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English
for Industry and Commerce:
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A
Certificate for Engineering Students
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This article presents an assessment of ten
years' experience with the certificate course in English for Industry and Commerce
offered by the Fachhochschule München as an additional language qualification to
its applied-sciences students. The Fachhochschule is an application-oriented
university offering degree courses particularly in Engineering, Design, Business
Administration, and Social Studies. It is a relatively young institution, as it was
granted its official academic status in Germany only in 1971. At present there are about
140 Fachhochschulen in the country. Typically, a degree course at such an
institution has a duration of eight semesters; in general, the third and the sixth
semesters are devoted to industrial placements. The Fachhochschule München (FHM)
is located in Munich and currently has about 15,000 students; of these, roughly two-thirds
are enrolled in technical degree courses.
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The FHM has offered English courses since its
foundation, although over the years offerings in other languages such as Spanish, French,
Italian, Russian, and Japanese have broadened the range of optional classes available.
English has always retained a special status from three points of view: there are more
courses in English than in any other language, only intermediate and advanced courses are
offered (there is no need for beginners' instruction as English is taught at
secondary-school level), and English is part of the compulsory curriculum for some degrees
(e.g., in Business Administration).
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At the beginning of the 1980s, as a result of
the globalization of markets, the need was felt to offer applied-sciences students who did
not have English in their compulsory curriculum the opportunity to acquire a special
qualification in this language. The plan was to equip the students with the general
language skills which they would need in the business environment of their future
profession, rather than offer them specialization in the technical language of their
particular fields of study.
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The original idea of an additional qualification
in English stemmed from the Bavarian Employers' Association, a body which represented the
bulk of the employers of FHM graduates. The General Studies Department of the FHM reacted
to the Association's suggestion by submitting a proposal for a Special Certificate in
English for Industry and Commerce ( Zusatzqualifikation Englisch in Wirtschaft und
Industrie ) to the Ministry of Culture and Education. This step was necessary for
formal reasons (curriculum definition), and because resources (staff, infrastructure)
would have to be approved for the project.
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In 1984 the Bavarian Ministry of Culture and
Education agreed to the proposal, and granted the venture the status of a Pilot Project
for the following five years, until 1989. During this time success was closely monitored
and the programme repeatedly adjusted. For example, initially only students of the
Engineering faculties had been admitted to the programme, but it turned out that it would
make sense to admit students from the Design faculties too (Business Administration
students already had English in their curriculum, and Social Studies students were
expected to have different professional requirements). Regular reports were sent to the
Ministry. At the end of the pilot phase the Certificate became a permanent feature of the
FHM.
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The first Certificates were issued in 1988. Over
the past ten years, some 300 Certificates in English for Industry and Commerce have been
issued. During any semester there are about 1,300 students enrolled in the programme; of
these, about 250 attend the certificate courses offered in that semester; at present, 15
certificates on the average are issued at the end of each semester.
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The programme consists of the eight courses
listed in Figure 1. Each course is taught in the form of one 90-minute class per week for
the duration of one semester. With an average semester length of 13 weeks, instruction
adds up to 208 hours for the whole programme.
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The courses are numbered from I to VIII for
convenience, but as the last column of the table shows, their numbers do not correspond to
a linear sequence as far as admission is concerned. There is a practical reason for this.
If the courses had to be taken from I to VIII in sequence, it would be difficult for the
students, who come from many faculties and have different schedules, to fit just one
course in each of the eight semesters of their degree, even if they made the decision of
participating in the programme from their very first semester (which is often not the
case). From a teaching point of view, the main advantage of a linear enrollment sequence
would be the possibility of setting increasingly higher standards of competence throughout
the programme.
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The other extreme, leaving the students free to
take any one of the eight courses at any time, would have great practical advantages, but
would defeat any attempt to attain progress; the standard would have to be the same for
all the courses, as each one of them could be the first or the last attended. The
admission sequence chosen represents a compromise: some courses (I, V and VI) are open to
all students and can be taken at any time, whereas others (II, III, IV and VII, VIII) can
only be taken in a sequence. A further advantage of this approach is that several courses
can be taken in parallel during the same semester, which can shorten the duration of the
programme to a minimum of four semesters. This is a popular option for students who do not
join the programme at the beginning of their studies (in fact, they have time until their
fourth semester, for then they can still complete the Certificate simultaneously with
their degree).
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During their degree course, all students are
required to pass examinations in three General Studies subjects not directly related to
their field of work. The aim of this regulation is to increase the students' general
cultural competence. The General Studies Department offers about 200 such courses in such
diverse fields as history, psychology, philosophy, literature, media studies, the natural
sciences, and modern languages. For students participating in the special English
programme, any three of the Certificate courses, except Oral English I and II (which do
not have written examinations), can be taken into account as General Studies subjects; the
remaining five have to be taken as voluntary options. This rule achieves a satisfactory
compromise between the additional effort required of the students, and the support given
by the institution to the programme. This also accounts for the fact that the programme
was developed within the General Studies Department.
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An overview of the contents and methods of the
programme is given in Figure 2. This, however, is really only a snapshot of a dynamic
situation: just like in any other curriculum, all subject matter and teaching approaches
are subject to constant revision and updating. For example, the material used for Courses
I and II, which has been continually supplemented by technically up-to-date handouts over
the past few years, is to be replaced soon. New materials are currently being tested.
Course IV, which is definitely not a commercial correspondence course, used to be taught
on the basis of Business Communication: Practical written English for the business
world (Beresford BBC English 1984), but over the years, material more specifically
appropriate to the professional requirements of future Fachhochschule graduates has
been developed.
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At the end of each course there is an
examination: a 60-minute written test for courses I to VI, and a 10-15 minute oral test
for courses VII and VIII. All the grades obtained in the examinations have the same weight
(one-eighth) in the final average. In order to obtain the Certificate, students must pass
all examinations. The Certificate is a separate document from the actual degree and
specifies the titles of all the courses, the grades obtained in each, the final average
grade, and the assessment to which it corresponds (for example, average grades ranging
from 1.0 to 1.2 carry the assessment "excellent," grades from 1.3 to 1.5
"very good" and so on).
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Courses I to VI are regularly taught by two
professors of English. The oral English courses VII and VIII are taught by native
speakers, ideally part-time lecturers as the courses are very practice oriented.
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As the programme had no precedents at any Fachhochschule
, it was expected that it might present a number of challenges. Predictably enough, no
significant problems of a pedagogical nature arose, as course development, assessment, and
adjustment belong to the standard activities connected with teaching any subject. The
challenges that did have to be faced, however, turned out to be of an administrative kind.
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A decision which had to be made right at the
beginning concerned the investment in materials and human resources. Obviously there was
going to be a trade-off between criteria of economy and effectiveness. Another important
consideration was the medium-term feasibility of the project within the facilities of the
FHM, which, having been built for 7,000 students and now catering to more than twice as
many, was bursting at the seams. In that situation, planning elaborately equipped
classrooms just for the project seemed unrealistic, and it was decided to keep the
investment in hardware to a minimum, with materials which could be used in an already
existing and occasionally available language lab or simply in any classroom with an
overhead projector and a videotape recorder.
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By far the bigger investment was made in human
resources and concerned class size. Keeping the maximum level of participants down to 10
in any class when the usual size for language courses is 25, means more than halving
capacity utilization; this effect is multiplied if several parallel classes are taught.
Nevertheless, it was felt that this decision made pedagogical sense for classes that
focused on writing and speaking skills, an assumption which has found ample confirmation
over the past ten years.
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In practice, smaller class sizes in some courses
have resulted not only from artificially set ceilings, but also from the need to offer a
sufficient number of parallel courses at different times for students of many faculties,
while prescribing a given sequence for some of the courses. For example, experience has
shown that offering course III (Introduction to Business Communication) in parallel on two
different days is sufficient to meet the demand; but, as this course can only be taken by
the students who have already passed the tests in courses I and II, the two classes tend
to be smaller than the maximum possible size. Even if there are only 25 candidates for the
course (which sometimes happens), two courses must be offered, as the students cannot all
attend at the same time. This seems to be a small point, but it has significant
consequences for long-term capacity planning.
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A corollary of this situation is the need to
offer the courses at times which are realistic for all the students. This means that those
who start the programme must be able to complete it. Each of the starting courses (I, V
and VI) must be offered at least three times in parallel, on different days. The more
students join the programme, the better the (teaching) capacity will be utilized in the
more advanced courses, even if the dropout rate never exceeds 10 percent. The best times
for the higher courses have turned out to be late in the afternoon, from 4:30 to 8 p.m. At
these times, even students who are doing an industrial placement locally can attend. Of
course, participants who have been working or attending lectures since the early morning
are tired at these times, but then, they are particularly motivated to work towards the
Certificate. At any rate, the need to keep classrooms free at certain times for the
Certificate students can be a constraint on the scheduling of all lectures in a faculty.
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The great interest shown by the students for the
programme from the very beginning soon resulted in a new challenge: setting up and
managing the database. During the first six semesters card files were used to keep track
of the subjects taken and the exams passed by each student. Subsequently, when it became
necessary to prepare detailed documentation for the Registrar's Office to issue the
certificates, a computer database program was used. Since the secretarial staff of the
department could not be burdened with this additional work, the activities involved were
taken over by one of the two professors teaching the course (one hour's relief per
semester was allocated to this function).
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Finally, a problem arose from the fact that the
numbering of the courses does not correspond to the sequence in which they can be taken.
Throughout the Pilot Phase, students tended to crowd Course I, but to postpone taking V or
VI, believing that the numbers corresponded to a level of difficulty. Furthermore, the
rather complex sequence of the courses tended to be misunderstood by students and staff
alike, so that intensive counselling on the part of those in charge of the programme was
necessary. At the time, various experiments were made with different course coding and
sequence plans, but none of these was really satisfactory. It was therefore decided to
keep the status quo, but to undertake a broad information campaign by distributing
leaflets, posting info sheets in many different places, publishing regular bulletins in
the students' information magazine, and holding frequent counselling sessions. In
addition, it was planned to run courses which must be taken in a sequence (e.g., II and
III), at the same time on the same day, as long, obviously, as they are not taught by the
same person, in order to avoid inadvertent "illegal" enrollment. This strategy
has proved effective and, over the years, has been strengthened by word-of-mouth
advertising of the programme participants.
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For an application-oriented institution like the
Fachhochschule , it is important to assess the results of the kind of programme
presented here not only in terms of student acceptance and teacher satisfaction, but also
with respect to the impact it has on the job prospects of the graduates. Programme
graduates have been asked from the beginning to provide feedback to the FHM on their
career experience with particular reference to the Certificate. Such reports, although too
irregular for a statistically representative quantitative analysis, have indicated that
having the Certificate can significantly improve job prospects, particularly for students
who also have good grades in their main subject. At times of an economic boom, as was the
case at the end of the eighties, this means a higher starting salary. In more difficult
phases of the business cycle, like at the time of writing, the Certificate may simply make
the difference between being offered a job and being turned down.
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Of course, the correlation between professional
success and the Certificate should be put in its right perspective. The students who
decide to participate in this largely optional programme are arguably high achievers
anyway, who are likely to perform above the average. From the standpoint of a future
employer, good English skills are not only essential for work in a global market, but also
proof of a very welcome versatility in a technical professional.
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The positive acceptance on the part of the
students can be gauged on the basis of two elements: the willingness to enroll in the
programme and to continue with it, and the comments made in the anonymous, written
questionnaires distributed at regular intervals throughout the programme. The actual
number of participants in the eight courses, after a rapid increase in the Pilot Phase,
has remained constant over the past few years, while the total number of new enrollments
at the FHM has decreased in line with demographic trends. This indicates that,
proportionally, demand for the Certificate has tended to increase.
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The students' responses to the questionnaires
have always provided valuable input for course evaluation and adjustment. Apart from the
occasional complaint about the quantity of subject matter to be studied, most comments are
favourable and focus on five types of benefits:
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- receiving an insight into economics and business topics which are otherwise not
addressed by the technical degree chosen;
- getting instruction in receptive (listening and reading comprehension) and productive
(speaking, writing) skills in specially designed courses;
- developing English language skills in particular, and by virtue of transfer, verbal
skills in general, which represents a welcome contrast to the methodological approach of a
technical degree course;
- benefiting from individual attention from the teacher in the classes in which the number
of participants is limited;
- getting to know, over the eight courses, students from other departments and thus
receiving an insight into different disciplines and careers.
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Of the five areas above, four can be seen as
inherent to the Certificate programme, whereas the last one appears of a more general
nature. Interdisciplinary courses of this kind are excellent practice for the future job
of any technical professional. In fact, this may well be the benchmark for the success of
the Certificate: improving the ability to communicate beyond the boundaries of a technical
field, of a company, and of a country.
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- Beneford, C. 1984. Business Communication: Practical written English for the business
wold. London: BBC English.
- Fitzpatrick, A., and C. Yates. 1990. Bid for power. London: BBC English by Television
(ELTDU).
- Murphy, R. 1996. English Grammar in Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Newbolt, B. 1992. Meeting objectives. Video. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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