Academic Writing in an Engineering Context. Towards Engineering Proficiency

In this study, we aim to investigate the best way to organize and teach the compulsory academic writing course Writing in the Engineering Profession (4.5 ECTS credits) in the first term of the five-year program in Computer Science at KTH RoyalInstitute of Technology. The language instruction is Swedish, the L1 of the majority of students. Up until 2016, the course was held by the School of Computer Science and Communication. The course was placed in the fall semester of year 1, toprepare the students for more academic writing tasks, focusing solely on the technical report / essay. However important, the course did not align with the other writing tasks that the students encountered during their first two years of study, and incourse evaluations, the students expressed that they found the course redundant and disconnected from the program as a whole. In fall 2016 the responsibility for the course was moved to KTH Language and Communication, which began a reconstruction of the course content and learning activities, while still keeping the academic writing objective. The ambition is to continuethe course reconstruction by teaching academic writing to increase the students’ proficiency, using real life text types from their workplaces. But for this, a better understanding of the engineering profession is needed. Engineering students in Computer Science at KTH write different types of texts, for example, code commentaries and project descriptions, and would, therefore benefit from a broader understanding of the various text types they may encounterduring their studies and future workplaces. As is well known, the importance of excellent communication skills for a successful engineering career cannot be emphasized enough, as discussed by e.g. Lappalainen (2009) and Gustafsson et al.(2014). Therefore, a continuation of the course re-development needs to include other text types, more aligned with other courses and written assignments within the program and in the engineering workplace, to further the students’ engineeringproficiency in literacy. In this study we propose that a general principle of academic writing could well be used as a starting point for the teaching of other text types. We want to problematize the relationship between writing academically (as part of a university degree)and writing in the engineer's workplace. We will also discuss why and how the course needs to be further developed and integrated with other courses throughout the program, in order to meet the requirements from both program directors and theindustry, and the challenges that such development provides. QC 20191122