Abstract
This paper reports on the effectiveness of a new teaching method employing dictionaries as an aid for teaching the standardization of English-based sports terms in Serbian. The research was conducted among the students of a sports faculty in 2017 by means of a questionnaire distributed to the students both at the beginning of the second half of an ESP course and again at its end. Its aim was to measure the students' progress related to the acquisition of standardized sports terms in Serbian as an indicator of the effectiveness of the new teaching method. The findings generally indicate a certain degree of improvement of the students' knowledge of standardized sports terminology, though a less than satisfactory amount of progress regarding their linguistic competence. Even though the outcomes did not fully meet the goals set in advance, they do provide solid arguments for further efforts in developing and monitoring dictionary use in teaching the standardization of English-based sports terms in Serbian within the ESP curriculum and, even more importantly, for the systematic education of dictionary usage as part of the mother tongue curriculum.
Highlights
IntroductionThis paper reports on the effectiveness of an innovative course of English for Specific Purposes (henceforward referred to as ESP) focused on dictionary use in teaching the standardization of sports terms in Serbian
This paper reports on the effectiveness of an innovative course of English for Specific Purposes focused on dictionary use in teaching the standardization of sports terms in Serbian
Given the fact that the literature (Chun 2004; Lew 2011) confirms that dictionaries are not used in language teaching as much as might be necessary, the course was innovative for three reasons: (1) it required the use of dictionaries for teaching standard English-based sports terms in Serbian as a teaching resource, not as a reference book, (2) it emphasized the teaching of the standardization of sports terms, which is not a common practice in ESP teaching, it is highly desirable, and (3) it promoted the development of contact linguistic competence, which is stressed in literature as an essential component of an ESP course (Prćić 2014)
Summary
This paper reports on the effectiveness of an innovative course of English for Specific Purposes (henceforward referred to as ESP) focused on dictionary use in teaching the standardization of sports terms in Serbian. Building on the first author's previous research into dictionary use in teaching ESP (Milić 2016), it is assumed that such a dictionary can significantly contribute to developing a proper approach towards the increasing influx of lexical and other borrowings from English into Serbian For this reason, the dictionary should be given the status of one of the compulsory ESP teaching resources for building contact linguistic competence (henceforward referred to as CLC), which is "a type of linguistic knowledge related to the use of elements, i.e., words and names, from English as the nativized foreign language in a non-English language that regularly comes into contact with it" (Prćić 2014: 147). The paper contains an Appendix, which is an English translation of the Final questionnaire
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