Using authentic materials in teaching ESP is part and parcel of communicative approach methodology. Unadapted materials bring the classroom closer to real-life language use and overall make language learning more meaningful and engaging for students. The needs analysis of Ukrainian students, which shows that many of them wish to continue their studies in English language universities abroad, makes the use of authentic materials particularly relevant, as they model the situations that students can potentially face in their future professional life. The presence of a vast array of authentic materials available today is both a challenge and a benefit for teachers, since they have to choose the ones which would meet their students' needs and expectations. Based on an ESP class taught to philosophy students, this article offers a suggestion on how to approach teaching presentation making skills and provides the practical outcome of using a TEDx talk in the ESP classroom. The featured talk, which focuses on today's perception of stoicism, was followed by some tasks to promote students' critical thinking and facilitate their future presentation planning, as well as by the students' own presentations in which they had to make use of the strategies discussed in class. Listening to the genuine presentation and using it as a model for presentations of their own follows the principles of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), which can benefit students by its explicit emphasis on the content and gives them a chance to acquire syntax, lexis, and discourse style skills as a by-product of content-oriented learning.
The article discusses an experiment that researched the intentional vs incidental ESP vocabulary uptake in two university groups of third year political science students and addresses the implications of using an authentic audiovisual material as an input text for an ESP course. The procedure of intentional vocabulary learning involved pre-teaching of lexical items and explicitly informing the students they would have to use the vocabulary in a following productive activity (writing an essay), while the incidental uptake took place in the course of self-study where the students had to watch an authentic audiovisual recording and then write an essay on the subject discussed in the video. The case study employed a quantitative research method to calculate the amount of the target words and collocations used in the written output, and a qualitative method to assess the accuracy of their usage. Two months later a delayed posttest was done to check the students' productive knowledge of the target lexis form. The experiment correlated with output-and involvement load hypotheses, and had to assess the effect of a text-based output on learning outcomes, as well as observe how applicable is the involvement load hypothesis to analysing the students' self-study strategies. The study showed that the intentional mode of learning outperformed the incidental acquisition by over 20% and suggested what factors may have enhanced the scope of the ESP vocabulary retention. Further studies could concentrate on evaluating ESP learners' both productive and receptive target vocabulary competence over a longer-term perspective.
In previous years, translation has been viewed as an inefficient teaching aid in communicative EFL teaching. It has rarely featured in either EFL or ESP textbooks. However, recent views on translation as a source of supplementary EFL practice expressed primarily by the teachers of theory and practice of translation, as well as the author's own practical experience, evidence to the fact that translation has managed to stand to the test of time, and has retained its teaching tool value, particularly for advanced students of English. This paper presents some examples of practical use of translation exercises in the ESP classroom of history students.
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