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ESP approaches?
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Fri, 03/27/2009 - 19:55
Hi there!
My name's Alena and I'm from Russia.
I teach English at the technological university and I'm interested in any trends of ESP.
Now I'm planning to do a research in this area and I'd like to clarify - are there any ESP approaches or methods?
I'll be grateful for everything: knowledge or experience.
Thanks in advance!
Thu, 12/03/2009 - 16:46
#2
Dear all,
Iam very happy to join your team. Iam an English secondary school and I have succeeded in the master exam. Iam going to specialize in ESP. Till now I have difficult choice to choose my future speciality . Can you enlighten me with some information concernig ESP in linguistics or in civilization, I would be very thankful. Also, my special thanks to Zira .
Thank you very much to reply me.
Sun, 03/29/2009 - 13:55
#3
Hi Alena & Zira
Zira has nicely explained about the approaches in ESP & the books for reference as well. Hopefully , I get hold of the book & benefit from it.
Well, there is communicative approach in ESP as there are number of books stating Communication skills in ESP.
Bye
Samjhana
Sun, 03/29/2009 - 21:43
#4
Sorry not to mention communicative, but I thought it goes without saying. Samjhana, thanks for your prompt.
Tue, 03/31/2009 - 06:17
#5
Dear Zira and Samjhana!
Thank you very much for your ideas!!! It really helps me to go further.
As far as I understand, there are no perculiar or special approach in ESP, but just some principles we use to teach General English, am I right?
Zira,
thank you for sharing the books to be read! Try to find them.
Re CLIL. I wouldn't say I'm an expert in this area, but I've heard something about it. It seems to me CLIL is similar to comminicative approach with the emphasis on the students' autonomy, isn't it?
Best,
Alena
Tue, 03/31/2009 - 10:58
#6
Dear Alena
On the contrary, ESP is an approach to teaching English not a product/subject. For detail see Hutchinson and Waters. According to them 'a truly valid approach to ESP must be based on understanding of the processes of language learning' (2003: 14).
To help you to make a choice on an approach to be used in ESP, I would highly recommend you to clarify for yourself: What is ESP? What distinguishes it from GE? keeping in mind your students and their needs as well as target situation where they will use English in future as ESP is English for Specific Purposes of learners.
It would be nice if you explain what you meant by saying 'to teach General English'? How it goes with students' specific purposes?
My own experience demonstrates that misunderstanding of the nature of ESP and as the result starting ESP courses with teaching GE is typical for many ESP teachers. I did the same some years ago:).
Besides, have you National ESP Curriculum in Russia like we here in Ukraine? If yes, it can be of great help to you.
Any comments and ideas?
Tue, 04/07/2009 - 07:56
#7
Dear Zira,
I think, I got you from the content point of view. But as for approaches, I have to read much to clarify this point.
Thank you for giving the direction!
As for National ESP Curriculim - unfortunately, I haven't heard about it and I'm afraid, there's no curriculum here, in Russia.
Wed, 05/27/2009 - 14:30
#8
Hi everyone.
All this while, I think we've talking about ESP approaches in a theoretical and very broad sense. I personally think there is one crucial aspect of the ESP teaching that any ESP teacher should never ignore - the technique of 'Awareness raising'. This is because what makes ESP so special and specific are all the 'special things' in ESP that we need to raise the students' awareness of - from the use of present tense in newspaper headlines, the different verbal signposts in a business or academic oral presentation, to the rigid format of a formal letter in business letter writing. Thus, I believe an important skill of the ESP teacher is the ability to create effective 'awareness raising tasks' for the students to discover what they need to know.
Wed, 05/27/2009 - 22:13
#9
You are absolutely right that learners' awareness of their needs distinguishes ESP from GE. As soon as there is 'awareness of...' there is a need in learning it. Without any doubt, raising awareness is among learning objectives of an ESP course that leads to the outcome of 'being aware of...' So, I see it as the initial step on the way to learning and the starting point of teaching ESP.
Do you think 'awareness raising' is the core of ESP course and the only one? What about developing abilities of ...(reading, speaking, writing, listening), abilities to learn? And where is the place of knowledge from your perspective? Is it enough to be aware of grammar structures used in report, article etc. to use them in future?
And the main question HOW? Can you give the example of 'awareness raising task' and its output? Or maybe you kept in your mind pre-task activities if think of task-based approach?
In any case, I liked your perspective on ESP approaches and its clear and very simple explanation :). You were very helpful.
Looking forward for clarification and some practical iexamples.
Thu, 05/28/2009 - 05:15
#10
Hi Zira,
Although I see 'awareness raising' as a crucial element in ESP teaching, I'm not saying it's the 'only one' thing. I however would like to point out that it is essential for the ESP teachers to be aware of the importance of this step in their teaching and always think about how they can raise their students' awareness more effectively in class.
Awareness raising isn't just about grammar structures - teachers can also use awareness raising tasks to sensitise students towards 'how' to read, listen, speak and write specific texts. Like my earlier example, in order to train students to write a business letter, we need to raise students' awareness of its format. There are different ways to do this in class - some teachers might choose to just draw 'blocks' on the board to show the positions of the letterhead, recipient's address, date etc.. Or you might want the students to work it out by themselves first, so you would prepare strips of paper of the different sections of a letter and get them to arrange them in the correct order with peers. What is a better way to raise awareness here depends on the teacher's understanding of his class - learning styles, motivation, level etc.
I see awareness raising as a teaching technique with a specific aim in itself, ie. to raise students' awareness of ..., which can no doubt be incorporated in any broader teaching approaches - be it task-based, communicative, learning-centred etc.
Chwa
Thu, 05/28/2009 - 16:28
#11
Hi Chwa
I see now what you've meant when saying awareness raising. Thanks for the explanation.
What I'm practicing in the classroom is 'learning by doing' approach, so I try to avoid starting a class with the input as I think students have previous experience and knowledge as well as abilities to notice the format of the letter by themselves and can easily come to its layout or identify the phrases used for salutation or farewell phrases using some samples of letters. That is why I liked your idea with strips of paper very much. Sometimes I'm practicing this too.
I think, though we both start with raising awareness, but we are doing it in different way. I think these differences in our approaches may be caused by the level of our students and/or cultural differences.
I highly appreciate your openness in sharing your experience, but it would be interesting to know what other think about these.
Sat, 05/30/2009 - 05:04
#12
Hi again.
In a gathering with friends once, I showed them a photo of me taken with my family in Gold Coast Australia. I was hoping they would ask where the place was and I could brag about it. But a friend started commenting how alike my dad and I were while another teased that my belly looked pretty obvious in the photo. In the end, to my dismay, no one cared to ask where the photo was taken.
Back to the ESP classroom - sometimes the teacher thinks he has done his job by giving students samples of texts, hoping that they would pick up all the imporatant features of the specific genre. However, after looking at different samples of business letters in class, I was irritated to find out nearly one quarter of the class wrote the date as 2009.6.23 instead of 23 June 2009 in their writing assignment. I honestly had not expected something like this could be an issue. In reflection, I realised I had not done enough to raise the students' awareness of how dates are supposed to be written. I took for granted that the students should have picked it up by themselves from the samples, but on second thought, there were indeed too many things that they had to pay attention to.
I'm not saying that after awareness raising, students will not make any mistakes. In fact, I totally agree that one has to make mistakes in order to learn. However, I also think that a well-planned and thought-out awareness raising task could help make our teaching more effective and class time more worthwhile. Students don't always have to wait until after the practice stage to learn what they haven't learnt.
Chwa
Sat, 05/30/2009 - 18:15
#13
Fully agree with you. You've caught what I meant: much is dependent on students in ESP classroom. However, I am not sure that you can plan everything in advance. I'm not too ambitious to say that I can predict everything will be going in the classroom. What I know for sure that in ESP a student and his/her needs are in the focus of teaching/learning and if they have problems with something not planned by me I should stop and start working on it instead of going further according to my plan. You may call it awareness raising or whatever you want. I'll agree with you.
For example, I'm giving the same lesson for different groups of students within a day. Of course, I think of learning objectives of this lesson and try to predict expected outcomes in advance, and draft a lesson plan. But as soon as I come in the classroom I can rearrange the lesson plan according to the particular classroom situation and/or students' paces or start improvising.
Hope, you'll agree with me that sometimes outcomes of the class even well-planned are unexpected as in your case with the letters. But in the classroom where students are aware of the pecularities of date writing in different countries it will work, won't it? Not to become irritated if I were you I would provide students with some set of rules on writing business letters, keeping in mind cultural differences not only in writing dates, but in layout, structure etc., as an input or follow-up. Besides, it will be cultural awareness raising task.
I've noticed that as soon as you are speaking about awareness raising you think or at least write "task". So, it's again about task-based approach, isn't it?
Besides, how do you differentiate techniques, tasks and approaches?
Sun, 05/31/2009 - 13:46
#14
Thanks for your comments again, Zira. You obviously take a more open attitude in teaching than I do. May I ask what you would consider a significant problem caused by inadequate teaching in an ESP class?
Forgive me if I have used the terms rather loosely and caused confusion. By 'tasks', I refer to the work that the teacher gets the students to do in class and I would like to differentiate awareness raising tasks from practice exercises. I do not wish to refer 'tasks' as what is specifically defined by Task-based approach. By 'techniques', I mean the teacher's means in achieving a specific aim in a lesson.
If I'm not mistaken - I understand that in ELT, methodology is the 'biggest' umbrella term. Under methodology is approach, followed by method, procedure and technique. Task-based, communicative, lexical, inductive vs. deductive etc. should all be referred as approaches. A method should be, eg. 'the use of realia, texts, pair work etc.' to achieve a specific aim in a lesson. On second thought, 'awareness raising' is probably more than a 'technique' -however I don't view it as an approach, so should it be called a 'method' instead?
Hope others could share their views on this.
Dear Alena
To start with you need to be aware of the two main approaches in ESP: a learning-centred approach, i.e 'learning by doing' and multidisciplinary approach or task-based approach described in:
Hutchinson, T. and Waters, A. (1996) English for Specific Purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dudley-Evans, T. ans St John, M. (1998) Developments in ESP. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Personally I use both of them as well as cooperative and collaborative. If you are an expert in the field of study of your students you can use CLIL.
Does it make any sense for you?
Best wishes from Ukraine