Todays globalized world demands successful communication with an increasing diversity of people - from different fields, background and cultures. Intercultural competence is increasingly recognized as an essential skill, especially for engineering graduates who, throughout their professional career, will work in global teams and play an important part in international communities.     In the Department of Languages and Communication at KTH, students can opt/take/add for additional courses to develop their core communication skills,  e.g. scientific writing, rhetoric, foreign languages, and Global competence. The language courses focus on language for professional use in the technology sector. For this reason/accordingly the course offerings at the Department of Languages and Communication aim to prepare the students for a professional career in international contexts, hence communicating in different languages and communicating with others is playing an important role in being a citizen of today’s world.   In the language courses for engineers, we have implemented different methodologies such as collaborative learning, tandem-learning, workshops, visits to technological museums and companies, and virtual Industrial Visits. Integrating these learning activities has different impacts on the course, the teacher, and the students. A course with integrated collaborative international tasks implies changes both in the pedagogic approach of a course, the role of the teacher, and the student’s learning outcome. Using methodologies like collaborative learning as a pedagogical approach in language teaching for engineering students enhance the students'' skills in cross-cultural communication while linking their technological knowledge, with being respectful of multilingualism.  In our presentation, we want to map these impacts on students and teachers in relation to our experiences. We also aim to share best practice on how we integrate international collaborative tasks in language courses for engineers, as a virtual mobility experience. Rethinking our teaching practices in order to facilitate cross-cultural communication through students’ discipline-specific academic language and literacy development to meet the challenges of the increased internationalization and diversity in higher education.   We will show a variety of collaborative activities offered in language courses - French, Japanese and German - as well as in courses in professional communication.  These activities provide students with an opportunity to interact with peers at technical universities and professionals, so they can develop intercultural competences and language skills while working together on subject-specific learning tasks.

In this study, we aim to investigate the best way to organize and teach the compulsory academic writing course Writing in the Engineering Profession (4.5 ECTS credits) in the first term of the five-year program in Computer Science at KTH RoyalInstitute of Technology. The language instruction is Swedish, the L1 of the majority of students. Up until 2016, the course was held by the School of Computer Science and Communication. The course was placed in the fall semester of year 1, toprepare the students for more academic writing tasks, focusing solely on the technical report / essay. However important, the course did not align with the other writing tasks that the students encountered during their first two years of study, and incourse evaluations, the students expressed that they found the course redundant and disconnected from the program as a whole.

In fall 2016 the responsibility for the course was moved to KTH Language and Communication, which began a reconstruction of the course content and learning activities, while still keeping the academic writing objective. The ambition is to continuethe course reconstruction by teaching academic writing to increase the students’ proficiency, using real life text types from their workplaces. But for this, a better understanding of the engineering profession is needed.

Engineering students in Computer Science at KTH write different types of texts, for example, code commentaries and project descriptions, and would, therefore benefit from a broader understanding of the various text types they may encounterduring their studies and future workplaces. As is well known, the importance of excellent communication skills for a successful engineering career cannot be emphasized enough, as discussed by e.g. Lappalainen (2009) and Gustafsson et al.(2014). Therefore, a continuation of the course re-development needs to include other text types, more aligned with other courses and written assignments within the program and in the engineering workplace, to further the students’ engineeringproficiency in literacy.

In this study we propose that a general principle of academic writing could well be used as a starting point for the teaching of other text types. We want to problematize the relationship between writing academically (as part of a university degree)and writing in the engineer's workplace. We will also discuss why and how the course needs to be further developed and integrated with other courses throughout the program, in order to meet the requirements from both program directors and theindustry, and the challenges that such development provides.

In this paper, we share our experience of organising and teaching a compulsory academic writing course in the first term of an engineering degree programme in computer science. The course we teach is a 4.5-credit (ECTS) course entitled Writing in the Engineering Profession. The language of instruction is Swedish, the L1 of the majority of students. Planning and giving such a course poses a number of organisational and pedagogical challenges. Our 230 students have diverse levels of writing experience, and our task is to offer a short but highly relevant introduction to academic writing that will bridge any knowledge gaps and prepare students for written assignments at university. At the same time, students need an understanding of the various text types they may encounter in their future workplaces. As is well known, the importance of excellent communication skills for a successful engineering career cannot be emphasized enough, as discussed by e.g. Lappalainen (2009) and Gustafsson et al. (2014). From experience, we draw the conclusion that general principles of academic writing could well be used as a starting-point for the teaching of other text types. We problematise the relationship between writing academically (as part of a university degree) and writing in the engineer’s workplace. We discuss why the course needs to be further developed in order to meet the requirements from both programme coordinators and the industry, and conclude by presenting some possible strategies for this development.