By Patrick Persaud
Do professionals and students speak the same language? How do engineers learn to communicate in the language of their profession? How do mathematicians learn to speak the language of mathematics? How do students learn to communicate in the languages of their disciplines and future professions? Natasha Artemeva of Carleton’s School of Linguistics and Language Studies (SLaLS) is attempting to answer these and other questions.
Artemeva’s first task at SLaLS was to design and implement a course that would satisfy the requirement of the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board to introduce a written and oral communication component into the engineering curriculum. Artemeva taught and coordinated the mandatory engineering communication course for six years. Now that the communication program at SLaLS is well established, Communication Courses for Disciplines and Professions are taught by five instructors to over seven hundred students a year. In addition to the engineering communication course, the courses include a graduate course for engineering students on thesis writing, a communication course for Computer Science majors, and two courses for Bachelor of Information Technology (one for interactive media designers and the other for network administrators). Artemeva is quick to point out, however, that her colleague Susan Logie and other instructors at SLaLS now maintain the program.
Since the program’s inception, Artemeva has received her doctorate in Education with the emphasis on engineering communication and was awarded the Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication by the Conference of College Composition and Communication (USA). Her research endeavour was an eight-year study, which focused on the questions of how novice engineers learn to communicate by using the “language of the engineering profession.” Her doctoral work indicates that social contexts of university programs and the professional workplace are so radically different that many “ingredients” of professional communication knowledge — such as cultural capital, personal motivation, content knowledge, and so on — need to be in place for an engineering student to be accepted by seasoned engineers as a professional communicator.
Artemeva’s current work on a SSHRC-funded study focuses on the language of teaching undergraduate mathematics. She collaborates with Janna Fox from SLaLS and Anthony Paré from McGill University on investigating the ways mathematics is taught to undergraduate students around the globe in an attempt to understand whether any support is needed (and/or possible) for new faculty in departments of mathematics in Canada. Another issue that the researchers are hoping to address in this study is the difficulties undergraduate students in science, engineering, and business programs often experience when studying mathematics.
So far, the researchers have observed that regardless of the country in which instructors live and work, regardless of where they were educated, their age, and the language they speak, all of them use very similar ways of teaching mathematics to undergraduate university students. The researchers have come to call this way of teaching “chalk talk.” Currently Artemeva and her colleagues are addressing the question why this way of teaching mathematics overrides national, linguistic, educational, generational, and gender differences. They expect that their research would lead them to an understanding of how university students can be assisted in learning mathematics.