Effective methods for teaching technical English to Japanese engineering students: Case study at School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo

This paper describes our four-year experience in teaching technical writing in English to engineering graduate students at School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo. This graduate course lecture is a new attempt to teach and train graduate students how to write scientific and engineering papers in English so that their papers will be easily understood by native speakers of English. To get rid of the students' bad habits of directly translating Japanese original texts into English word-for-word, we pointed out that these translations will give an incomprehensible, funny, or incorrect impression on native speakers of English and introduced correction measures. For that purpose, differences in the writing styles and in the sentence structures of Japanese and English were discussed in detail: conclusions come first in English, but conclusions come last in Japanese; the three-step style of introduction, body, and conclusion in English versus the four-step style of ki-sho-ten-ketsu in Japanese. In addition, differences in ways of thinking (mind-set) in Japanese and English were discussed and it was stressed that English way of thinking should be used when writing in English. The remaining lectures are devoted to the proper style of technical papers and related grammatical points that Japanese engineering students should follow.