What is the role of the learner and what is the task s/he faces?

The graduate students come to the ESP class with a specific interest for learning, subject matter knowledge, and well-built adult learning strategies. They are in charge of developing English language skills to reflect their native-language knowledge and skills. In this view, ESP is a powerful means for creating opportunities in their professional work or further studies.

The more learners pay attention to the meaning of the language they read and analyze, the more they are successful; and on the contrary, the more they have to focus on the linguistic input or isolated language structures, the less they are motivated to attend their classes.

The ESP graduate students are particularly well disposed to focus on meaning in authentic contexts and on the particular ways in which the language is used in functions that they will need to perform in their fields of specialty or jobs.

Graduate students are generally aware of the purposes for which they will need to use English. Having already oriented their education toward a specific field, they see their English training as complementing this orientation. Knowledge of the subject area enables the students to identify a real context for the vocabulary and structures of the ESP classroom.

Graduate students must work harder than they used to before, but the learning skills they bring to the task permit them to learn more efficiently. The skills they have already developed in using their English make the language learning abilities in the ESP classroom potentially immense. They will be expanding vocabulary, becoming more fluent in their fields, and adjusting their linguistic behaviour to new situations or new roles.

To summarize, students bring to ESP focus for learning, subject matter knowledge, adult learning strategies. They can exploit these innate competencies in learning English because ESP combines purpose, subject matter, motivation, context-relevant skills.

The teacher’s role in the ESP classroom is to organize programs, set goals and objectives, establish a positive learning environment, evaluate students' progress.

Assessing students’ needs and skills

What language skills will the students need to develop in order to perform these tasks? Will the receptive skills of reading and listening be most important, or the productive skills of writing and speaking – or some other combination?

The Common European Framework (CEF) describes what a learner can do at six specific levels: Basic User(A1 and A2); Independent User(B1 and B2); Proficient User(C1 and C2).

These levels match general concepts of basic, intermediate, and advanced and are often referred to as the Global Scale.

The Global Scale is not language-specific. In other words, it can be used with virtually any language and can be used to compare achievement and learning across languages. For example, an A2 in Spanish is the same as an A2 in Japanese or English.

The Global Scale also helps teachers, academic coordinators, and course book writers to decide on curriculum and syllabus content and to choose appropriate course books, etc.

The Global Scale is based on a set of statements that describe what a learner can do. The “can do” statements are always positive: they describe what a learner is able to do, not what a learner cannot do or does wrong. This helps all learners, even those at the lowest levels, see that learning has value and that they can attain language goals.

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<== попередня сторінка	\|	наступна сторінка ==>
How is ESP different from English as a Second Language, or general English?	\|	Common Reference Levels - The Global Scale

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