REDESIGN OF A FRESHMAN ENGLISH COURSE FOR COMMUNICATIONS ENGINEERING FRESHMEN

This paper reports results of the Freshman English course redesign for Department of Communications Engineering (DCE), Feng Chia University. Skills of teamwork, active learning, creative thinking, critical thinking, and communication in English as a foreign language were particularly emphasized in the redesign endeavour. In recent years, DCE has incorporated CDIO in its curriculum renovation by launching freshman projects, deep-bowl and capstone courses to continuously advance the quality of engineering education. Positive results of DCE’s curriculum reform in developing students’ disciplinary knowledge and competences are evident. Nevertheless, DCE still considered room for improvement, especially in students’ personal and interpersonal skills. Therefore, in 2017, DCE started seeking cross-disciplinary collaboration with Foreign Language Center with keen determination to enhance, from the onset of college education, Freshman students’ personal and interpersonal skills. With such an unprecedented collaboration, an integrated Freshman English program (DCEFE) was launched in Fall 2018 with distinctive features of learning English through active learning in the communication engineering context. Implementation and results of students’ perceptions of the intended learning outcomes are presented for future applications of CDIO syllabus.