critical reading of research articles as oral activator in the language

This paper reports on an experience carried out with second course students of the School of Aeronautical Engineers at the Polytechnic University of Madrid in the subject class Modern Technical Language. In the previous years the problem in that class had been the scarce participation of the students in the oral practices. They seemed to be lead and exclusively represented by a few students when it came to oral participation. The students proposed tackling recent research articles in which opinions could be discussed. The reading of these articles has risen new elements that work as language activators in the language classroom: critical reading and thinking have developed participation in the oral activities and produced a noticeable influence on their scientific and humanist thinking and behavior.From this, we may extract the consequence that the experience is not only related to scientific knowledge, since it has made them better speakers or speaking-counterparts and more class-participating and collaborative, which implies that the human, scientific and linguistic factors progress at the same time through the critical experience. This way, the exposition of their critical ideas has developed both their humanism and scientific mind. These two facets which seem to belong to far away fields become a bond in our experience: the process is scientific since it tries to be a systematic study of the knowledge fleshed in written texts and it is also humanist because it fulfils the students need to grow up as persons, that is absorbing knowledge and processing it in order to produce a new personal approach to the world.