A successful teacher is not only a person with specialist knowledge and prominent personal features but the one with skills and capacities emphasizing particularly his/her managerial qualities. In addition, ESP teachers face a specificity dealing with two subject-matter fields – the English language and specific subject-matter knowledge, be it science, humanities, engineering, or anything else.A successful teacher is not only a person with specialist knowledge and prominent personal features, but the one with skills and capacities emphasizing particularly his/her managerial qualities. In addition, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teachers face a specificity dealing with two subject-matter fields – the English language and specific subject-matter knowledge, be it science, humanities, engineering, or anything else. Are general pedagogical practices overemphasized and often at the expense of content knowledge? In our opinion, teachers’ knowledge of student thinking and learning is more related to their emotional intelligence and psychology than pedagogy. Instead of memorizing facts, students are to be taught to search for information, to connect things, and enable the development of integrative knowledge in a multidisciplinary education. In such a learning environment, the responsibility of teachers is not only in their teaching but in facilitating learning by doing. Teachers’ ability to use English in a way that encourages learning in their students, where accuracy, fluency, and intelligibility are implied as necessary, is in our opinion above all theories, especially in times when motivation in students is constantly decreasing and dazzling lights ‘are killing softly’ our society of gadgets and gizmos.
A well-crafted ESP syllabus fosters learning by bridging the gap between foreign language learning and the field of profession. Besides, ESP syllabi should promote a specific genre and content-based tasks established on and integrated with functional grammar and lexicon. In our classroom, we have adopted the situation-based learning approach and context-based vocabulary learning. Experimental science with English-based instruction offers the first-hand experience through observation inside laboratories to our students of biology, chemistry, and environmental science. Building up students’ language competence is vocabulary-based and thus special attention is paid to word chunks and wordlists. Although often regarded as a ‘service activity’, ESP is also a medium between academic and popular genres. Teaching a foreign language, especially English as the lingua franca of our age, is not just a stultifying practice of teaching a thoughtful discipline but providing students with valuable vocational knowledge.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.