Digital German assessment for Swiss engineering students
Reading and writing are key competencies not only in language-focused professions but are becoming increasingly more prominent in technical fields, as domain-specific language and communication skills are now also acknowledged as professional...
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Reading and writing are key competencies not only in language-focused professions but are becoming increasingly more prominent in technical fields, as domain-specific language and communication skills are now also acknowledged as professional literacy (Göpferich/Neumann 2016). Accordingly, the proportion of communicative tasks in everyday work of engineers has increased due to new information processing technologies and because of internal knowledge and quality management systems in companies (Karras et al. 2015). For engineering students in Switzerland, German language competence represents a prerequisite for successfully completing their studies. In fact, reading and writing play a crucial role in almost all engineering subjects as students need to be able to retrieve information from highly complex texts (e.g. journal articles) and also need to produce specialized technical texts (e.g. manuals) for a specific audience or purpose. Consequently, linguistic competencies such as precisely describing objects and processes for documentation or providing technical information to both experts and laymen represent critical study outcomes for engineering students. The aim of our project is to develop an online German test to automatically measure German competencies relevant to engineering students. For this purpose, not only grammatical and lexical skills are being tested (C-tests), but also more complex tasks such as synthesis writing are included and automatically evaluated. The test design is based on a needs analysis with various stakeholders (students, program directors and employers). The data was obtained through semi-structured interviews. Based on the results of the initial online assessment, we want to establish competence profiles that reflect students’ abilities and potential deficiencies regarding their German language competence. Starting from these competence profiles, individualized teaching content is to be created enabling students to focus on specific aspects of reading and writing in their ...
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