VERMITTLUNGSTEXTE IM STUDIENBEGLEITENDEN DEUTSCHUNTERRICHT AN EINER TECHNISCHEN UNIVERSITÄT
SUBJECT-ORIENTED TEXTS FOR THE STUDY OF GERMAN IN TECHNICAL UNIVERSITIES

Summary/Abstract: Given the flood of information the knowledge gap between professionals and the rest of society is expanding and consequently specialization of knowledge turns into a a risk factor. Since each professional group has its own code of solving domain-specific problems, the expertise-knowledge is often not efficiently understood by non-specialists/laymen. Because of this, the interest in specialized and subject-oriented texts (the so called Vermittlungstexte”) has lately increased a lot among linguistics and communication specialists who look for means of improving the inteligibility of these texts and thus their reception by end users. With respect to the changing profile of the engineer, whose area of activity is situated at the interface between production and consumption, and the fact that engineers in leadership positions are also responsible for the quality of information and knowledge transfer (e.g. in the form of instructional texts), the author of the present paper believes that teaching specialized languages at technical universities is meant to develop a new objective in the foreign language curricula. Engineering students should be made aware of their responsibility towards ensuring the effectiveness of knowledge transfer among laymen/endusers; therefore, a curricula update, made possible by the inclusion in the curriculum of a new course offer, entitled Technical Writer/Technical Communicator, might be according to the author a timely requirement if we envisage a revised profile of the engineering qualification in the global labour market. These assumptions are documented by the description of a successful project work with students of the German Stream of the Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages (University „Politehnica” of Bucharest) that shows the benefits of making use of the foreign language teaching for specific purposes at technical universities in order to introduce a Technical Writing/ Technical Documentation course, which is absent now in Romania on an institutional level.

• Details
• Contents