Esp teacher’s Transforming Profile

2.2 TEACHING
-Identified big questions and stories: most of the teachers ‘identified big questions or stories that gave meaning to the whole course. ..A sociology professor posed the question: “How does society influence individual human behavior and is that influence greater than the personal and biological forces within a person?”(ibid) An ESP teacher should come up with the question: Can ESP affect their way of perceiving science and life?
Our example: at the beginning of the course students are informed that the aim of this course is not only to increase their vocabulary or grammar knowledge, but to affect every aspect of their learning.
-Formulated good learning goals: they moved into learner-centered teaching and realized the need for defining high-quality learning goals around which they built their courses. They went beyond the categories of cognitive learning as ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’ and insisted on developing relevant generic competencies like in the case of the medical-school professor who wanted the students to learn how to handle their emotions and how to treat patients as human beings etc. i.e. she wanted them to develop intra- and inter-personal competencies (as constituent parts of the emotional intelligence). ESP itself is a generic competence, as it increases the knowledge of the foreign language in a particular scientific field; depending on the nature of the science and the future professions of the students, ESP teachers should decide which generic competencies are most suitable. However, we consider inter- and interpersonal competencies to be relevant and important for every profession.
Our example: as for the other generic competencies as recognized in the Tuning Project³we have already published an article on the generic competencies that can be developed by an ESP course, including: the capacity for analysis and synthesis, the capacity for applying knowledge in practice, basic general knowledge in the field of study, information management skills, interpersonal skills, the ability to work autonomously, elementary computer skills, research skills⁴.
-Used good learning activities: they moved beyond traditional way of teaching that relies on lecturing, homework and whole-class discussions and introduce: engagement of students in authentic tasks, working in small groups, finding sources of information, answering the ‘big questions’ and reflecting on their own learning. ESP teachers can apply all these range of different activities that increase students’ autonomous learning. It can be done by discussing authentic case studies, or by assigning individual research on relevant topics etc.
Our example: starting with making-notes activities which can be used for practicing paraphrasing, students first work in pairs and later individually, thus enhancing their autonomous learning, but they can also see their progress in terms of their writing competences; another important activity is the research they do on topics they choose that refer to controversial and/or unexplained phenomena both in science and in nature. Thus they start exercising mind-open activities, practice tolerance and surpassing biases (especially referring to scientific dogmas).