Past Event

Preparing Students to Write for Engineering Practice: Research-based Materials Development

Dr. Susan Conrad
(Department of Applied Linguistics, Portland State University)

Coursework can never replace mentoring in the workplace, but is it possible to prepare engineering students for workplace writing more effectively than most programs currently do? Can we identify specific student writing weaknesses that will have serious consequences in the workplace and then address those weaknesses with targeted instruction? Can we integrate the instruction into existing engineering courses and stimulate students to express meaning and organize texts in ways that are more consistent with workplace expectations? These are the questions addressed in the Civil Engineering Writing Project. In this talk I will describe the two phases of the project. The first phase analyzed a large collection of student and practitioner writing, seeking to understand differences in word choice, grammatical choices (such as active and passive voice), sentence structure, organization, and the sequencing of information in several different genres. Interviews of students and practitioners supplemented the language findings and allowed us to identify the most serious student writing weaknesses. In the second phase, applied linguists, engineering practitioners, and engineering faculty are collaborating to develop and pilot new teaching materials at four universities. I will share examples from the materials and the assessment of their use. Results of initial piloting are positive for both quantitative measures of discrete language features and more qualitative analyses of organization and effectiveness. In addition, many of the student writing weaknesses corresponded to misconceptions about the practice of civil engineering, and the new writing materials appear to have an impact on these erroneous beliefs. Although the project focuses on civil engineering, the principles and procedures that I cover – and some continuing challenges – are applicable to any engineering discipline.

About the Presenter

Dr. Susan Conrad is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Portland State University. Her research has focused on corpus linguistics, English grammar, and discourse analysis, including collaborating on books such as the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Pearson Education), Register, Genre, and Style (Cambridge), and Real Grammar: A Corpus-based Approach to English (Pearson Education). She began studying writing in civil engineering after hearing her husband’s regular complaints about junior engineers’ writing. She now heads the Civil Engineering Writing Project and collaborates with numerous engineering practitioners as well as faculty.