ESP Teaching Practice at Technical Faculties

ESP Teaching Practice at Technical Faculties

TARABAR, Aida

The paper offers an insight into the highlights of the ESP teaching practice at the University of Zenica, the university with the longest ESP tradition in the country. This type of language instruction started as part of an optional course at the Faculty of Metallurgy in 1970s. During the following decades – especially in recent times – the teaching has been developed and organized into several obligatory ESP courses that are taught during the final four semesters of undergraduate studies at technical faculties. The training finishes with so called Public Lecture – a series of presentations delivered by the students themselves. The main characteristics of ESP instruction at these faculties are total flexibility and adaptability. This means the ESP teacher not only tends to follow the most recent findings in the realm of the ELT, but also observes the specific educational and social circumstances within which the learning/teaching process takes place. In a country such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the legacy of war includes a brain drain and a complex situation at all three educational levels, it is important to design innovative practices that can compensate for the aforementioned deficiencies. By being responsive to students’ needs, we try to bridge and/or fill in the gaps in their knowledge. In the course of our ESP instruction the students are equipped with the most appropriate and practical tools they can use when they encounter the problem of translating a technical text – a simplified 'translation technology'. Thus, they are encouraged to enter the language arena. Without such a scaffold, they would most probably remain only spectators. Key words: ESP, translation technology, vocabulary, syntax, morphology

Article
PeerReviewed

2014-11-24

2779