Development of ESP courseware via the world wide web (WWW): a computational linguistics analysis approach
english language programmes that are being designed to meet specific needs of the learners would benefit not only the learners themselves but also their stakeholders. An example of an English language programme that has been designed to meet the english for Specific Purpos...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Book Section |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit UTM Press
2009
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://eprints.utm.my/14461/ http://eprints.utm.my/14461/1/SarimahShamsuddin2009_DevelopmentofESPCoursewareviatheWorldWide.pdf |
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| Summary: | english
language programmes that are being designed to meet
specific needs of the learners would benefit not only the learners
themselves but also their stakeholders. An example of an English
language programme that has been designed to meet the
english
for Specific Purpose (ESP) needs of Civil Engineering (CE) students
of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) is the programme called
English for Civil Engineering or ECE. This programme was a three-
semester programme that has been planned through very close
collaboration between the faculty of Civil Engineering (FCE) and
the Department of Modern Languages (DML).
The ECE programme ‘rests on the principle that language
learning is and should be part of the mainstream CE programme
(DML of UTM, 1996). Its ultimate aim was to be able to assist
CE students in using English for executing their academic work assigned by their faculty, the FCE. In general, the ECE programme
was mainly intended to ‘serve as the foundation of the long term
objective of enhancing the marketability of CE graduates by
integrating language training into the overall training plans of the
FCE’ (DML of UTM, 1996). The ECE programme offered three
different courses which are UHB1312, UHB1322, and UHB2332,
to the CE students. Although it is subdivided into three courses,
that is, one course per semester, the courses should be regarded
as a continuous and coherent training scheme. Hence, in general,
the ECE programme intends to assist the CE students in extracting
information for written and oral communication for both academic
and professional purposes.
In relation to the second course of the programme, UHB1322,
in every phase of the course, the students are required to perform two
parallel and complementary types of activities – the core activities
and the support activities (also called pedagogic activities). The core
activities are activities which would train the CE students to extract
information from texts related to Civil Engineering Materials (one
of the core topics in Civil Engineering), that are written in English,
and consequently, make notes from them. These notes would then
be used to write essays and reports related to Civil Engineering
Materials (CEM). As for the pedagogic activities of the UHB1322
course, they are activities which lead to and support the core activities
of the course. All pedagogic activities such as the reading of texts,
vocabulary/glossary work and language exercises, will be related to
the topic on Civil Engineering Materials.
In relation to the above pedagogic activities, they are very
time-consuming as they require several classroom sessions with
the language instructor. They also require frequent referencing to
an extremely limited number of monolingual and bilingual Civil
Engineering dictionaries as well as English CEM textbooks in the
UTM library. In order for the CE students to perform the pedagogic
activities much more efficiently and efficaciously, a unique self-access courseware that can be accessed via the WWW (World Wide
Web, Web or Internet) using the computational linguistic analysis
approach, has been designed for the ECE programme in UTM,
which will be referred to as ‘UNITEKMA ECE Courseware’. This
chapter aims to describe the process of producing the prototype of
the above courseware in which its lessons focus both on content
words and language structures taken from texts on Civil Engineering
Materials. The following sections of this chapter will discuss related
literature to the design of the courseware. |
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