Chapter 6 Empirical Experiences of academic literacy
6.6 Perceptions of the Technical Communication course
6.6.1 Students‘ perspectives
The adequacy of the Technical Communication course in equipping students with the necessary skills was another discursive theme that emerged from the data.
Responses from both students and tutors were mixed, with some suggesting that the module was achieving its purposes and others indicating shortcomings. Students who thought the module was achieving its purposes used their perceived success in executing the activities they were given in the module as a measure, while those who thought it did not meet their needs focused on their needs for the degree as a whole. Moreover, while students who had recently completed the module thought they had benefited from the module, students who were in their second or third year, where they had further report writing to do, felt the course had not adequately prepared them to handle this kind of writing.
Positive comments:
Student 1: I think it‟s a good module to start off with in the beginning because umm, we will obviously be doing report writing, I am sure it does help you, gives you a head start, when you get to that point you have an idea of how to do about writing
Student 2: Well, I think it was very helpful because it introduced us to a different writing style that I never thought of.
Student 14: I think it‟s a very important course because it teaches you like more in-depth how to use language skills as an engineer....to speak well and um, write reports, that‟s one of the main things we do as engineers.
Negative comments
Student 5: ... the only problem is that they introduce it to us very early, while we not even, like first semester first year, we are still finding our feet...if they were to introduce it to us maybe first year second semester to get us ready for second year, because second year is when we write reports, most importantly if we start with like second year semester two that‘s when we like really start report writing because second year first semester we don‘t really write even if they give it to us , first semester second year it will still be fresh in our minds.
Student 4 and student 7 reiterated these sentiments regarding the adequacy of the course:
Student 4: Oh well, I think, we didn‟t do it for very long, so I don‟t think we got much out of it, but doing eh, engineering modules now, I can see where it does come in because now we have to do report writing , than we did then.
Back then we just, we took it for granted as first years because we were at, we were at that stage where we thought we are never gonna use this, because we didn‘t use it then.
Student 7: ... there is a time period between the the time in which I was taught Tech Com and the time in which I need to actually apply the knowledge I acquired during the Tech Com..
The sentiments that students 4, 5 and 5 raise are very significant. They problematise the justification of ‗stand alone‘ academic literacy courses which are separated from the content subjects students are doing at any partcular time.They also raise a similarly important question about whose purposes are being achieved by providing the course in the first semester of the first year when, as the students said; they were just doing Maths and Physics (Student 4) and their brains were set on calculations
(Students 14 and 16). Other comments related to the course were focused on the tutors and the way in which the tutorials were structured.
Student 4: I think it would have been better if we had engineers that took us for engineering... I remember we had a lecturer called xxxxx, he took us, and he wasn‘t really in tune with the whole engineering part of it, and he was not in tune with the manner in which, the way in which we had to, ah I think,.... we didn‘t learn as much as we could have in terms of what to write instead of how to write. I think it‘s more important for us to know what to write than how to write.
Student 5 [the tutorials]:...they were uncomfortable cause most of the time the tutor would be speaking and we were listening.
Student 13: Well, um some of us didn‟t really go for the lectures…It‟s kind of boring though, it‟s not nice… you do fall asleep.
Student 4 raises some very critical issues concerning the pedagogy of the course, in particular the approach that is used in the tutorials. It is clear that the tutor‘s unfamiliarity with engineering discourse did not escape this student‘s attention, raising another question: who owns the discourse in the Technical Communication course? The language tutors or the engineering students? Student 4 clearly makes a distinction between ‗they‘ (language tutors) and ‗us‘ (engineers/engineering students) when he says ―he [the language tutor] was not in tune with the … way in which we [engineers] had to … think‖. Student 5 highlights another critical issue concerning the pedagogy of the course. Her comment suggests that students were reduced to the role of audience in the tutorials with the tutor doing all the talking while students observed and listened. Unsurprisingly some students interviewed saw the role of the tutor as “transferring their knowledge to us” (student 3); or to give “hints on how to write the reports like the conclusion, abstracts, introducing us to abstracts” (student 2). From a Freiran point of view, one can argue that these students were reduced to comatose receptors of academic literacy information, mere objects who have no say in what and how they learn (see Freire, 2008). This has implications for the way in which students acquire academic literacy, as they do not get to learn on their own terms.