Aiming at greater specificity in ESP courses: English for Industrial Engineering

Abstract

Little seems to have changed since Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998) listed the main roles performed by ESP practitioners: teacher, course designer and materials provider, collaborator, researcher, and evaluator. Even Johns (2013) asserts that such roles have been traditionally performed by ESP practitioners and will continue to characterize their work in the future. The exercise of these roles presupposes a decision-making process that is “research-based” and combines theoretical and practical considerations (Hyland 2002: 1). As an illustration of all of this, the authors of this study aim at describing and discussing a course design project that they have recently started at the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena (UPCT) in Spain, where they teach various ESP courses.The project targets an existing set of Technical English courses that are currently taught as a part of five Industrial Engineering degrees, namely Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electronic Engineering and Industrial Technology Engineering. In its present form, neither of the courses are involved with the specifics of any of the aforementioned engineering areas; rather, they offer an overview of structures, technical vocabulary and text types that are supposed to be equally useful for all engineering students. The authors have now begun a review of the courses by engaging with disciplinary experts – that is to say, the school’s faculty. Unable to perform a fully-fledged needs analysis, as the courses’ objectives are predetermined in the relevant “Memoria académica” documents, the main objective of the authors is to use the experts’ input for designing distinct courses for each engineering degree; these will feature greater specificity but will also maintain a degree of inclusiveness.The study begins with a general overview of ESP courses at the UPCT that takes into account all the relevant factors, ranging from the professional profile of the courses’ instructors to their current syllabuses; the strengths and weaknesses of the latter are duly described. The newly designed courses are then described as intending to include a common core of technical English skills (which will be taught across the different degrees), and a set of linguistic items that are specific to each one of the five engineering areas. A case study follows where two courses (the one designed for the Degree in Electronic Engineering, and the one devised for the Degree in Industrial Technology) are considered. As a conclusion for their study, the authors place their project in the context of the “still ongoing” debate between wide-angled and narrow-angled approaches to ESP (Anthony 2018: 159) and concur with Hyland’s opinion that a needs analysis – even one that is limited in scope – is always “a continuous process” that eventually modifies teaching and helps establishing “the effectiveness of a course” (2006: 73).