of terms created by students for a particular, professional purpose, in this case, engineering terms. One problem that the students face, is that professional dictionaries already exist. They are only required under our process to create a personalized dictionary for the students’ own use. They include only those terms or phrases necessary to student learning. The engineering students may use information from textual material they read which may include the author’s definition of terms used. They may also use professional dictionary entries. They must, in both cases, include source citations.

B. The Results of Applying Dictionary Management in Teaching Foreign Language Reading

We applied our technique during a course of Special Purpose English for second year engineering students at the Perm National Research Polytechnic University. At the same time, these students took a Russian Language course in specialized terms that helped them with their work in English and gave us an additional opportunity for employing our learning strategy. The students read specialized texts in English and kept “dictionaries” of key words, terms, and phrases associated with their proposed profession. They compared these to Russian words, terms, and phrases for the same activities thereby improving their understanding of English by first understanding the key concept in their mother tongue.

As a result of applying our “customized learner’s dictionary management” technique in their classroom, their rates of “digital user’s reading competence” rose significantly. In response to follow up questionnaires, students mentioned the following positive after-effects of the collaborative dictionary management process: the opportunity for discussing the advantages and disadvantages of using various search engines, dictionaries, and automatic translators; the opportunity to learn, discuss and test a variety of search-query composition techniques; the opportunity for utilizing information gained from Russian professional language courses; the opportunity to read and compare Russian and foreign language texts on a particular subject; the opportunity to assess one’s work and that of their classmates and make group decisions about which terms to include in the common dictionary; the opportunity for creating a list of foreign terms that will be particularly useful to one’s career.

Conclusion

Teaching future engineers is a tremendous responsibility as we face an uncertain tomorrow. However, this is exactly where an opportunity lies for demonstrating the potential of the humanities to assist the sciences. Collaboration, reading skill, foreign language ability and life-long learning when applied to the creation of a customized and collective learner’s dictionary become powerful tools for the development of an aspiring engineer’s “digital user’s reading competence.”

References

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