Undergraduate engineering programmes worldwide aim to equip their graduates with specialised skills applicable to a career in the discipline. These programmes increasingly include instruction in professional communication skills by language educators. Engineering faculty often request that students be instructed in discipline-specific professional skills, while universities may expect graduates to have developed a broad range of transferable skills, often expressed as ‘graduate attributes’. Language educators developing professional communication courses for engineering students need to consider how specific their instruction should be, given that the communication needs of engineers will change as they transition from frontline technical roles to managerial positions when ascending the career ladder. This chapter presents four best practices for the design of professional communication courses for engineering students, based on the experience of course developers in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. These principles attempt to meet the expectations of subject faculty that their students will learn discipline-specific professional skills, whilst addressing the longer-term communication needs of engineers. These four best practices are likely to be relevant to other language educators facing a similar mix of expectations and requests from subject faculty and academic leaders in their own institutions.

Short Descriptions

To ensure the CLE Competency-based assessment descriptors match with the university common core competency framework, our team plans to review the existing CLE Competency-based assessment descriptors. Through this process, we hope to evaluate the language used in these descriptors and determine their effectiveness and usefulness in learning and grading.

Deliverables

CLE Competency-based assessment descriptors will be the framework to assist all course leaders to develop their course specific competencies descriptors to fit in their course assignments.

Short Descriptions

To foster an Open Feedback Culture in the CLE, this project will analyse ideas and data received from a survey and workshop collected and run in April 2022. This project team will analyse data and further feedback from the workshop and conduct research into best practices for sharing feedback and creating an open feedback culture within the CLE.

Deliverables

1. Analyse data and feedback collected from Feedback survey and workshop in April 2022. 2. Research best practices or successful strategies to encourage open feedback culture, and share common best practice feedback strategies derived from CLE colleagues and our research.