2. ENVIRONMENTAL ChEMISTRy & TEChNOLOGy 2.1. Lectures

Chem. Listy, 102, s265–s1311 (2008) Environmental Chemistry & Technology
P08 ENGLISh FRO ChEMISTS CAN bE PhuN
GABRIELA CLEMEnSOVá
Faculty of Chemistry, Brno University of Technology, Purkyňova
118, 612 00 Brno, Czech Republic,
clemensova@fch.vutbr.cz
“To teach or not to teach any special English tailored to
serve a particular profession which in our case means English
for chemists? ...Isn’t deep, substantial knowledge of general
English everything one needs to be able to communicate?”
Such questions are often ask by many a technically oriented
colleague I meet at my workplace. To answer them,
I always remember Elaine Horowitz, PhD from the School
of Education of UT at Austin (TX). She openes her doctoral
classes on Foreign Language Acquisition with the following
definition of language competence:
“Foreign language competence can be defined as the
ability of authentic self presentation in that language. In other
words, you can be called competent in L2 if the level of your
education is reflected in the way you use this language. That
means if a native speaker finds out who you are from the way
you communicate.”
Accepting this approach to competency we can say with
confidence that English for specific purposes has its irreplaceable
position in a postsecondary curriculum.
ESP may not always focus on the language of one specific
discipline or occupation, but it is supposed to introduces
students to common features of academic discourse in the
sciences or humanities, frequently called English for Academic
Purposes (EAP),
I would like to communicate some ideas and experience
of teaching ESP classes at the Faculty of Chemistry of BUT.
Our mission of teaching English for future chemists is more
or less challenged by these phenomena:
(i) Absence of appropriate teaching materials on the
market. We have not found any material in bookstores which
would fit our specific needs and could be used as an English
textbook for the chemistry students. (This said with no intention
to blame any bookstore, of course!)
(ii) The different language experience of the students
who come to our school. Their language proficiency often
ranges from the true novice level to the advanced. The beginners
and lower intermediate students have the possibility to
attend two semesters of general English classes before they
register for ESP. However, the different level of their language
knowledge in the ESP classes cannot be fully eliminated
as you could hardly expect them to make the leap from
the beginner level to the upper intermediate or even advanced
one in one year.
(iii) The absolute majority of our students strongly
oppose and almost detest memory based learning as they are
used almost entirely to rely on their ability of logical reasoning.
(“We would not have been here at BUT if we had
been able to memorize. If we had been able to memorize, we
would sure have studied law or humanities!)
s348
(iv) Students, especially in the previous years, had often
a feeling that English was not their major specialization.
That they did not come here to study English but chemistry.
Despite the gradual change in this approach, there are always
some who enter to the English classroom saying: “We are
so tired from the previous instructions ...,” The laboratory
classes we have just had were so tedious...”, We are just after
organic chemistry/physics, math, … classes and tests, absolutely
drained both intellectually and physically, please, do not
want us to talk…” etc, etc.
(v) Last but not least challenge is that the technically
oriented students are not such good “natural speakers” even
in their mother language as the students of the humanities.
(“My goodness gracious, I do not know what to say even in
Czech. And now you want me to communicate it in English
on top of it…!”)
What have we done to cope with the above mentioned
challenges?
Ad (i) The first step to overcome the gap in the teaching
materials on the market was the creation and implementation
of the teaching material of our own. At the earlier stages of
our professional lives at our school we always prepared handouts
and distributed them at the beginnings of the lessons.
The dramatic change in our work occurred when the internet
was installed into most of our classrooms. The availability of
this medium made a great stimulus for us to create an internet
based textbook which we called English for Chemists www.
fch.vutbr.cz/ang2. When creating this material we had the
following objectives in minds:
The structure of our faculty – it is reflected in the selection
of the topics as the subject matter of the individual lessons
corresponds with the specialization of our institutes...
Proportional balancing of the lesson content so that all
four major skills could be developed equally. The use of 4
different icons (indicating writing, talking, listening and
reading) to label the individual exercises gives us a quick
orientation.
We tried hard to bring sound into the reading activities. –
Why do we emphasize sound so much? Everybody will agree
that priority number 1 in foreign language instructions is to
reach fluency. Fluency can be defined as the ability to understand
and speak instantly, e.g. without translating. Fluency
enables us to talk easily with native speakers. They easily
understand us and we easily understand them The only way
how to reach it goes through listening. That means we shall
not get fluency in English just by reading English articles
or learning grammar rules. To become fluent, students must
have a lot of understandable, repetitive listening. It means,
they will not learn English only with their eyes, but they
must learn English with their ears. It is important to know
that powerful listening must be repetitive and understandable
(A. J. Hoge). We managed to answer this demand by the following
ways:
•
the reading sections of the textbook have been vocalized
by a native lecturer