Book Review: Resources for Teaching English for Specific Purposes

Transcription

1 English as a Global Language Education (EaGLE) Journal: Vol. 1 No.1 (2015) Foreign Language Center, National Cheng Kung University & Airiti Press Inc. DOI: /EaGLE Book Review: Resources for Teaching English for Specific Purposes Hsien-Chin Liou 1 Resources for Teaching English for Specific Purposes. Wenli Tsou & Shin-Mei Kao (Eds.) Taipei, Taiwan: Bookman Books, Ltd. 199 pp. ISBN: English for Specific Purposes is continuing to develop in Taiwan, as seen in the various conferences (e.g., Asia University, 2014) and workshops (Workshop on ESP Professional Development, 2014, National Cheng Kung University, NCKU, September 13-14) that have taken place in recent years, while a local journal, Taiwan International ESP Journal, publishes two issues annually. With contributions by ten leading scholars from across the island, Resources for Teaching English for Specific Purposes constitutes an up-todate and welcome addition to the field of ESP, and should be of interest to graduate students, advanced undergraduates and scholars engaged in ESP research. This timely and useful volume provides practical tips on how to design, teach, and assess an ESP course, and furthers the development of the field in Taiwan. The book contains an introductory chapter, and is then divided into three sections: (1) critical issues for ESP professional development, (2) key considerations in teaching and learning ESP, and (3) the important topics of assessment, each with two to four chapters. Although ESP has a long history, its importance was not recognized in Taiwan until recently, and this has led to a number of issues that are addressed in the book with regard to the challenges local scholars face when they have to deal with teaching English in higher educational settings. As stated in the forward of the book, the aim of 1 Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Feng Chia University, Taiwan. Corresponding author, hcliou@fcu.edu.tw

2 90 EaGLE Journal 1(1), 2015 compiling the work is to respond to the common confusion in the English teaching profession by addressing ESP s basic premise and the ways in which the needs, language requirements, and teaching methodologies of ESP are used to achieve this (p. v). In Section 1 (Critical Issues), Wenli Tsou first elucidates how ESP teachers can be empowered in order to deal with various challenges they face, including giving appropriate instruction to English and non-english majors of different disciplines. Under the influence of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), ESP teachers are advised to develop content knowledge for the specific fields they may work with, cultivate research skills, and work with content specialists. Tsou notes that the development of a good ESP program can empower the teachers who must instruct it. However, she also claims that the ESP area is well researched (p. 18), which I do not agree with. Indeed, not only is ESP in various disciplines or domains of workplace communication underresearched, but this is especially true of ESP in Taiwan (and very much so in relation to teachers cognitions and practices, as stated in Atai and Fatahi-Majd [2014]). Still, I agree with Tsou that teachers, even those with a heavy teaching load, need to spend more time reading the related ESP research, and perhaps working on the action research to examine their own immediate pedagogical concerns (Atai & Fatahi-Majd, 2014). In Chapter 3 Meei-Ling Liaw introduces the notion of intercultural competence in professional contexts. She emphasizes the need for students to become intercultural speakers in order to recognize cultural diversity in the workplace and face the challenges that arise when communicating with speakers from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. A competence with regard to this would include the abilities to problematize and cope emotionally with the issues that arise in multicultural professional contexts, and thus work more efficiently. In order to help ESP learners develop intercultural competence, it is necessary for teachers to foster students awareness of the global use of English, create joint projects for them with the cooperation of teachers in different cultures, and take advantage of information technologies to achieve these goals. Finally, Liaw showcases a tele-collaborative project, called Creativity Seminar, in which she worked with a teacher who led a group of French students majoring in business

3 Book Review: Resources for Teaching English for Specific Purposes 91 who collaborated with Taiwanese college students majoring in English. A task-based project was designed, with classroom instruction as well as teleconference sessions between the two groups, with the teaching materials being hosted online along with the students PowerPoint files of their related presentations. Finally, in Chapter 4 Mei-Ling Tsai discusses a promising approach that can bridge the gap between ESP courses and English Mediated Instruction (EMI) courses through collaboration between English teachers and content specialists in each field. This chapter describes the full process of the development of a specific course that was carried out at the South East Asian Health Education Center in NCKU, presenting detailed information on various aspects of the related pedagogical considerations and instructional activities. As the chapter vividly shows how this course evolves step by step, challenges of linking teachers from two different disciplines can be appreciated readily. Although the goal of the course was to foster the learners global competence, readers of this chapter may want to better understand the feedback obtained from students after the course was completed, or how their performance was affected by their participation in it, such as audience feedback to any subsequent conference presentations they had made, as seen in Hu and Gong (2014), which examined conference presentations at a medical university in China. Section 2 is organized around four chapters on ESP teaching and learning. In Chapter 5, Chiou-Lau Chern discusses the importance of needs analysis and its impact on curriculum design, and reviews the opinions of several scholars with regard to this in relation to ESP. She then examines some empirical studies on needs analysis carried out by various stakeholders, with the issues of course design and syllabus selection being the critical backdrops of the chapter. Two classroom examples from Singapore and Taiwan are discussed to show how specific ESP courses evolved based on needs analysis. In Chapter 6, Ching-Kang Liu revised a traditional freshman English course by introducing a project-based collaborative ESP method, based on greater authenticity in material and task development. He then showcases how a class was conducted in Taipei University, presenting the detailed procedures, the results of pretests and

4 92 EaGLE Journal 1(1), 2015 posttests across three academic years, and the findings of a questionnaire. The data indicates that the project was a success, and also well-received by participating students. Similarly, in Chapter 7, Fay Chen looks at the issue of authenticity in material development and how this can lead to more effective tasks in ESP classrooms through writing and authoring as well adapting teaching materials with appropriate course design. She discusses the ongoing debate on using authentic materials without assuming that such materials are always beneficial to learners in all contexts. She then introduces some of the sources of material that can be used in such classes, using examples from the NCKU ESP program. Finally, in Chapter 8, Shu-Chiao Tsai explains how ESP courses can be more easily designed and taught through the introduction of dedicated ESP multimedia courseware, based on Chapelle s suggestions (1998) and Mayer s views on multimedia (2001). He then describes how he integrated ESP courseware into his classes, and provides details of student performance and their responses to this approach. Vocabulary Profiler ( and Computerized Propositional Idea Density Rater (Brown, Snodgrass, Kemper, Herman, & Covington, 2008) were adopted for data analysis. The details of the pedagogical processes that he applied, as well as the materials used and experiences obtained in each case, can provide other ESP teachers with useful examples or even a model for applications in their own classrooms, or serve as a starting point to start other ESP research projects. In Chapter 9, the start of Section 3 on ESP assessment, Benjamin Wang first criticizes the existing high stakes but restricted ESP tests that are often used in Taiwan, such as those that assess aviation English, health/ medical English or legal English. He then presents a model which includes general proficiency tests, specific purpose-english tests, and performance evaluations, and details its implementation, again taking a course at NCKU as an example. Table 9-3, on p. 168, shows the costs of various common proficiency tests, which can serve as a useful reference for institutions or departments considering adopting them. Next, Shin-Mei Kao examines the need for learners to cultivate the skills related to professional communication, and the role which

5 Book Review: Resources for Teaching English for Specific Purposes 93 performance assessment can play in ESP classrooms. In two short sections, she describes some linguistic elements of professional communication, such as the level of formality (e.g., lexical choices, syntactic complexity or organizational structures), one-way or two-way communication types (using examples from the hospitality and tourism sector), or written and spoken discourses. She then describes four steps that can be used when conducting a collaborative evaluation of student performance, where both content experts and peer students are involved in the process of assessing ESP outcomes and student performance in the classroom. Again, similar to the chapters in Section 2, the two chapters in this section provide useful resources for classroom teachers, ESP researchers, and policy makers, with the aim of demonstrating how ESP teaching can be assessed. Overall, much more work is needed to examine how best to use ESP resources in a Taiwanese context, given the trend of English as a Lingua Franca. I found reading this book very useful, and learned much with regard to the latest ideas for teaching ESP. This book will thus be a very useful resource, providing inspiration in each of its chapters to graduate students and scholars in Taiwan and elsewhere who are interested in ESP. There is, however, some room for minor improvements with regard to the following issues. First, a brief synopsis of each section and chapter would enhance the usability of the book. Second, more empirical evidence and data with regard to the development of ESP in Taiwan is needed, as too much has been speculative in nature, even in relation to practical applications of teaching ESP in various classrooms. A fundamental issue in this context is how English for general purposes (EGP) should be integrated with ESP, or where EGP should end and ESP start in higher education in Taiwan. There is also limited knowledge with regard to how ESP is applied in the workplace in Taiwan, as there is not enough research that applies textual analysis (e.g., Tsou & Hung, 2011) in various domains that use English. There are two other books those who are interested in the development of ESP in Taiwan may desire to learn from regarding more diversified factors in implementing ESP in our country. In a course design book, Basturkmen (2010) discusses the requirements to analyze needs, investigate

6 94 EaGLE Journal 1(1), 2015 specialist discourse/communication, and develop a curriculum (content, materials, and assessment), using examples of teaching English for police, medical doctors, and thesis writing, as well as for visual communication. In addition, a recent handbook on ESP by Paltridge and Startfield (2013) highlights the needed research for an international ESP audience, in addition to examining the more practical aspects of the field for teachers. The handbook includes 31 chapters, examining issues such as the history of ESP history (from 1962 until 2013), four language skills, important areas of ESP research (e.g., corpus-based work, genre analysis, and studies of social practices within institutional and global contexts), pedagogical issues, different perspectives on ESP (power and politics) and methodologies (e.g., multimodality). With regard to future work, we anticipate that more wideranging and up-to-date publications on ESP in Taiwan will be produced, thus serving as a supplement to the ESP program at NCKU (Tsou & Chen, 2014), with content that provides a balance between both research and practice. References Atai, M. R., & Fatahi-Majd, M. (2014). Exploring the practices and cognitions of Iranian ELT instructors and subject teachers in teaching EAP reading comprehension. English for Specific Purposes, 33, Basturkmen, H. (2010). Developing courses in English for specific purposes. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, C., Snodgrass, T., Kemper, S. J., Herman, R., & Covington, M. A. (2008). Automatic measurement of propositional idea density from partof-speech tagging. Behavior Research Methods, 40, Chapelle, C. A. (1998). Multimedia CALL: Lessons to be learned from research on instructed SLA. Language Learning and Technology, 2(1),

7 Book Review: Resources for Teaching English for Specific Purposes 95 Hu, J., & Gong, S. (2014, October). English forum on medical humanities of SMMU: An interdisciplinary innovative teaching practice. Paper presented at 2014 Cross-Straits International Conference on English for Specific Purposes, Taichung, Taiwan. Mayer, R. E. (2001). Multimedia learning. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Paltridge, B., & Starfield, S. (Eds.). (2013). The handbook of English for specific purposes. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Tsou, W. L., & Chen, F. (2014). ESP program evaluation framework: Description and application to a Taiwanese university ESP program. English for Specific Purposes, 33, Tsou, W. L., & Hung, H. L. (2011). A functional grammar approach to a text comparison of Taiwanese EMP students and international EMP experts for an understanding of the EMP writing gap. English Teaching & Learning, 35(1), 1-46.