Abstract

Today’s increasingly borderless, transcultural and challenging business world, requires engineers to becommunicatively competent in the oral and written form. Unfortunately, breakdowns in communication oftenhappen, due to linguistic and psychological boundaries. In such conditions, verbal and non-verbalcommunication strategies also known as strategic competence helps to compensate the breakdowns. This studyseeks to determine whether the Malay bilingual engineering undergraduates, who form the majority in atechnical university in Malaysia, adopt the avoidance or achievement strategy dominantly in attaining a writtencommunication goal. The instruments that were used in the study include survey questionnaires, focused groupinterview and Written Discourse Completion Tasks. The findings based on the Written Discourse CompletionTasks reveal that the achievement strategy which includes literal translation manifests as the most dominantstrategy employed by the undergraduates. The paper concludes with a note on the significant role played bylanguage instructors in providing optimal scaffolding. It also points towards directions for future inquiry on theneed for a rigorous review of the language curriculum in technical universities so that the undergraduateengineers are able to improve their strategic competence as well as overcome the momentary inadequacy of theirsecond language resources due to the linguistic repertoire of the Malay language which stigmatizes them asspeakers of the second language.

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