Challenges in teaching ESP to students of technical universities in Poland

Introduction

There are two fundamental sources of challenges in teaching language in a specific context at a technical university. Firstly, the choice of language textbooks is limited. Secondly, the level of a considerable number of students at technical universities in Poland is pre-intermediate or lower intermediate, which considering the nature of ESP texts and textbooks is not sufficient.

The textbooks that are available on the market are aimed at intermediate and higher level students and there is a shortage of textbooks which are designed for teaching both the language and the subject matter. In their work, ESP teachers frequently resort to authentic scientific and academic articles as well as GCSE textbooks for less proficient students which, although interesting and attractive visually, are designed for teaching the subject, not the language. There are diagrams, pictures, charts and a great deal of relevant vocational vocabulary in such resources but there are no exercises that would make the teaching and learning process successful and enjoyable for both the student and the teacher. And a successful process means here the process through which students attain the lesson’s objectives taking advantage of the material presented in the textbook in the most efficient way. Consequently, it is necessary to deal with the problem, i.e., create language tasks and use techniques which teachers are familiar with due to experience in teaching general English. How to face the challenge

First of all, before embarking on the task of creating the exercises to the text that we wish our students to read, we need to decide if the language of the text, especially its grammar, is manageable for our students. Ideally, students should be exposed to authentic materials but if the language is impenetrable for students to understand, the texts should be adapted for their level remaining at the same time as much real English as possible [4, p. 100]. If, on the other hand, the grammar of the text is not too complicated, we can set about creating our step by step exercises, even though the number of unfamiliar words seems to be overwhelming. The type of exercises we devise depends on the objectives we want to achieve, e.g. enhancing reading skills, teaching note taking or giving presentations. However, no matter what our objectives are, we have to start with a thorough practice of unfamiliar vocabulary.

Pre-reading

ESP texts cause a great difficulty to students, especially at A₂ CEFR level, mainly due to the large amount of unfamiliar vocabulary they contain. Thus, the first step in a lesson preparation is to make a list of words we predict to be unknown to our students. The list below (Fig. 1) refers to chapter 10.2 of Complete Chemistry by Rose Marie Gallager and Paul Ingram [2, p.156]. The lesson was prepared for students of Environmental Protection Technologies at the faculty of Chemical Technology at Poznan University of Technology, Poland.

a few of us	absorb	allotrope	atmosphere
bond	break down	carbon monoxide	cause
composition	consist of	continually	degree
element	equation	get dense	get spread around
graphite	height	hydrogen	ionosphere
jet	magnesium	mainly	mb (millibar)
mesosphere	molecule	nitrogen	noble gas
odd	pollutant	pressure	rapidly
remaining	result	shuttle	slightly
split	stratosphere	sulphur dioxide	surface
thin out	troposphere	temperature	uneven
uniform	vapour

Fig. 1 Vocabulary list for pre-reading exercises

Chapter 10.2 (Fig.2) describes the structure and composition of the atmosphere and explains how the ozone layer protects the Earth from UV radiation. The set of words to teach, together with the information conveyed by the text, usually suggests some types of exercises that could be developed. The following tasks were designed for this particular extract and gave successful results.

 

 

Fig. 2 Extract from chapter 10.2 of Complete Chemistry by Rose Marie Gallager and Paul Ingram, page 156.

Exercise 1. Putting words into grammatical categories:

In this exercise students analyse the words on the list and group them into the following grammatical categories:

· Verb

· Noun

· Adjective

· Adverb

This activity not only makes students think about the meaning of the words to facilitate memorising them but it may also help to develop word structure awareness as well as provide gradual introduction to grammatical metalanguage.