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During the first two years of an Engineering Undergraduate degree, all engineering students are exposed to multidisciplinary courses and a variety of different faculty members, regardless of their major. The pressing question in this case is whether these multidisciplinary courses are designed to cater for students" specific learning styles, especially when they are offered in specialized institutions like the Petroleum Institute, which aims to prepare engineers to join the workforce at one of the leading oil and gas companies in the United Arab Emirates. In this study, the Vark questionnaire for young learners was used to study freshmen engineering students" learning styles to see whether gender had any impact on these students" learning styles. The aim of this research is to utilize this information and apply the results in the teaching methods used by freshman year teachers and more specifically the way language teachers approach engineering students.

Freshman students begin their engineering studies at the Petroleum Institute after having met the Institute's language proficiency prerequisites. In many of their courses these engineering students are required to write in a concise form in accord with all aspects of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). In this pilot research, students produced three in-class pieces of writing at five -week intervals between the writings. After their first writing, students were exposed to Bloom's Taxonomy table. The paper is based on the reflection/observation of the teachers and students whilst and after the exposure to Bloom's taxonomy, and student focus groups in which students were asked to reflect back on their experiences of the best practices from their point of view that can be inferred that this exposure helps facilitate some level of HOTS transferability. The aim of this paper is to intensify the role teachers in teaching Higher Order Thinking Skills in a systematic way that would allow students to grasp its essence and take an active role in the redesign of its instruction.

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