Basic Functional Literacy for Engineering Students: Towards a Linguistic Definition

Abstract

Queen's University at Kingston Established categories of grammatical, sociolinguistic and discourse competence and principles of autonomous and ideological literacy are used as the basis for an analysis ef e"ors in submissions for a post-admissionswriting test at university level. To complement Crawford's recent (1995) analysis ef the test in this journal, emphasis is placed on identifying the significant ''job-related" e"ors BackgroundTire Pedagogical Need 41 IT IS OF COURSE PEDAGOGICALLY ABSURD to expect teachers of any technical writing course to provide meaningful instruction when a significant proportion of the students is functionally illiterate in the language of instruction. Yet that is often the case in many English language Canadian colleges and universities today. Increased numbers of immigrants and visa students, especially from the Pacific Rim, coupled with reduced funding in schools for skilled library teaching, ESL instruction and special education, mean that fewer students are capable ofbenefiting from a technical writing or first-year writing course.The lack of reliable admissions criteria for writing ability is the real problem. TOEFL test scores tell us very little about the candidates' abilities Technostyle Vol. 14, No. 11998 Spring!Printemps 42 Basic Functional Literacy to comprehend or write in English; and the TOEFL essay scores, though more reliable as an indicator, are not readily available internationally. The grossly-inflated marks for graduating high school English in Canada are at best a poor indicator of a student's ability to write in English. Marks in the high 80s and even the 90s are no guarantee of basic functional literacy, although marks below 70 do tend to indicate general illiteracy in English. Moreover, school grades for "English" tend to reflect students' abilities to analyse literary texts, and are thus often unreliable indicators of their abilities to express themselves clearly and correctly.Because of the unreliability ofindicators ofbasic proficiency in written English, every year Canadian colleges and universities find that they have admitted students who are functionally illiterate in written English. One solution is a first-year course with early testing and streaming, with additional time being given to those with severe language and writing problems. Another solution, discussed here, is a post-admissions test, designed to identify the weaker students early in first year and to require them to improve to a minimum level of adult functional literacy (N afzinger et al, 1976) before being allowed to start a technical writing course. The question then becomes: ''What is that minimum level?" To answer that in other than loose aims or goals, we need to establish writing competence in clear linguistic terms. Defining Basic Functional LiteracyThe difficulty of defining literacy in reasonably concrete terms has been noted by Mikulecky and Drew (1991), who claim that:Most attempts to define literacy or establish a criterion for determining what is "basic functional l...