Future Oriented Specialization for Engineering Students Based on TecCOMFrame
Future Oriented Specialization for Engineering Students Based on TecCOMFrame

Summary/Abstract: Today's career development requires specialized jobs and consequently special skills. More and more universities are offering new job perspectives nowadays, technical communicator being one of them that is much in demand. One fundamental task in the architecture of this job is use of terminology and terminology management. A specialization course containing terminology training provides students with those skills that will enable them to carry out writing, translating and editing work efficiently. After discussing the academic qualification and competence framework for technical communication entitled TecCOMFrame (Erasmus+ project, 2015), that offers teaching staff the best premise to select relevant subjects for a particular target group to be trained in Technical Communication (TC), the authors of the present article document the selection criteria and present the prototype curriculum for a specialization course in TC for engineering students. The present practice-oriented study introduces a case study with Romanian engineering Master’s-level students as an example of innovative language learning. Taking into account that engineering students are quite familiar with vocabulary training in a foreign language (FL), an interdisciplinary approach with emphasis on terminology training in English and German as a FL is appropriate. Because engineering students are taught about the tight links between terminology and the topics of different subject courses they are studying, they have an interest in terminology. Furthermore, students could and should be made aware of the significance of terminology knowledge for a possible job in the domain of TC or specialized translation. The aim of the present study is thus twofold: on the one hand, to highlight the benefits of a comprehensive academic competence framework such as TecCOMFrame which can be the starting point of curriculum development in TC for engineering students and, on the other hand, to prove the benefits of a future-oriented specialization course tailored according to the needs of this special target group of students. By the end of their master’s studies, these students will improve their proficiency of the FL and could opt for a career as technical communicator, which is in high demand, not only in Romania but also throughout Europe.

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