The Right Tools for the Job: Discipline-Specific Language-Learning for First-Year International Engineering Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vantage College at UBC offers specialized first-year programs for international students that integrate core disciplinary courses with complementary language education to allow students to develop their communication skills before joining their direct-entry counterparts for the remainder of their studies. This paper builds on the partnership between two first year engineering chemistry courses and their adjunct language courses, in which the instructors work closely together to accomplish mutual learning objectives. As a measure of the effectiveness of this integrated approach on the development of discipline-specific communication skills, the frequency of specific language error types are tracked in student’s lab reports, across two terms, and students report through a survey their perception of how this integrated approach helped them develop their technical communication skills. Overall, as indicated by both significant reductions in the frequency of several error types, as well as the responses provided by students, this integrated approach is effective, and the data suggests key areas of focus for further improvement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".