What is expertise in language teaching? Balancing between LAP and LSP

Abstract

The wish to turn university education into meaningful preparation for a successful professional career has given rise to teaching foreign languages for specific purposes (LSPs). While in the 1980s there were just a few main branches of LSPs, like Business English or English for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), today, in the efforts to provide tailor-made courses for a specific sector of prospective employees, they have increased to an extensive range of courses taught for narrow specializations, such as English for Sports Managers, which I taught at a college in the past. Dealing with unknown discipline-related elements of an LSP, however, are sources of anxiety for many language teachers at the start of their career. I suggest that this unpleasant situation be dealt with by shifting the attention to practising academic and soft skills, as well as functional language (all belonging to the area of LAP - languages for academic purposes), which would serve as a template for the very discipline-related language that our students need. The eternal "what" and "how" of LSP teaching can be additionally handled by giving the students enough autonomy to help us generate classroom content. The results of a survey conducted on bachelor's and master's students from the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, taught at B1 and B2 levels, seem to prove that point, as does my experience after teaching these two levels for the last ten years.