Bilingual teaching is one of the most significant teaching modalities in non-English-speaking country, and becomes a routine engineering education method in China. Different from the traditional teaching method using native language (Such as Chinese), bilingual engineering teaching typically includes scientific English teaching as an important complement for teaching of professional knowledge. However, engineering teacher‟s lacking of teaching skill and experience in language teaching will probably make negative impact to bilingual engineering teaching. Moreover, the nonproficiency using of English from both teacher and student may become a barrier in class, which makes such course tend to a one way task.
This course based study examines how the reconstructed curriculum using CDIO concept can improve the teaching effect in both professional knowledge and scientific English knowledge, as well as other studying activities in the course.
The data were collected from an undergraduate Digital Image Processing course at Chengdu University of Information Technology, China. Two groups of students from 3rd year undergraduate students are compared. One group was taught in the traditional bilingual method which teaches professional course and scientific English course separately, the other one studied using reconstructed CDIO curriculum which integrates both professional knowledge and scientific English in a single course. Academic scores for both professional knowledge and scientific English knowledge were test as the quantitative evaluation, and subject survey of students to evaluate the teaching effects was also taken as well.
The research showed a significant improving in study confidence and interests of students in professional knowledge as well as scientific English according to the subjective survey. Besides that, the academic scores of the professional knowledge are similar for both teaching method (an average point of 48.15 in a total 70 points of the traditional method compared with an average point of 47.93 using the reconstructed CDIO bilingual teaching). However, the academic scores of the scientific English in the new way achieved significant improvement for the average point of 21.78 in a total 30 points compared to the students in the old method only got 17.47 averagely.
The study suggests that using CDIO concept in curriculum design for bilingual Engineering teaching can significantly improve the study confidence and activate studying tendency of students. Meanwhile, the studying result of the professional English can also be enhanced through the CDIO framework together with a stable teaching effect in the professional knowledge.