Factors Affecting Bachelors of Engineering and Technology Academic Performance in Teaching English for Special Purposes: Corpus Approach and Terminological Units

Abstract

The widespread use of modern information technology in the educational process of the Russian education system forces the need to develop new educational standards and approaches focused on consideration of the individual characteristics of students. This leads to a need to consider the individual characteristics of students that can influence the acquisition of necessary knowledge and skills. This study involved the task to consider the influence of factors such as sex, age and academic year on the introductory and final testing results of bachelors of mineral resources, who took training courses in English for special purposes on the basis of the corpus-based approach model in teaching and determination of its efficiency. The experimental training is presented in three stages: introductory, operational and final. These stages included learning English for special purposes based on the corpus analysis mode l of the grammatical environment of terminological units, introductory and final testing with subsequent statistical processing of the data obtained. The experimental training outcome obtained demonstrated that the degree of the influence of sex and academic year on academic performance was less pronounced at the introductory testing stage, while it was more pronounced at the final testing stage. The influence of the age groups of students on the data was noted at both stages of testing. It was expressed in the simple average values of the age groups of 17 and 21 years, indicating a downward value in accordance with the age of students. The paired samples T-test data helped us reveal the learning efficiency. Such samples demonstrated sufficient statistical significance of the differences in the average values of the final and introductory testing data.