Resumen de English for engineering students: needs and attitudes
Engineering students of English, as other ESP students, have special needs; they have a general knowledge of the English Language, but require specific training in English, mainly as regards specific vocabulary and functional language for special professional situations they may encounter in their future careers. However, it is sometimes very difficult for teachers of English to recognise their specific needs, as generally speaking, these teachers were not trained in technical English and find it hard to choose material and to decide on which linguistic functions and grammatical points they will have to focus on. As their teacher, we have some premises about their needs and we try to carry out a schedule which may fulfil those potential needs we guess they will have. However, there is a chance that we are wrong, that their expectations do not match our guesses. The aim of this paper is to present these students' needs and attitudes. Finding out the students' attitudes towards the language and their ideas concerning the needs they may have is a crucial starting point for the teacher to prepare the material which the class will find interesting and relevant.
In order to study the students' attitudes towards English and the needs they think they have, a survey was carried out amongst students who studied English in their degree in the past two years as well as those who are studying this subject during the present academic year. The survey was analysed to study our main concerns in this paper: student needs and attitudes.
