Effective English support for overseas students in engineering departments

This paper was presented at the 2008 Engineering Conference - Innovation Good Practice and Research in Engineering Education.

This paper explores the extent of the problem faced by overseas students then goes on to describe briefly two departments’ initial attempts to match those problems to new English language support mechanisms. A study in the Electronic and Electrical Engineering and Automatic Control and Systems Engineering departments at the University of Sheffield attempted to define the support needed by overseas students by:

• surveying overseas students’ perceptions of English language support
• using focus groups of overseas students to find out how they think their abilities in English affected their first year in university
• consulting staff on their perceptions of overseas students’ need for support with the English language.