Developing engineering students´ language and cultural skills for academic and professional success

This paper describes work in progress to develop and evaluate a three-week program focusing on academic language and culture for international students beginning a two-year program of study in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We provide a rationale and theoretical background for the program, describe the curriculum, and summarize the evaluation data collected to date. We propose that the increasingly international student body can provide a useful context for preparing all students with global competence for practicing engineering.