Languages lecturer wins award

Languages lecturer Francoise Blin wins 'engineering' award.

It is not often that a non-engineer wins an engineering prize, yet this is exactly what Francoise Blin, lecturer in SALIS, and 'honorary' member of the science and engineering faculties, has achieved. Working in collaboration with Roisin O'Donohoe of the Institut National des Télécommunications, they have been awarded the 'Fondation Louis Leprince-Ringuet' award worth €7,000 for their project on language teaching to engineers. The presentation itself took place at Evry, just outside Paris, on 31st January 2002.

Leading French telecommunications companies such as Siemens France, Alcatel, Cegetal, Motorola Inc and France Telecom are all members of the foundation, whose overall aim is to promote the education of telecom engineers in France.

Francoise's project, TECHNE, was a study of computer-mediated communication, which is a collaborative approach to language teaching. Its fundamental premise is that teaching a foreign language to students of other academic disciplines such as engineering and science requires different teaching methodologies to traditional language learning. Preparing engineers for a work placement abroad, for example, requires more than a simple linguistic training; it is not just about vocabulary or the ability to translate from one language to another. It involves the ability to communicate in a rounded way in 'real life' professional situations, which demands an understanding of intercultural approaches to problems. This so-called 'tandem learning' is now an integral part of both the B.Eng and M.Eng Electronics Systems degree programmes at DCU.

For the undergraduate programme students spend six months at a university in France; for the postgraduate programme, they spend a full year in France when they are awarded both an M.Eng and a Diplôme d'Ingénieur. As its partner for these programmes, DCU chose one of the highest calibre universities in France, the Institut National des Télécommunications, which is a 'grande école' producing top class specialists in the field of electronics and telecommunications.

However, this project is not just about collaboration between two institutions, but also about interdisciplinarity. Despite the lack of a national policy, there are interesting and innovative initiatives being taken in the area of language learning and the use of technology in the classroom, and specifically in relation to the fields of science and engineering. As Francoise explains, "France is an extremely high-tec country with enormous expertise in the area of science technology - it produced Concorde, the TGV. It is important that with globalisation, Europeans learn to share expertise and communicate effectively with each other. This goes beyond pure language-learning per se, and into realms of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary learning . Irish engineers must be able to function in a multi-cultural environment".

Francoise's DCU students and Roisin O'Donohoe's students at the INT in France, took part in a virtual class room 'experiment', with a common subject-specialism of electronics. They designed bilingual chatrooms, talked to each other through videoconferencing sessions and drew up teaching materials which they shared using a software programme called Topclass. Lecturers were able to intervene in the videoconferencing and chat sessions which took place in French and English. By using this tandem learning approach, each learning institution becomes both teacher and learner.

Francoise is keen to emphasise that this project would not have been possible without the coorperation of staff from the engineering department at DCU, in particular Jim Dowling, Noel Murphy and Charles McCorkell. In fact, it was the pioneering approach of the electronics department as a whole which brought about the introduction of these unique degree programmes which have resulted in Irish engineers being on a par with their European counterparts.