INTEGRATED EDUCATION FOR MID-ADOLESCENT ENGINEERING STUDENTS IN KOSEN

This study examines methods for imparting first-through-third-grade engineering students in KOSEN (one of the Japanese tertiary educational institutions, the National Institute of Technology, which conducts 5- or 7-year-rapid growth of engineers after grade 9) with fundamental reading competence in response to our finding that some students have difficulty understanding textbooks and dictionaries. We used the Reading Skill Test (RST) to determine students’ reading competencies in October 2018. Students’ results were relatively insufficient in some component skills such as paraphrasing, representing figures or tables with sentences, and instantiating with given definitions. In response, we aimed to develop effective methods to increase the reading skills of 15- to 18-year-old KOSEN students. Such students must acquire basic literacy to understand various types of documents and diverse topics in engineering. In our recent research, we have identified some potentially successful methods, such as keeping a short journal in a business diary to establish self-management skills; reflecting on lectures in Japanese focusing on connecting two sentences with conjunctions; and using figures and tables to comprehend English also verified the RST results with a language skill assessment. In this paper, we report our recent practices.