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English for Specific Purposes – Getting the balance right

Businesspeople shaking handsLewis Lansford discusses the four key elements of success for teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Lewis has written a wide range of ESP teaching materials, including Engineering 1 and Oil and Gas 1 in the Oxford English for Careers series, and English for Cabin Crew.

Most teachers come to ESP teaching with no specialist background in the field they’re teaching (English for medicine, robotics, aviation, law, the military, etc.) It can be intimidating teaching experts in a field that you yourself know little about. The key to success is getting a good balance of four basic elements: special lexis, general English language/grammar, special context and pedagogy.

Special lexis

This is generally the most intimidating part of ESP for teachers and learners. Teachers, who are used to being the expert, find themselves trying to help students communicate clearly using words that they – the teachers – don’t understand. That’s tough. Here are three ways that teachers overcome this feeling of lack:

  1. They learn as much as they reasonably can about the field;
  2. They are honest with themselves and their students about the things they don’t know, demonstrating that their expertise is in language teaching, not engineering or medicine or aviation;
  3. They remember that special lexis is only one part of the whole picture.

English language/grammar

This is an area of ESP teaching where the teacher is the expert. Think of ESP as a pyramid. Special lexis is the small pointy part at the top. The wide foundation of the pyramid is the English that everyone needs every day – the grammatical building blocks of sentence structure, verb tenses, adverbs and so on. Special lexis is important, but is useful only with the support and structure of English sentences to put it into. This holds up the whole pyramid.

Specialist context

Getting things done in English involves discourse – conversation, extended texts, and negotiations. Like grammar, this is familiar territory to the teacher: asking for information, clarifying, interrupting, making suggestions and all the other familiar functions. People in almost any professional or academic situation must do these things. Some specific situations differ across fields. Students of English for medicine need to develop an understanding of the discourse of the hospital, which involves communicating in a very hierarchical environment, often under intense pressure, sometimes with lives at stake. Business people need to learn non-linguistic negotiation skills, and often must learn about how these differ across cultures. The teacher’s job in this case is to develop the best understanding possible of their learners’ target context and to create lessons that give students the opportunity to use English appropriately.

Pedagogy

This is where it all comes together. The key to learners’ success is well-crafted lessons that provide exposure to authentic language, but not too much; allow for plenty of practice and recycling; give the teacher and the learner opportunities to measure and mark progress. Without sound pedagogy – well-planned and well-executed lessons – language learning and development are unlikely to take place. When the teacher gets it right, the other elements fall into place, and balance is achieved.

Teachers often start their first ESP job feeling intimidated by what they don’t know and worried about their ability to deliver useful lessons. Those who stay with it discover that their own expertise in running effective classes using appropriate materials balances perfectly with their students’ knowledge and experience in their own field. Many go on to relish the expertise they develop in teaching pilots, nurses, or engineers – comfortable with what they know, but also confident in what they don’t – which may be the hardest lesson for a teacher to learn.

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Tricks of the trade: teaching English for engineering

Lewis Lansford, co-author of Engineering 1, talks about why teaching technical English isn’t as daunting as it seems. Lewis will be speaking on this topic at the 2012 IATEFL BESIG conference on 17th November 2012.

I was freaking out the entire summer before the class started.
I hadn’t a clue.
I had no experience in the industry.
I realised a teaching mistake could have fatal consequences.

These are the words of English teachers describing their thoughts and feelings as they began the journey into teaching English to engineers and technicians. Many technical English teachers never planned teach technical English, it just happened to them – they were in the right place at the right time – or some might say the wrong time.

Consider this technical English sentence: Our tools sinter or anneal thin-film materials using the photonic curing process in only milliseconds. It’s easy to see why teachers feel frightened. How can you possibly help students express ideas that you yourself don’t understand? And what teacher wants to feel that they’re the person in the room with the least knowledge and experience? The teacher – and not the student – is supposed to be the expert, right?

But is the above sentence a typical example of the language Engineers and technicians need? While highly technical language is an important component of any technical English syllabus, it isn’t the full story. So what is the full story? Here are four lessons learnt by the same four teachers who made the comments at the start of this blog.

It isn’t as daunting as it seems at first

The above sentence about sintering is representative of only a small part of the language engineers need. Just like any worker communicating in English, basic transactional language is the broad foundation that the technical language rests on. As a teacher, you’ll often be in highly familiar territory, because this is general rather than specialist English – Did you get my email? I can’t make the meeting on the 9th, and so on.

Allow your students to teach you

When you are confronted with difficult material, don’t panic. You can make your own ignorance an asset in the classroom by having your students explain technical terms and concepts to you. This sort of explanation is a skill that will serve them well in the work place, and it will help you develop your own expertise as a technical English teacher.

Demonstrate that you’re a language expert

OK, you haven’t mastered the photonic curing process mentioned above, but that’s not what your students want to learn from you. Your job is to bring teaching expertise and a good understanding of the English language to the classroom. Instead of being held back by what you don’t know, play to your own strengths and deliver pedagogically sound lessons.

Fun is pedagogically sound

We often imagine that a classroom full of engineers will be serious students who want ‘hard’ lessons. It’s true that if your students are involved with safety-critical systems such a brakes in cars or control systems for airplanes, it’s important to get it right – mistakes could put lives at risk. But the experience of most teachers is that like all students, engineers are at their best when classes are fun, even when the subject matter is potentially heavy. Technical vocabulary can be taught and revised using crosswords, word searches and puzzles, and communication activities can take the form of games. For example, students can analyse the function and purpose of a piece of equipment by imagining what life would be like without it; students enjoy this sort of break.

Most teachers find that once they’re used to teaching technical English, they have no desire to go back to the general English classroom, with the same old conversations about Lady Gaga, the Loch Ness Monster, and favourite festivals around the world. If you find yourself in a state of panic over an upcoming technical-English teaching gig, take heart and listen to people who’ve been there: It won’t be as bad as you fear, and you’ll probably end up enjoying it.


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Coping with specialist content in ESP

Industrial plant workers checking plansLewis Lansford explores some of the difficulties of teaching specialist content and vocabulary in ESP. His talk at IATEFL 2011 in Brighton, entitled ‘Mudmen and monkey boards: Coping with specialist content in ESP’, will this explore further.

I interviewed a handful of teachers of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) about the challenges of their job and how they’ve overcome them. All four of these comments were made by teachers during the interviews:

“I’m afraid I’m not up to it.”
“I’m at a loss.”
“I’m not a [content area] specialist.”
“The content teachers might disagree with what I say.”

Of course all teachers have felt these things at one time or another, especially newer teachers who are still finding their way. But all four of the teachers who made the above statements are highly educated, well-trained, extremely experienced professionals. And yet they had all felt The Fear.

ESP teachers work in an environment of constant challenge, often with a nagging sense of self-doubt. While general English teachers are trying to decide whether a discussion about Lady Gaga will hold their students’ attention long enough to get through a lesson on comparative adjectives, ESP teachers might be struggling with the question of whether someone could be seriously injured on the job if tricky technical vocabulary is mishandled in the classroom. It can be a huge responsibility.

When dealing with high-achieving doctors or super-ambitious airline pilots, teachers can begin to feel that they just don’t know much. They forget that teachers, too, bring specialist knowledge to the classroom. The same teachers who expressed the doubts above also came up with these suggestions for how to approach ESP.

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Can I offer you some pigeon?

Female flight attendant smilingFollowing his posts on the oil and gas industry, Lewis Lansford, co-author of English for Cabin Crew, part of the Express Series, returns to consider the importance of clear communication in moments of crisis, focussing in this case on cabin crew.

‘E-wackoo-way! E-wackoo-way!’

The trainer shakes her head. ‘I hope he never has to clear a plane’, she says to a colleague. ‘No one will know what he’s on about!’

To be fair to the trainee flight attendant, chances are that if the plane had just ground to a stop at the end of the runway with the landing gear still up after an emergency descent, the passengers would fully understand what he had in mind – Evacuate! Evacuate! – and would readily comply.

As passengers on the receiving end of in-flight service, we forget that passenger safety – rather than passenger comfort – is a flight attendant’s main job responsibility. Miscommunication during dinner service can be unpleasant, but is unlikely to result in serious injury.

‘The worst mix-up I ever had at meal time was with a British passenger’, says Japan Airlines flight attendant Mika Wade. ‘He asked me for an iced vodka. Well, that’s what I heard. After he spat out the drink violently, I understood that he’d actually asked for iced water.’ Oops.

Wade continues, ‘I also once told a first class passenger that his meal was pigeon. He became very angry and said “People don’t eat pigeons!” I checked, and of course the dinner was pheasant, not pigeon. I tried to apologize for my mistake, but he was angry for the rest of the flight. He was very rude to me about it.’ Oh, dear.

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World English at the well head

Oil pump by sunsetFollowing Peter Astley’s introduction to the oil and gas industry, Lewis Lansford, co-author of  Oil and Gas 1, considers the confusion British vs American English can cause in international industry, and whether this is countered by the emergence of ‘World English’.

When I began teaching in Barcelona in the late-80s, I was surprised by the intensity of the rivalry between students at the Institute of North American Studies and those at the British Council over the question of which variety of English was superior. Some teachers, too, expressed firmly held positions on the matter. But in today’s international workplace, Global English may have ended the debate by swallowing both the American and British varieties whole.

“I was the only native British English speaker on the team” says Peter Astley, remembering his stint as a project controls manager in the oil and gas industry in Kuwait. “I reported to a Texan project manager. We had an Anglo-Indian clerk and two Polish women – one setting up the computer system and the other a trainee scheduler. The engineering manager who was being transferred from another project was from Lebanon. Various high-ranking Kuwaitis floated in and out. The client I interfaced with was Indian.

“The Texan, of course, spoke English, but I often had to translate what he had said to the Indian clerk, who was also a native English speaker. The clerk disliked admitting he didn’t understand something, so I often had to decode instructions from the Texan even though I wasn’t present when the request was made. The world's top 10 oil producing countriesThe Texan didn’t allow the Polish girls to speak Polish in the office even though he couldn’t understand the Indian clerk’s English.”

More than 100 countries produce oil. Many of the largest producers in the industry – Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kuwait, and many others – employ a diverse workforce made up of both local and imported expertise. When people from all over the world work together, English is frequently the main language of communication. But this lingua franca, often called World English, is rarely identifiable as either British or American. It generally encompasses both – and a whole lot more.

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