EXTEND WARWICK WORKSHOP

The Warwick workshop took place against a major change in surrounding circumstances. The corona virus crisis led to 13 cancellations and only 9 attendees plus 3 Warwick hosts.

This crisis raised a number of challenges regarding the Warwick workshop, mainly:

content,  order of agenda items, online communication with the other participants,

financial issues regarding both the cancellations and overall budget breakdown.

 NMSTU team presented the coures, Foreign Language for Engineering. Academic Writing” Key speakers: Natalia Zerkina, Iulia Savinova. Mentor RTU.

The speakers made an ample and well documented presentation of their product that up to the present has run into more than two hundred pages. The presentation was also accurately structured on the recommended template.

Natalia Zerkina, Iullia Savinova underlined that the course is being adopted for e-version. Didactic materials are taken from real sites (references to the sites are given) and adopted for training purposes, private developers’ materials are included into the course as well. “Listening” part was arranged with a help of colleagues from Riga Technical University, who were asked to make recording for the course. It is planned to make recording of “Listening” part with native- and non-native speakers, as in real life we speak more often with non-native speakers.

Learner-oriented approach which is applied in the course shows that teachers must have in advance prepared ‘differentiation’ strategies to ensure that their activity instructions are understood.

Various forms and techniques of training such as case studies, monologues, dialogues, polylogues, role plays, flipped learning, Project-based learning, ICT learning, Problem-based learning, etc. are implemented. English is treated as a means of building professional capacity of future engineers and teachers of engineering disciplines.