Vocabulary Needs of Engineering Students: A Survey
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11113/lspi.v2n1.17Abstract
There is substantial amount of technical vocabulary that new engineering students at the tertiary level are required to read and understand in their field of study. Technical vocabulary refers not to a single word but to a group of terms used to explain scientific processes and relations. This means that in the field of engineering, a scientific field, many technical terms are used. These terms may pose some difficulties to the students when reading engineering textbooks, so here seems to be a need to familiarize them with engineering terms to facilitate reading of those textbooks. In order to develop this specialist list of engineering terms, a group of 7 engineering lecturers were interviewed to find out the students’ vocabulary needs through the seven subject matter expert perspectives. In addition, a survey was carried out on a group of 318 engineering students in a tertiary institution. The survey aims to find out the needs of engineering students for a list of introductory engineering terminology. This paper will therefore present the results of the survey.References
Alderson, J. C. 2000. Assessing reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boylestad, R. & Nashelsky, L. 2012. Electronic Devices & Circuit Theory. 11th Edition. Prentice Hall.
Brantmeier, C. 2005. Effects of reader’s knowledge, text type, and test type on L1 and L2 reading comprehension in Spanish. The Modern Language Journal. 89: 37–53.
Charles, K. A. & Sadiku, N. O. 2003. Fundamental of Electric Circuits. 3rd Edition. McGraw Hill.
Coxhead, A. 2000. A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quaterly. 34(2): 213–238.
Farrell, P. 1990. Vocabulary in ESP: A Lexical Analysis of the English of Electronics and Semi-Technical Vocabulary CLCS Occasional Paper No. 25 Trinity College.
Floyd, T. L. 2009. Principles of Electric Circuits. 9th Edition. Pearson.
Hammadou, J. 1991. Inter-relationships Among Prior Knowledge, Inference, and Language Proficiency in Foreign Language
Reading. The Modern Language Journal. 75: 27–38.
Hammadou, J. 2000. The Impact of Analogy and Content Knowledge on Reading Comprehension: What Helps, What Hurts. The Modern Language Journal. 84: 38–50.
Hancock, O. H. 1998. Reading Skills for College Students. 4th ed. Upper Saddle Rivers, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Hughes, M. S. 1995. Electrical Technology. Wesley Longman.
Hughes, M. S. 2008. Electrical & Electronic Technology. Prentice Hall.
Johnson, P. 1982. Effects of Reading Comprehension on Building Background Knowledge. TESOL Quarterly. 16: 503–516.
Joshi, R. M., & Aaron, P. G. 2000. The Component Model of Reading: Simple View of Reading Made a Little More Complex. Reading Psychology. 21: 85–97.
Kornwipa Poonpon. 2002. Vocabulary Input in English for Science Course: A Course Analysis of Intensive and Extensive Course
Materials. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Mahidol University.
Laufer, B. 1989. What Percentage of Text-Lexis is Essential for Comprehension? In C. Lauren and M. Nordman (eds.). Special
Language: from Humans Thinking to Thinking Machines. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Lee, J. F. 1986. Background Knowledge and L2 Reading. The Modern Language Journal. 70: 350–354.
Liu, J. and Nesi, H. 1999. Are We Teaching the Right Words? A Study of Students’ Receptive Knowledge of Two Types of
Vocabulary: “Subtechnical” and “Technical”. In H. Bool and P. Luford (eds). Academic Standards and Expectations: the Role of EAPNottingham: Nottingham University Press. 142–147.
Love, A. M. 1991. Process and Product in Geology: An Investigation of Some Discourse Features of Two Introductory Textbooks.
English for Specific Purposes. 10(2): 89–109.
Martin-Chang, S. Y., & Gould, O. N. 2008. Revisiting Print Exposure: Exploring Differential Links to Vocabulary, Comprehension and Reading Rate. Journal of Research in Reading. 31: 273–284.
Nagy, W., & Scott, J. 2000. Vocabulary Process. In M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P. Pearson & R. Barr (Eds.). Handbook of Reading
Research Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 3: 269–284.
Nassaji, H. 2003. Higher-level and Lower-level Text Processing Skills in Advanced ESL Reading Comprehension. The Modern Language Journal. 87: 261–276.
Nation, I. S. P. 2001. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pressley, M. 2000. What Should the Comprehension Instruction be Instruction of? In M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P. Pearson & R. Barr (Eds.). Handbook of Reading Research Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 3: 269–284.
Qian, D. D. 2002. Investigating the Relationship between Vocabulary Knowledge and Academic Reading Performance: An Assessment Perspective. Language Learning. 52, pp. 513–536.
Rahman, M. M. 2012. The English Language Needs of Computer Science Undergraduate Students at Putra University, Malaysia:
A Focus on Reading Skills. English for Specific Purposes World. 12: 34.
Shamsudin, S., Abdul Manan, A. and Husin, N. 2012. Introductory Engineering Corpus: A Need Analysis Approach. Procedia Social
and Behavioral Sciences.
Sutarsyah, C., Nation, P. and Kennedy, G. 1994. How |Useful is EAP Vocabulary for ESP? A Corpus Based Case Study. RELC Journal. 25(2): 34–50.
Thomas, L. F. 2003. Principles of Electric Circuits. 7th Edition. Prentice Hall.
West, M. 1953. A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman.
Yang, H. 1986. New Technique for Identifying Scientific/Technical Terms and Describing Texts. Literary and Linguistic Computing.
(2): 93–103.
