In this course, we will take it to mean
the language skills necessary for an engineer
to do day-to-day work in English in a very broad
sense.
What does an engineer do?
The main work of an engineer is to build solutions
to problems. What language skills are necessary for
that? Enough reading, writing, listening, and speaking
proficiency to:
- understand the problem
- collect information, equipment, people, etc. to solve it
- explain the progress (final result) of the work
Although the term problem usually has a negative
connotation, for engineers this is not always the case.
For engineers, a problem is a "gap between what you have
(reality) and what you want (ideal situation)" and the job
is to close this gap. Maybe you have written a program
that works correctly, but you would like it to run faster.
The robot prototype you built is ready for new features to
be added.
For simple problems, language skills might not be so important,
but when there are complications (e.g., there is not enough time,
money, or information to solve the problem as planned), then language
skills will often become very important in getting the job done.
What about non-technical English?
Engineers are people, too, and there will be many
situations in which you need language skills to solve
problems that are not directly related to the details
of getting your work done.
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