Scholarly record

LANGUAGE POLICY FOR SUCCESSFUL ENGINEERING EDUCATION

AL. LIPAEV, S. Lipaev, L. Alekseeva

Abstract

The aim of the Bologna Process is to promote the European system of higher education worldwide, remove obstacles to student and academic mobility within Europe, and bring increased career opportunities for students and teachers in the European employment market. Since 2003 Russia has been involved in the Bologna process. Perhaps the task seems to be extremely ambitious. But we hope it will help us to change the situation with foreign languages acquisition for the better. A significant number of educational experiments are being conducted throughout the country and development of curriculum in English for special purposes (ESP, in our case it is English for petroleum engineers) is among them. Microeconomic indicators and openness of Russia to global economy are being discussed and Russian educational institutions are carefully examining the educational models of developed countries in order to develop the country`s own strategy. We need students which in future will became a qualified and creative workforce with knowledge able to increase productivity, carry out applied and fundamental research and transfer their knowledge to industry. The English language is de-facto standard in cross national communication between engineers. At our institute while starting ESP course, we try to follow the principles: teachability (easy to remember and illustrate), similarity, availability (the whole industry uses them), coverage (include the meaning to be used further in learning). We prepare auxiliary material like parallel texts, background information, bibliography and resources such as specialized web sites, and glossaries. We make a compilation of suitable exercises for the goals we want to reach together with the learners and a part of this practical course deals with metaphors. The English language is rich in metaphors involving animals used in term formation, which sometimes impress the non-English speakers. For example, there are so many `dogs` in engineering : chainsaw dogs, shutter dogs, bench dogs, ladder dogs, hatch dogs, firedogs (alias dog irons, andirons), clutch dogs, lathe dogs, feed dogs. Metaphorisation is viewed as a cognitive model of terms formation in the terminological system of a number of sciences and it is proved that the absolute majority of petroleum engineering metaphoric terms belong to the type of metaphors that can be called orientational-conceptual. It can also be explained by the fact that the oil industry began over five thousand years ago. In the Middle East, oil seeped up

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