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In 2004, the Council for Higher Education (CHE) required a curriculum responsiveness to the teaching and learning of literacies at the programme level, which needed to be addressed across all disciplines. This study aims to describe a situated higher education (HE) collaboration project between mechanical engineering and the Department of Applied Language Studies (DALS) at Nelson Mandela University from 2010 to 2014. The collaboration project aimed to develop the literacies levels of engineering students, reduce the first-year attrition rate and prepare engineering students to meet the high graduate attribute expectations of a competitive workplace amid employer concerns that engineering graduate communication competencies were lacking and insufficient.

The collaboration study used a mixed-method approach, which included student and lecturer questionnaires, as well as an interview with one engineering lecturer to determine his perceptions of the collaboration practices instituted. As the sample was purposeful, two mechanical engineer lecturers and 32 second-year mechanical engineering students from 2012 to 2013 were selected as the study’s participants, as they met the study’s specific needs. From the questionnaire responses and transcribed interview data, codes were identified to describe the themes that emerged, namely, rating the collaboration practices, attitudes to the course, report feedback provided and report template use.

Most of the student participants viewed the collaboration practices positively and identified their attitude as “positive” and “enthusiastic” to the language/engineering report collaboration initiative. The report feedback practices were viewed as improving writing skills and enabling the students to relate report writing practices to workplace needs. The engineering lecturers also found that the collaboration practices were enabling and improved literacy levels, although time was identified as a constraint. During the four-year collaboration period, the language practitioner increasingly gained report content knowledge, as well as unpacking the specific rhetorical structures required to produce the report text by co-constructing knowledge with the mechanical engineering lecturers.

Studies have shown that language practitioners and discipline lecturers need to change their conceptualisation of academic discourses as generic transferable skills and autonomous bodies of knowledge. Little benefit is derived from this model, least of all for the students who grapple with disciplinary forms of writing and the highly technical language of engineering. Discipline experts often tend to conflate understandings of language, literacy and discourse, which lead to simplistic understandings of how students may be inducted into engineering discourses. Therefore, spaces to nurture and extend language practitioner and discipline-expert collaborations are needed to embed the teaching and learning of discipline-specific literacies within disciplines.

For the collaboration project, the language practitioner and mechanical engineering lecturers focused their collaboration on discussing and negotiating the rhetorical and content requirements of the Design 3 report as a genre. To achieve the goal of making tacit knowledge and discourse explicit, takes time and effort, so without the investment of time and buy-in, interaction would not be sustained, and the collaboration would have been unproductive. As a result, the collaboration project required regular meetings, class visits and negotiations, as well as a language of description so that the often tacit report discourse conventions and requirements could be mutually understood and pedagogically overt to produce “legitimate texts” (Luckett, 2012 p. 19).

In practice, peer collaboration is often a messy, complex and lengthy process, which requires systematic and sustained spaces to provide discourse scaffolding so that the criteria for producing legitimate design reports are not opaque, but transparent and explicit pedagogically. The study also describes the organisational circumstances that generated the collaboration, as establishing and sustaining a collaborative culture over time requires planning, on-going dialogic spaces, as well as support and buy-in at various institutional levels to maintain the feasibility of the collaboration practice.

Literacy and discourse collaboration tends to reduce role differentiation amongst language teachers and specialists, which results in shared expertise for problem-solving that could provide multiple solutions to literacy and discourse learning issues. This finding is important, especially as most studies focus on collaboration practices in isolation, whilst fewer studies have focused on the process of collaboration between language practitioners and disciplinary specialists as has been described in this study.

Although English for academic purposes (EAP) courses are vital components of engineering disciplines in the universities of Iran, studies investigating engineering students' English language needs are infrequent, and even more infrequent are studies comparing how the students of different engineering disciplines vary in their English language needs. Research demonstrates that students of different disciplines have different language needs, which requires competency in different language skills (Soruç et al., 2018). However, in the majority of Iranian universities, students of different engineering disciplines are taught similar subskills, through similar teaching methodologies and textbooks. With the twofold purpose of identification and comparison of the students' language needs and weaknesses, this study focuses on the perceptions of Iranian students of electrical, mechanical and chemical engineering at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels of their present language abilities and target-situation language needs.

Online surveys regarding language needs and self-assessments were completed by 194 undergraduate students and 189 postgraduate students studying at Sharif University.

While only educational level was found to have a significant effect on the perceptions of the respondents of their target needs, both educational level and discipline had a significant effect on the perceptions of the students of their present level of language proficiency. Furthermore, almost equal attention to the four language skills were considered necessary by the respondents, who also held that the number of credits devoted to the EAP courses was insufficient. A further finding was that the majority of the undergraduates required that the EAP courses be oriented toward English for specific purposes (ESP), whereas almost half of the postgraduates preferred that the EAP classes be geared toward general English.

Researchers have so far analyzed the language needs of students of a number of academic disciplines. This study adds to the existing literature of needs-analysis by comparing the engineering students' present abilities and target language needs. This study is different from the existing publications on language needs-analysis in two ways. First, through a comparative perspective, a profile of engineering students' language needs is obtained, which can serve as a new database for curriculum developers and material designers of engineering programs. Second, investigating whether the students' perceptions of their language needs are affected by their educational levels and disciplines is a topic for which there is little information at present.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how dominant social practices embedded in situated report‐writing activities in an automotive discourse community in South Africa causally shape component engineers' perceptions of literacy. The study explores how the dominant practices of supervisor feedback and report acceptance causally impact on effective report‐writing perceptions during report text production.

Critical ethnography is the preferred methodology as it explores cultural orientations of local practice contexts and incorporates multiple understandings to provide a holistic understanding of the complexity of writing practices. This study focuses on data collected during two interviews and a focus group discussion with four L2 component engineers as well as the questionnaires their two L1 supervisors completed.

The engineers tended to measure or associate literacy and effective writing standards with supervisor feedback practices. These feedback practices interacted causally with the meanings or associations, the participants gave to or associated with literacy and their report‐writing competency. As a consequence, literacy was often described in terms of correct wording or terminology, grammatical correctness, spelling, sentence structures or styles in reports as determined by their supervisors during feedback practices, rather than report content, structure or technical details.

The participants constructed literacy in terms of correct language, word and spelling use and focused on linguistic errors in their report writing. They tended to perceive rhetoric and engineering discourse as separate entities rather than rhetorically constructed contextual knowledge. Language problems were usually attributed to human being inefficiencies and L1 standards rather than the individual creation of knowledge.

This paper not only impacts causally on engineering workplace writing practices but on higher education and future report‐writing practices. Digital technologies and systems will increasingly impact on report‐writing practices, what constitutes contextual knowledge and acceptable literacies as varied and different audiences define acceptable writing practices.

The paper shows that on‐the‐job writing research is limited and research that has been done often focuses on criteria for good writing as defined by experts in the field. If all workplace writing‐practice research adopts this expert view, it offers no insight and understanding into what implicitly and explicitly guides writers. Writing‐practice research also needs to focus on the voices of writers so that the influence of human social behaviour on these practices can be understood.

The software virtual machine (SVM) concept is described as a methodology to reduce the manpower required to implement and maintain finite element software. A SVM provides the engineering programmer with high‐level languages to facilitate the structuring and management of data, to define and interface process modules, and to manage computer resources. A prototype finite element system has been successfully implemented using the SVM approach. Development effort is significantly reduced compared to a conventional all‐FORTRAN approach. The impact on execution efficiency of the SVM is described along with special procedures developed to minimize overhead in compute‐bound modules. Planned extensions of capabilities in the SVM used by the authors are outlined.

The purpose of this column is to inform librarians and other information professionals about prompt engineering (PE) and to challenge them to consider how it relates to the work that they are doing and consider if it might enhance their current ability to serve users.

PE is a new job category in the fields of technology and artificial intelligence. Prompt engineers use various approaches to elicit the best possible outputs from large language module technologies such as ChatGPT. This column examines the various elements present in effective prompts and how the skills, knowledge and abilities relate to the work that librarians already do, where there are disruptions and how the field of library and information science may approach studying the emergence and effectiveness of PE in resolving information needs.

While PE shares many of the goals, procedures and skillsets that librarians already know and use, it is a disruption in information-seeking processes. It is a highly complex undertaking that requires a mix of knowledge, skills and abilities. If done well, PE will allow information seekers to achieve a whole new level of results both in terms of the information retrieved and the content that is produced based on that information.

Librarians are currently generally not considered to be prime candidates for PE positions. However, this column introduces the idea that many librarians already have the knowledge, skills, abilities and aptitude to do PE. This may be as prompt engineers or by integrating PE into their existing professional practice.

In this paper we give a synoptic view of the growth of the text processing technology of information extraction (IE) whose function is to extract information about a pre‐specified set of entities, relations or events from natural language texts and to record this information in structured representations called templates. Here we describe the nature of the IE task, review the history of the area from its origins in AI work in the 1960s and 70s till the present, discuss the techniques being used to carry out the task, describe application areas where IE systems are or are about to be at work, and conclude with a discussion of the challenges facing the area. What emerges is a picture of an exciting new text processing technology with a host of new applications, both on its own and in conjunction with other technologies, such as information retrieval, machine translation and data mining.

The definition of modeling languages is a key‐prerequisite for model‐driven engineering. In this respect, Domain‐Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) defined from scratch in terms of metamodels and the extension of Unified Modeling Language (UML) by profiles are the proposed options. For interoperability reasons, however, the need arises to bridge modeling languages originally defined as DSMLs to UML. Therefore, the paper aims to propose a semi‐automatic approach for bridging DSMLs and UML by employing model‐driven techniques.

The paper discusses problems of the ad hoc integration of DSMLs and UML and from this discussion a systematic and semi‐automatic integration approach consisting of two phases is derived. In the first phase, the correspondences between the modeling concepts of the DSML and UML are defined manually. In the second phase, these correspondences are used for automatically producing UML profiles to represent the domain‐specific modeling concepts in UML and model transformations for transforming DSML models to UML models and vice versa. The paper presents the ideas within a case study for bridging ComputerAssociate's DSML of the AllFusion Gen CASE tool with IBM's Rational Software Modeler for UML.

The ad hoc definition of UML profiles and model transformations for achieving interoperability is typically a tedious and error‐prone task. By employing a semi‐automatic approach one gains several advantages. First, the integrator only has to deal with the correspondences between the DSML and UML on a conceptual level. Second, all repetitive integration tasks are automated by using model transformations. Third, well‐defined guidelines support the systematic and comprehensible integration.

The paper focuses on the integrating direction DSMLs to UML, but not on how to derive a DSML defined in terms of a metamodel from a UML profile.

Although, DSMLs defined as metamodels and UML profiles are frequently applied in practice, only few attempts have been made to provide interoperability between these two worlds. The contribution of this paper is to integrate the so far competing worlds of DSMLs and UML by proposing a semi‐automatic approach, which allows exchanging models between these two worlds without loss of information.

The aim of this paper is to show how multilinguality is permanently present in organizations in this global world, and how they should take into account the multilingual phenomenon specifically from the perspective of knowledge management in order to gain presence in markets.

The approach followed by the authors consists of a review of the published literature addressing this issue during the last years, followed by a proposal of applicable technologies in each step of the information processing.

The clearest finding is that if technology is not used for solving the problems that arise when dealing with multilingual contents, efficient information managing turns out a rather difficult task.

The paper points out a number of different states in the information flows, which make it possible to study and analyse the most appropriate technologies for their orderly treatment. A unified treatment of the information flows is recommended, especially if there are multilingual components.

The issue of multilinguality in organizations, a possible cause of a weak penetration in the global world, has been scarcely studied and hardly tackled from a methodological perspective. This paper suggests technologies adequate for different situations when managing organizational information.