A NEW APPROACH IN CURRICULUM PlANNING FOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS
A NEW APPROACH IN CURRICULUM PlANNING FOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Summary/Abstract: With respect to the changing profile of the engineer in a globalized world, the author believes that teaching specialized languages at technical universities completes the study of future engineers and opens them doors to an international career. Students should be made aware of their responsibility towards ensuring the effectiveness of knowledge transfer among laymen/endusers, who often have difficulty in understanding specialized texts. Therefore, an update of curriculum planning, made possible by the inclusion of a new course offer like Technical Documentation at the University "Politehnica" of Bucharest, is a timely requirement for technical universities in Romania, if we envisage a revised profile of the engineering qualification in the global labour market. The author proceeds first to an empirical analysis of texts chosen: German and Romanian documentation, user manuals for electrical appliances, which are instructional texts placed at the interface between technology, marketing and public. They are considered from the viewpoint of intelligibility of discourse and from an intercultural perspective as well. The results confirm the working assumption that documentation should correspond to certain quality standards. The author then describes various individual tasks students solve online in the German language class, related on the one hand to websites of different companies and on the other hand to documentation of appliances these companies produce. Websites and user manuals are evaluated by students according to two checklists which enable them to differentiate between general vs. particular/intercultural features. Step by step they become aware of the way how knowledge transfer among endusers is performed and which are the means of improving it. In the long run both contentandlanguage skills are improved and they may constitute the premisesof a successful start as an engineer.

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