Writing in Engineering and English as a Second Language: A Double Challenge

by Nathalia Peixoto, Bioengineering and ECE

All writers in neural engineering are second language writers. Have you ever met anyone who knew the concepts of prosthesis, electrodes, and micro-electro-mechanical-systems and used them in everyday language? Technical writing, especially when it involves concepts that have been learned in college, doesn’t come intuitively. Often it is not straightforward either. We second- (L2) and third-language (L3) writers encounter a further complication: the correct use of written English. This puts us quasi-Americanized faculty and students at a disadvantage: we are always one step behind when writing in English. One consequence of this is that we L2 faculty need to work harder, and we also need to ask more of our L2 students in order for them to raise to a reasonable standard. Those students deserve a good learning experience while in college, and that experience includes obtaining English written communication skills.

Our L2-3 students often ask why they need to learn to write well in English if “all I want to be is an engineer.” Often the reason they selected engineering in the first place, as I learn from talking with them, is that they could communicate through math only and demonstrate their knowledge through the numerous exams from Digital System Design to Electric Circuits, which include graphs, formulas, and numbers but require fewer than ten words of written text to achieve an “A.” Many of our students are indeed excellent, high-GPA students. Despite claims to the contrary (sometimes by our own engineering faculty), engineering students do need to communicate in written English if they are to receive a degree from George Mason University. This need is obvious in some senior undergraduate and graduate classes where they have to explain their ideas for designs and argue for their point of view in writing.

To achieve the highest level of the new Bloom’s Taxonomy—“create”—it is imperative that the student writer know how to express ideas appropriately in English. It is disturbing when a sentence makes no sense, but more than that the impact on the information transfer is enormous. As an instructor, the first question that comes to my mind is whether the student understood any of what I talked about in class. The second question is what the student actually means. To explain how critical this skill is, I use an analogy with my students: Imagine you are trying to look through a glass window at something your friend is pointing at, but the window is very dirty and you can only partially see through it. So it almost doesn’t matter what your friend is pointing at, you want to first clean the window in order to understand—to see—what he is pointing at, his point. The window is their writing skill, I tell them, and they need to clean up the writing so that I can clearly see what they mean when they describe their ideas.

Actually, there is nothing more important for engineering students than learning to communicate effectively while they are still in college. If students are still unmoved by that argument, then maybe a 2009 survey conducted on behalf of the AACU (Association of American Colleges and Universities) will be more convincing. When employers were asked which outcome (out of 17) they believe should be most emphasized by colleges, 89% answered “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing.” The second-ranked outcome, with 81%, was “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills.” No technical outcome exceeded the communication skill. This fact, along with the ABET requirement that students be competent communicators, makes the task of convincing our engineering students very straightforward: “Do you want a better job? Learn to communicate in English.”