Twenty-fifth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

The paper describes a situated higher education collaboration project aimed to develop the literacy levels of engineering students to meet the high expectations of a competitive workplace amid employer concerns that engineering graduate communication competencies are lacking and insufficient. For the project, the language and engineering lecturers focused their collaboration on negotiating the rhetorical and content requirements of the design report as a genre. This facilitated making the often tacit discourse understandings and report requirements explicit so that they were mutually-understood and pedagogically overt. There have been few studies on collaboration processes, which is often a messy, complex and lengthy process requiring sustained collaboration spaces and constant negotiation so that the criteria for producing “legitimate text” is not opaque but transparent and explicit. The study used a mixed methodology and the data collection included student and lecturer questionnaires as well as an interview with the engineering lecturer to assess his perceptions of the collaboration practices instituted. During the four-year collaboration period, the language practitioner increasingly gained design report “inside knowledge” of concept selection processes as well as specific rhetorical and discourse structures required to produce the text by co-constructing understanding and knowledge with the engineering lecturer.