Communicative Language Needs of Engineering Students in Nigerian Universities: Implication for Curriculum Development

ABSTRACT

This work is titled "Communicative Language Needs of Nigerian Engineering Students: Implication for Curriculum Development. It was carried out in order to have an insight into the English programme offered to Engineering students of Nigerian universities. The study sets out among other things, to determine the communicative language needs of Nigerian Engineering students in listening, reading, speaking and writing skills, · to determine the position of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in the teaching of communicative skills and to determine the pedagogical implications of the findings for the teaching of ESP. For this purpose, sets of questionnaires were used to elicit the information needed. The responses gathered from the questionnaires were analyzed using simple percentages and mean scores. The statistical tools used were simple mean, percentage and t-test. The analysis of data collected for the research led to the following finding among others: It was found that both respondents considered listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills important to Engineering tasks. It means that the importance attached to all the skills is significant. It also means that both students and lecturers perceived all skills important to those tasks. The researcher concluded that the Engineering students of Nigerian universities have different language needs. For this reason, the branch of ESP relevant to their language needs in their area of study should be taught to them (English for Engineers). In other words, language must be taught in connection with specialized procedures common to the area of specialization in which this special langtfage will be used. Language cannot be disconnected from content, so ESP teachers need to use content as a vehicle to help their ESP-ESL learners develop their listening, reading, speaking, writing, grammar, vocabulary abilities. Based on the finding it is strongly recommended that the English language is used extensively in the Engineering field in EFL and lingua franca contexts. It plays a crucial role as the main tool of communication to conduct a variety of different activities. Therefore, the criteria to define English language courses for Engineering purposes should be based on the target c:,9mmunicative situations representing the communicative use of language rather than formal linguistic categories representing the grammatical rules of language.