Научная статья на тему 'USING ESP VOCABULARY TEACHING AND LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN ESP CLASSES'

USING ESP VOCABULARY TEACHING AND LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN ESP CLASSES Текст научной статьи по специальности «Языкознание и литературоведение»

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Ключевые слова
Specific purpose / educational / significant / vocabulary / motivating / Short-term memory / Long-term memory / learning strategies. / конкретная цель / образовательная / значимая / лексика / мотивация / кратковременная память / долговременная память / стратегии обучения.

Аннотация научной статьи по языкознанию и литературоведению, автор научной работы — Sattarova Nasiba Azamatovna

Learning and teaching vocabulary is very important when learning English, especially in ESP; however, vocabulary has been an abandoned field of foreign language teaching for a number of years. To develop students ' communicative competence, language teachers should encourage them to learn as many words as possible. English for specific purposes (ESP) courses are a new trend in the teaching of English and include technical English, scientific English, English for medical professionals and English for tourism. There are different opinions about teaching ESP courses, but vocabulary is crucial in this area of learning. Students should be aware of the importance of language learning strategies and teach them how to use them properly.

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ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИЕ ЛЕЧЕБНОГО ЗАПАСА ESP И ИЗУЧЕНИЕ ИНОСТРАННЫХ ЯЗЫКОВ НА КЛАССАХ ESP

Изучение и преподавание словарного запаса очень важно при изучении английского языка, особенно в ESP; однако словарный запас в течение ряда лет оставался заброшенной областью обучения иностранным языкам. Чтобы развить коммуникативную компетентность учащихся, учителя иностранных языков должны побуждать их выучить как можно больше слов. Курсы «Английский для конкретных целей» (ESP) это новая тенденция в преподавании английского языка. Они включают технический английский, научный английский, английский для медицинских работников и английский для туризма. Существуют разные мнения о преподавании курсов ESP, но словарный запас имеет решающее значение в этой области обучения. Студенты должны осознавать важность стратегий изучения языка и учить их правильно их использовать.

Текст научной работы на тему «USING ESP VOCABULARY TEACHING AND LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN ESP CLASSES»

Oriental Renaissance: Innovative, R VOLUME 1 | ISSUE 5

educational, natural and social sciences (~) ISSN 2181-1784

Scientific Journal Impact Factor SJIF 2021: 5.423

USING ESP VOCABULARY TEACHING AND LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN ESP CLASSES

Sattarova Nasiba Azamatovna The Teacher of Termez State University

Abstract: Learning and teaching vocabulary is very important when learning English, especially in ESP; however, vocabulary has been an abandoned field of foreign language teaching for a number of years. To develop students ' communicative competence, language teachers should encourage them to learn as many words as possible. English for specific purposes (ESP) courses are a new trend in the teaching of English and include technical English, scientific English, English for medical professionals and English for tourism. There are different opinions about teaching ESP courses, but vocabulary is crucial in this area of learning. Students should be aware of the importance of language learning strategies and teach them how to use them properly.

Key words: Specific purpose, educational, significant, vocabulary, motivating, Short-term memory, Long-term memory, learning strategies.

Аннотация: Изучение и преподавание словарного запаса очень важно при изучении английского языка, особенно в ESP; однако словарный запас в течение ряда лет оставался заброшенной областью обучения иностранным языкам. Чтобы развить коммуникативную компетентность учащихся, учителя иностранных языков должны побуждать их выучить как можно больше слов. Курсы «Английский для конкретных целей» (ESP) - это новая тенденция в преподавании английского языка. Они включают технический английский, научный английский, английский для медицинских работников и английский для туризма. Существуют разные мнения о преподавании курсов ESP, но словарный запас имеет решающее значение в этой области обучения. Студенты должны осознавать важность стратегий изучения языка и учить их правильно их использовать.

Ключевые слова: конкретная цель, образовательная, значимая, лексика, мотивация, кратковременная память, долговременная память, стратегии обучения.

INTRODUCTION

Today, while implementing the third phase of National program of preparing cadres, all new specialists undergoing the higher educational system are required to know one or several foreign languages. In connection with this, huge tasks are set before teachers of English language; teachers became one of the main subjects of

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educational reforms. Therefore, if a teacher is open to welcome new pedagogical innovations, he can provide goal-oriented introduction of innovative ideas into educational process. Lately, range of significant official acts was issued on accelerating and developing the foreign languages teaching; they define the state policy towards teaching foreign languages.

Teaching and learning ESP vocabulary

Teaching vocabulary especially in ESP courses is becoming a challenge for English Language Teachers. Vocabulary is an inseparable part of any teaching syllabus and vocabulary should be taught in a well-planned and regular basis. It is essential to carefully decide what vocabulary will be selected for teaching, and what approach or activities will be used to teach it to the students.

English has been taught in primary schools from the first grade for several years. The traditional textbooks have been changed and the students are provided with more modern books that include pictures and focus on language skills. The same situation exists in high schools where the students attend two to four English classes a week [1] .

English teachers are being trained in using modern methods of English teaching and attend local and international conferences. Old teaching methods are rapidly being replaced with modern ones. The teachers at Universities in the country design curricula based on the students' needs and interests. Vocabulary learning is a very important part of the curricula of universities and the students who study here need to learn English for different purposes: to deal with the foreign business partners in their jobs, to know it for their studies, to travel abroad to meet other cultures or on holiday, to read literature in English, etc.

It is believed that ESP combines subject matter and English language teaching. This approach can be highly motivating for students because students are able to apply what they learn in their English classes to their main field of study, whether it be law, computing, business, tourism, etc. Being able to use the vocabulary and structures that they learn in a meaningful context reinforces what is taught and increases their motivation [2]. Nevertheless, ESP concentrates more on language in context than on teaching grammar and language structures.

Another interesting fact is that ESP words are perceived as more complex than general words and they should spend more time learning them. This is probably due to the fact that collocations are very frequent in ESP and combining them correctly requires more effort. There are specific types of collocations in ESP which cause

DISCUSSION AND RESULTS

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students' errors due to a lack of translational equivalence between the students' first language and the second language. Teachers must help the learner become familiar with ESP collocations, and such familiarity will develop best when the learner is consciously aware of this tendency of words to go together (Lewis, 1993).

When selecting words to teach:

• Teach words that are central to the concept students must learn.

• Teach only words students do not already know.

• Teach students to use context clues, when available.

• Teach only a few words at a time so meaning is retained.

• Relate new words to previously learned words.

• Provide multiple exposures to words.

Teachers should:

□ Encourage students to bring their ideas, background knowledge, and experiences into class learning activities.

□ Be responsive and accepting listeners when students are talking.

□ Nurture an accepting, risk free environment where students will feel comfortable. Language is not practiced or acquired when students are afraid to use it.

Learning ESP vocabulary

Vocabulary acquisition is incremental in nature and this means that words are not learned instantaneously but they are learned over a period of time. The number of words learned depends on numerous exposures to a particular word. McCarthy (1990, p. viii) points out that "No matter how well the student learns grammar, no matter how successfully the sounds of L2 are mastered, without words to express a wider range of meanings, communication in an L2 just cannot happen in any meaningful way" (McCarthy 1990, p. viii).

Schmitt (2000, p. 131) emphasizes that "the object of vocabulary learning is to transfer lexical information from short-term memory, where it resides during the process of manipulating language, to permanent long-term memory".

Short-term memory is also called working memory. Working memory is a kind of gateway where the information is transferred to long-memory [3]. Working memory is linked to human consciousness and its characteristic is that it holds a limited amount of information for a limited amount of time. The role of the working memory in this case is to extract visuals, for example, that are relevant for ongoing comprehension but the capacity of the working memory is always limited.

Long-term memory serves as the storage area of information. The amount of information that people hold there is not known but the information can be stored for

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a long period of time. However, instead of words being represented alphabetically, concepts are represented according to their associations to one another. An example is the word "blue" and what usually comes to mind is the sky which is closely associated with blue or "red" usually associated with love [4].

Driscol (2005) gives a detailed explanation of each: episodic memory refers to specific events such as in specific events as remembering the circumstances of how one learns to read a map. Whereas semantic memory refers to all the general information stored in memory and recalled independently of how one has learned the information. The circumstances under which reading a map was learned are not memorable but the skill is remembered. The long-term and working memories are also important in producing speech where the material is accessed and assembled from the long-term memory.

Learning concrete words is easier than learning abstract words. Learners can more easily remember words like: fire, hose, and safety if they appear on a list than words such as firefighter and fire track. The reason is that the verbal system represents the meaning of the words, but the imagined system represents images of the words. The concrete words are remembered better with two memories available at recall, as opposed to one for abstract words (Driscol, 2005).

A recent trend in higher education is ESP (English for Specific Purposes) courses. These courses are designed around students' needs based on their field of study. The goal is to strengthen students' proficiency and help them to get ready to cope with everyday situations and deal with professionals in many fields such as: engineering, medicine, education, IT, etc. There are many training sessions organized by international experts whose goal is to train local teachers to teach these courses successfully [5].

In order to develop an ability to learn new vocabulary, for both general English and technical vocabulary in learning ESP (English for Specific Purposes), the students should become aware of the importance of language learning strategies and be trained to use them appropriately. The teachers put a lot of effort toward helping them to learn vocabulary related to their field of study.

It is widely believed that reading is the major source of vocabulary growth in L1. Students with strong reading skills who read a variety of texts may realize substantial gains in their vocabulary without direct instruction. These students may also realize some incidental vocabulary gains through independent reading, however. Teachers should neither ignore nor rely solely upon incidental acquisition but rather seek to enhance its effectiveness with vocabulary logs, word walls and other

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techniques. Words occur in written texts in four different categories distinguished by Nation (2001):

1) High-Frequency words including many content words, e.g., government, forests, production, adoption, represent, boundary;

2) Academic words include many words that are common in various kinds of academic texts, e.g., policy, phase, sustained

3) Technical words are closely related to the topic and subject area (words from the field of agriculture) in the text, e.g., indigenous, beech, pod carp, regeneration, timber;

4) Low-Frequency words include words like pastoral, aired, perpetuity,

zone.

During the past decades, teaching a foreign language has gained much more attention in most countries around the world. As a result, searching for appropriate and effective teaching materials occupies a great space of instructors' thinking. The purpose of learning a foreign language is to be able to benefit from using it in the real world, in real situations. Therefore, most of the language teachers think whether it is enough to teach the language using the course book tasks, which are regarded artificial because they are designed for teaching purposes only, or if they should adopt using authentic and translation materials to scaffold learners' learning process in general and develop reading skills in particular. Therefore, when teachers are concerned with helping their students to develop reading skills, they should think about the methods of teaching being used and materials being taught to students. Reading tasks should provide learners with a high level of independence when reading in a foreign language in a real life context, which in turn means, using actual authentic materials.

[1] Lewis, M. (1993). The lexical approach: The state of ELT and the way forward.Hove, England: Language Teaching Publications.

[2] Azamatovna, S. N. (2020). The main goal of using feedback in the writing process. Proceeding of the ICECRS, 6, 167-169.

[3] Azamatovna, S. N. (2020). TECHNOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIO-CULTURAL COMPETENCE IN STUDENT. International Engineering Journal For Research & Development, 5(CONGRESS), 3-3.

[4] Erkinovna, T. M. (2021). TO THE STUDY OF VALUABLE COMPONENTS OF LEXICAL UNITS ON COMPARATIVE ASPECT (ON THE

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

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MATERIAL OF RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES). Oriental renaissance: Innovative, educational, natural and social sciences, 1(5), 155-159.

[5] ERKINOVNA, T. M. THE PROBLEM OF TEACHING ANALYTICAL READING AND EXERCISES OF NON-PHILOLOGICAL DIRECTIONS.

[6] Sattarova, N. A. (2019). THE IMPLEMENTATION OF GIVING FEEDBACK FOR WRITING. ИННОВАЦИОННЫЕ ПОДХОДЫ В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ НАУКЕ, 114-117.

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