ESP Teaching Research Articles

Challenges in English for Specific Purposes: Case-Study of Economics Students

This research work is to investigate the status of English for Specific Purposes course on first year Master students of Economics in their development of English for Specific Purposes. It focuses on one research instrument for data collection which is: classroom observation. The results revealed that teachers of English are not ESP teachers; therefore, they need to collaborate more with subject specialists to improve their own levels and to learn modern methods of teaching, they should also proceed to Needs analysis as far as the learners are concerned. Hence some recommendations and tips are provided so as to boost the students’ learning process.
 
 Key words: collaboration; ESP; language teachers ; needs analysis, subject specialists

When teaching must go on: ESP teachers’ strategies and challenges during COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract. Online classes have been rampant since the global spread of COVID-19. ESP teaching in higher education institutions is no exception, following the national government’s call to employ an online mode of teaching. Although technology has been long used to facilitate the teaching-learning process, the practice of online teaching is not without problems. Thus, this study was aimed at investigating ESP teachers’ strategies to make effective lessons delivery, optimize students class participation, and what challenges were emergent during their online teaching. The participants of this study were six ESP teachers in five private and one state universities who teach in various non-English departments. Data were gathered through interviews via WhatsApp. The findings showed that the strategies employed by ESP teachers were among others: ensuring instruction clarity, employing various learning platforms, virtual grouping, using authentic materials, etc. To optimize students’ online class participation was done by scoring students’ active participation, not giving non-doable tasks, using more asynchronous than synchronous method, etc. The challenges are having inconsistent internet connection, teaching while taking care for children, difficulty in monitoring students’ progress, etc. The findings imply the need of serious attention from higher education institutions in conducting ESP online teaching during this pandemic as it requires not only technical preparedness, but also most importantly the human aspect involved in it. Keywords: strategies, challenges, online teaching, ESP, pandemic

Research on Countermeasures for the Successful Transition From Egp Teachers to Esp Teachers in Colleges Based on Computer Information Technology

The special-purpose English course should combine the specific subject content with the language teaching objective, and the teaching activities should focus on solving the language problems encountered by students, and cultivate the English ability related to the major as the teaching focus. This shows that “a post-college English teaching era emphasizing individuality and diversity has arrived, and the only way for college English teaching to meet international standards is to gradually shift from basic English to ESP teaching”. It can be seen that ESP teaching has become a trend in colleges and universities. How to transform EGP teachers into ESP teachers and other problems remain to be solved in the reform of College English teaching in China.

Research on the Transformation and Development of EGP Teachers to ESP Teachers in Post-University English Age Based on Computer

The popularization of calculation broadens the use of English in social activities, thus forming a driving force for the transformation of college English teaching from EGP to ESP. By analyzing the present situation, necessity, obstacles and strategic approaches of college English ESP teachers’ development and transformation, this paper provides theoretical support for the transformation of college English teachers in the computer age.

Application of Corpus-Based Text Statistics Analyzer in Sports English

The link between corpora and ESP is crucial and even more for some time to come, due to the current patterns of academic and professional mobility which create a need for ESP expertise and teaching materials. The problem in Sports English in China since 2004 is the lack of competent teachers and proper-leveled textbooks, which hindered the development of the major of Sports English greatly. This essay discusses four corpus-based online text analyzers to offer statistics of individual texts and vocabulary profile to help English teachers choose proper-leveled texts and modify materials to meet their needs in Sports English teaching.

MODELLING ESP TEACHER IDENTITY IN UKRAINIAN TERTIARY EDUCATION

In an attempt to leverage knowledge in an ESP classroom, some university teachers find not much support from the university staff and administration in Ukraine. Yet, it hardly restrains ESP teachers to eagerly develop and construe their professional identity aimed at equipping students with employability literacy skills. A two-stage survey of three different groups of respondents was conducted at Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, Ukraine. The findings on the open-ended questionnaire allowed designing a rank of identity constituents, which appeared to be different in research groups’ perceptions. While both language and subject teachers valued “individual features” as the most significant and “work experience” as the least, the students correspondingly ranked the other categories – “professional knowledge” and “foreign language competence”. Within the close-ended questionnaire dataset, these discrepancies vanished. All research groups agreed on the model of “ideal” ESP teacher identity as a combination of significantly ranking categories: “methods of teaching” → “professional knowledge” → “individual features” → “foreign language competence” → “work experience”. The “professional knowledge” category was estimated twice as significant as the “work experience” domain. The research results are consistent with the recent studies on teacher identity simulation. New was ranking the ESP teacher identity model on constituents’ significance based on opinions of three different social groups – students, language teachers, and subject teachers. The worked-out model could remedy ESP teacher identity ambiguity due to approach fruitfulness.

Task-Based Language Teaching: Understanding of The Task

The characteristic of ESP that puts more emphasis on the ability of students to perform tasks relevant to the world of work requires a learning approach that allows the transfer of authentic activities in the work field to the learning activities in the classroom. Many studies then suggest that Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) approach meets this special trait. The application of this approach, however, still confuses some ESP teachers or lecturers in which they find it difficult to distinguish the terms of “task” in TBLT with tasks in ordinary classes. This descriptive qualitative research then seeks to describe the nature of tasks in TBLT and reveal the lecturers’ knowledge on that approach. The subjects of the research were all of the lecturers teaching ESP classes at State University of Padang (UNP). The data were obtained through a literature study and interviews. The data gathered then were analyzed qualitatively. The results of the research reveal what task in TBLT is and the extent to which the ESP lecturers know about TBLT

The role(s) of the business English teacher: a practical approach

Starting from Jeremy Harmer’s (1994) general list and Evan Frendo’s (2012) Business English-focused perspective on teacher roles, this paper aims to discuss in more detail the different dimensions of the teaching process I have identified during my seminars at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration and provide practical examples of the teacher’s role(s) in the classroom based on the fundamental process of needs analysis. It will show that teaching ESP is indeed more of a collaborative process between the students and the teacher and, consequently, the latter’s role must shift according to the former’s learning needs.

Esp teachers’ perspectives on the online teachingenvironment imposed in the covid-19 era – a case study

This paper reports on the results of interviews conducted with ESP teachers examining their attitudes towards different aspects of online language teaching. The aim of this case study is to investigate how confident the teachers feel while teaching online in synchronous mode and to examine whether this emotive attitude is in correlation with their prior experience in both formal and informal online environments. It also aims to establish correlations between the respondents‘ attitudes towards the degree of difficulties and challenges pertaining to teaching all language skills in an online education context. The findings derived from the analysis of the respondents‘ answers point out to the need to investigate the possibilities offered by digital technologies in order to help learners enhance their language skills and competencies. © 2021, Adam Marszalek Publishing House. All rights reserved.

ESP Students’ Satisfaction with Online Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Ukraine

This study aims to determine the level of ESP students’ satisfaction with online ESP learning courses at three faculties of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The current study examines students’ answers to identify their satisfaction in ESP online courses. The study’s research questions were divided into four categories: the effectiveness of online ESP learning, the availability of learning material used by ESP instructors, the evaluation of ESP teachers’ results, the effectiveness of online testing, and students’ difficulties with ESP distance learning. A descriptive statistical method was used to validate the study. The statistics package JASP was used for data analysis. The authors chose observation, literature analysis, a questionnaire provision, and descriptive data analysis as the research tools. The study results show that students are primarily pleased with ESP courses taught online, students fulfil the expected progress in ESP learning performance. It is revealed that the main problems that influence and impact online ESP learning during COVID-19 are related to technical, academic, and communication challenges. Student satisfaction surveys may lead to changes in ESP online learning activities that may, in turn, boost students’ outcomes. The results provide valuable insight into students’ satisfaction with online learning and pose practical questions for its implementation. As a result, this study is just a preliminary attempt at offering considerate analysis to Ukraine’s policymakers.

A New Pedagogical Model for Teaching English for Specific Purposes: Collaborative Educational Project

Raising young professionals is one of the main goals of ESP teachers across the globe, but in today’s rapidly changing world it is complicated by the need to adapt learners to a demanding international working environment that puts heavy pressure on human resources. English communication skills are now sought by employers, so, English teachers worldwide need to help future graduates meet such high expectations. However, the practice has shown that options for improvement within national educational systems are limited. In artificially bilingual classrooms progress requires cooperation and networking of practitioners from different countries. This article presents the results of the first stage of an experimental collaborative educational project, which involved teachers and students from two state universities in Russia and Kazakhstan. It describes the beginning of implementing a relatively new pedagogical model for ESP teaching through designing a virtual crossborder learning environment simulating certain real-life professional communication situations. The aim of the paper is to analyze the initial impact of this model on developing certain soft skills and English communicative competence in the students of non-linguistic majors. The authors used the comparative analysis of data obtained through formal structured questionnaires. The statistical significance of the results was measured by the F-test and the paired Student’s t-test The results suggest that extending ESP learning environment beyond borders helps ESP teachers to shift from purely academic settings to simulating real professional scenarios, thus developing students’ English communicative competence, contributing to their professional socialization, and creating a sufficient level of stress to appeal to their motivation while avoiding discouragement.

A Study on Improving ESP English Reading Ability for Students Major in Mechanical Design and Manufacturing

ESP Teaching method is an approach that is significantly different from the conventional English Language Teaching method. ESP teaching is a market-driven, communicative English teaching model which is based on the overall principle of significantly improving learners' professional English social skills, learnercentered, and meets the needs of society and individuals. In this study, researcher’s attempt is to integrate ESP reading model into the design and manufacturing English teaching. The study aims to explores the effect of ESP reading in mechanical design and manufacturing English teaching from the following three points, preclass reading task detection, while-reading teaching and post-reading teaching. And the author finds that ESP reading model not only make students have a strong interest in English learning and reading, improve their English reading ability and application ability of professional knowledge, but also enhance their innovative thinking ability.

Teaching English for ESP Students and Technologies to Use

n nThis article examines issues concerning ESP teaching and the most productive technologies to use in classes. To get fruitful results in ESP teaching English teacher is recommended to use following groups of components of the teaching technology discussed in this article

ВОПРОСЫ ПЕРЕВОДА И СЕМАНТИЗАЦИИ ТЕРМИНА “PUBLICITY” В РЕКЛАМНОМ И ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОМ ДИСКУРСАХ

The article discusses translation difficulties of the term “publicity” from English into Russian in advertising and political discourses. Despite many translation equivalents that dictionaries offer, there is no universal, unambiguous and accurate equivalent for the term “publicity” in the Russian language, and the available variants often include additional evaluative connotations that the original English term does not contain. The context and type of discourse determine considerably the choice of a translation equivalent of publicity. It is noteworthy that the concept of “publicity” is one of the key ones in the political, advertising and public relations discourses – the areas that are currently developing under significant influence of the English language, culture and mentality. This article is intended to complete this gap. The article presents translation variants of the term “publicity” in dif- ferent contexts, and it is concluded that an adequate translation of the term depends on the pragmatics of political, advertising and marketing discourses, which determine the key seme of the term under consideration, which should be retained in the translation.The results of the work can be applicable in the fields of public relations, translation practice, ESP teaching and research into international communication, as well as to students studying English for specific purposes.

Focus on the principle of visuality in ESP teaching

Focus on the principle of visuality in ESP teaching

Terminology in ESP teaching

Terminology in ESP teaching

Organizational component of pedagogical interaction in ESP teaching in multinational groups in mining region by using hybrid learning

Education is traditionally considered a non-profitable, non-commercial branch of the service sector. However, education includes hidden financial, market, social and political resources that ensure the sustainable development of an individual region. Kemerovo State University (KemSU) holds itself out not only as an educational center of the coal region, but also as a center for assembling new-generation specialists capable of supplying labor resources for the main coal and other industries in Russia and other countries. Training takes place in multinational groups, which inevitably leads to the need for pedagogical interaction research in cultural dialogue and intercultural communication. Its organizational component reflects interaction essence and is particularly important. It is a set of educational forms, methods and technologies by which the set goals and objectives are achieved as a result of the interaction and cooperation of all pedagogical interaction subjects, their cooperation and management of the whole process. We believe that the implementation of this component will ensure the sustainable development of human capital in higher education environment to the coal region.

Students’ perception of CLIL in higher education : Preliminary results of the CLIL HET project

There has been a growing research interest into the implementation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in higher education, however, limited research attention has been devoted to the investigation of the situation in the Visegrad countries. These countries have seen an increasing pressure on higher education institutions to provide courses taught through English in order to enhance teacher and student mobility, to share knowledge and to network. Still, disciplinary teachers are not always prepared for this task. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it introduces the Visegrad 4+ Project CLIL-HET (Content and Language Integrated Learning – Higher Education Teacher). In the course of the project, a special platform for CLIL, ESP, and disciplinary teachers has been created. Disciplinary teachers can complete a course on CLIL methodology at the website, and the project also aims to assess the linguistic weaknesses of disciplinary teachers who teach their subject through English. The second aim is to report on international students’ expectations on courses taught through English at the Hungarian partner institution of the project, the Faculty of Education of the University of Szeged.

How To Design Effective Esp Courses:, A Theoretical Support For ESP Teachers

How To Design Effective Esp Courses:, A Theoretical Support For ESP Teachers

Training and development of ESP teachers—Take the cultivation and development of medical English teaching team as an example

In recent years, under the background of the national college English teaching reform, college English teachers are facing new problems and challenges. Taking the reform of college English ESP teaching in Xi’an Peihua University of medicine as an example, this paper analyzes the problems in the construction of college English ESP teaching team under the new situation, the strategies of teachers’ transformation, and proposes solutions and countermeasures.