Preliminary Results of a Study Assessing Engineering Students' Formation of Identity as Rhetorician

The difficulty of teaching communicationskills to engineering students in a way that facilitates thetransfer of knowledge to workplace situations is widelyacknowledged. At the College of Engineering at theUniversity of Saskatchewan we have tried to address thisdifficulty by developing a programme that attempts to addthe identity of effective communicator to the students’identity as engineer. The purpose of this study is to beginto assess whether students are forming this identity. UsingBurke’s concept of terministic screens and the analyticaltools of cluster criticism, we analyze the transcripts ofinterviews of students returning from internshipexperiences to assess whether students’ language choicesreflect a rhetorical orientation to the world and thus thedevelopment of an identity of rhetorician