Abstract
Undergraduates of the University of Economics in Bratislava need to receive decent economic and legal education to be able to work successfully in different areas of the national economy and in the management structures of all levels. The previous research has shown that Slovakia follows a significant negative trend with performance in reading. Online learning platforms like LMS Moodle are ideal for students in higher education. This paper is a part of the KEGA Project carried out at the Department of English Language of the Faculty of Applied Languages. It demonstrates the work of an experimental group of sixty-four first- and second-year students of the Faculty of National Economy in a course “Business English for Advanced Students III” supported by an e-course “Business Communication”. During the semester, students developed reading skills and improved communication by reading and investigating written discourse for unknown words and idiomatic expressions. The rationale for the quantitative research is to compose a corpus of professional articles from English-language periodicals read by “Economics and Law” students. The rationale for the qualitative research is to identify important business, legal and academic vocabulary in them. The method of “Statistical Hypothesis Testing”, T-test, tests the significance of the difference between the knowledge of idioms of the experimental group and the control group (33 students doing a traditional course). The results indicate that LMS Moodle increased students’ motivation to study English. The results prove that “Economics and Law” students enlarged greatly their legal vocabulary and that both groups were interested in learning idiomatic expressions.
Highlights
Unsatisfactory results achieved by the Slovak readers in the PISA 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015 and 2018 assessments and a negative trend with performance in reading provided the main impetus for investigating the linguistic features of general English reading texts in detail
The aim of the study is to find out whether reading newspaper and magazine articles and acquiring idiomatic expressions from them will contribute to the positive results achieved in an idiomatic test, to compose the corpus of professional articles read by all “Economics and Law” students, and to demonstrate how the corpus of each student was analysed
Participants of both the experimental and control groups sat for an idiomatic test consisting of 30 business English idioms
Summary
Unsatisfactory results achieved by the Slovak readers in the PISA 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015 and 2018 assessments and a negative trend with performance in reading provided the main impetus for investigating the linguistic features of general English reading texts in detail. Whether the students have acquired B1 or B2 English language levels in secondary school, in accordance with the CEFR (2011), they are mixed together and take two or three courses in “Business English for Advanced Students”. Undergraduates need to study texts written by academics or experts with many years of teaching experience to gain knowledge independently from their field of study They should distinguish at least between academic and journalistic styles and use the right vocabulary within their genres. Students need to learn these words as part of their subject studies, whether or not they are learners of English. In between these two extremes, there is so-called “sub-technical” or “general
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