Using CALL to bridge the culture gap between discourse communities and ESP learners

Abstract

Learners of English for computer science have to master one essential skill: reading technical documentation. This documentation, available online and consulted whenever programmers need information to code programs, is barely understood by French first-year university students in computing. Faced with these professional texts, they experience linguistic as well as cultural problems due to lack of fluency in English and lack of knowledge in computer science. Our pedagogic aim is to lighten the cognitive overload induced when they read texts written by members of the discourse community. To this end, we have developed a software application to help students understand these authentic texts. Based on computer-assisted reading research and socio-constructivist learning theories, different types of aids were designed to alleviate the learner's difficulties and make the input comprehensible. Our software provides scaffolding on the macrostructural level (textual and rhetorical organisation) and the microstructural level (lexis and syntax). It was tested with 112 students who had to answer comprehension questions and carry out professional tasks similar to the activities programmers undertake in real life. We present the results of our experiment and reflect on a genre-centred, action-oriented, task-based learning approach that requires the learner to participate actively in these computer-mediated learning systems.