Teaching 21 st Century Skills to Engineering Students Through Project-Based Learning (Social Semiotic Perspective)

Abstract

The 21 st century skills include 3 main skills and 12 sub skills are indispensable in teaching English particularly for engineering students. Globalization has intensified the demands for communicative engineers having soft skills such as effective communication, cooperation, teamwork, project management, lifelong learning that become the requirements of industries and professional organizations. This descriptive-evaluative research aims at describing the procedure of teaching 21 st century skills to Engineering students through Project-Based Learning (PjBL) and evaluating PjBL from student's voice. The research subjects involved 37 Civil Engineering students of a private engineering institute in Surabaya city. They were instructed to develop English online magazine as their group-projects. Guided using socio semiotic approach, the students eventually could publish three online magazines containing Civil engineering news at the end of semester. The results also revealed that the students learned and experienced a lot about 12 skills of 21 st century skills. Moreover, through PjBL, their English language skills developed well specifically in reading, speaking, and writing ones when addressing issues related to Civil Engineering.