Designing an English Course for Adult Non-philological Students in Long-life Learning Education

This article will describe briefly some of the language needs of the undergraduate students doing mechanical engineering within long-life learning education at “Ovidius” University and the programme which is being developed to satisfy these needs. Many of these students have considerable language problems during their first year, despite the fact that they have studied English for about four or eight years at secondary school and high school.The main initial need of these students is to be able to follow lectures and take notes, to be able to understand a wide variety of text including diagrams, tables, graphs, course brochures and job advertisements, to be able to write simple descriptions and explanations of components and processes, to write study-and work-related letters, and last but not least, to communicate about engineering topics.