LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES Ursula Erik, Ülle Sihver

Ursula Erik

LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

Estonian University of Life Sciences Ülle Sihver

Languages, and for specific purposes – what could possibly be so specific about a language or the purposes of learning it?

Let us take a look at teaching them, based on real-life case studies. Teachers of languages for specific purposes (LSP) meet each year and this year shared their experience at the seminar “Learner of LSP. What and how should be taught?” at the Estonian University of Life Sciences (Eesti Maaülikool, EMÜ) in Tartu on 14 February 2020. The presentations gave insights into the joys and mission-impossible moments of the teachers – or how else would you describe the task of teaching French to beginners in 40 hours, from total zero, so that the learners would manage with basics in Mali, on their real mission? Madli Kütt from Estonian National Defence College (Kaitseväe Akadeemia, KVA) energised the audience with her story of teaching not ’just a language’, but a ’backwards-language’, as even NATO is OTAN in French, for learners with a very practical communicative goal. She found out first what exactly the learners needed, then “understood I have to forget about the available textbooks” and worked out a system of simulation and role plays, creating associations for spoken language with movement, gestures, associations and vocabulary cards. The varied and inspiring teaching kit prompted a question from the audience about how much time it took to prepare for the 40 hours of teaching. Madli Kütt was diplomatic, expressing hope it had been within the general hours of working time required for teachers.

Maia Boltovsky, also from the Estonian National Defence College (KVA), described how to encourage reflecting and meta-learning activities, with a learner insight by cadet Mihkel Veski. Learners with insufficient preparation of learning strategies for studies need practice to develop their self-regulated learning skills. Cadet Mihkel Veski explained how a total no-group-work person – what he had thought he was – could enjoy reflection, self-reflection and peer reflection when work is well planned and tasks suitably organised.

Kaarin Tuuksam and Sigrid Tooming from EMÜ described the obligatory English for Specific Purposes course for the 1st year students. EMÜ ESP courses have a common framework, based on the curricula and objectives of the university, and specific terminology of the field for groups. The focus is on being able to write abstracts (for coursework and theses), explaining the speciality concepts in Estonian, based on comprehension of specific information in English (an article in Wikipedia) and being able to express the ideas in English (presentations).

Mare Roes from the Tallinn University of Technology (Tallinna Tehnikaülikool, TTÜ) told us about her experience of teaching ESP and highlighted the correlation between objectives and teaching hours. Sigrid Parts from the Estonian Business School (EBS) shared their practice of teaching languages for business communication. The students of EBS are expected to be able to communicate in at least three languages.

Kaire Viil from TTÜ Virumaa College (Tallinna Tehnikaülikooli Virumaa kolledž) described her experience of motivating e-course learners, especially during the all-too-often drop of enthusiasm after the first weeks of active participating. It should be kept in mind that motivation can be internal or external or combined and needs to be encouraged. She reminded us of an EMÜ student’s feedback to an online grammar course, which sums up the mixed motivation and self-regulation students might struggle with: “I joined the course because I needed the credit points, but ended up learning something as well.” An e-course is a flexible way of enabling learners to combine their studies in and out of the classroom and develop the skills for self-management of learning.

Some very specific aspects that have to be considered were discussed by Jelena Kapura and Kerli Linnat from Estonian Academy of Security Sciences (Sisekaitseakadeemia, SKA). The title of their presentation about ageing population and curriculum development evoked curiosity. Actually, the connection is logical, as they are training students for the 112 distress calls, to be able to communicate in Estonian, Russian and English. An issue one might not think about is the callers – all of them in trouble, sometimes in panic or drunk or both, often using the vocabulary you will not find in any textbook nor in many dictionaries either, or just having a very limited command of the language which is not their mother tongue, but the 112 has to find out what is going on, despite the callers themselves sometimes not having a clear idea of what is wrong. Jelena Kapura mentioned that their students’ average age is rising due to young people’s insufficient Russian. The callers, on the other hand, tend to be elderly people whose Estonian is poor. Surprisingly, the Estonian-Russian speakers do not have an advantage, she said, as they communicate in Russian, but take notes in Estonian, which needs mental processing and specific vocabulary.

The recurrent theme during the seminar was the wide scope of language skills. The future specialists have to manage when they start their independent career and often face long and complicated texts or instructions. Therefore, the set of the so-called survival skills has to include an understanding of machine translation, its limits and practical applications. Ursula Erik (EMÜ) gave a brief overview of machine translation and what more there is to it than Google Translate. Even Google Translate is not the source of jokes it used to be and has switched from the statistical piece-to-piece method to Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT), which uses wider context and is more accurate. Irina Koksharova (EMÜ) gave examples from English and Russian and stressed that the learners have to know what they need the language for, and how to find the relevant terminology by checking, rechecking and double-checking. The number of texts of some fields is higher in the internet, therefore the translations are more reliable, e.g. with technical and veterinary terminology. Ursula Erik demonstrated the machine translation options of TartuNLP and Tilde. TartuNLP, University of Tartu, specialises in neural translation. Their neurotolge.ee even enables multilingual translation with a mix of languages in a sentence, changing the style from informal to formal to polite, and correcting errors. Tilde is a European language technology company, which has Estonian in their Tilde Translator choice of languages and provides a number of services, including processing of documents.

Learners tend to think about dictionaries when they need “a word“, therefore we have to give them practice to make them aware that terms are often not translated word for word; the context has to be considered, and sources like the Riigi Teataja parallel texts (legislation in Estonian and English), Wikipedia multiple language versions and the IATE termbase with the languages of the European Union should be used when looking for a term that is correct and used in the field. In addition, it should be kept in mind that the learner of LSP has to have a good command of terminology in their mother tongue. They should know that CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) tools with translation memories are available. CAT tools are different from machine translation, as they enable creating personal databases and text corpora.

At the end of the day (as the saying goes in contemporary Estonian), one could not help feeling in awe with the creativeness of the teachers. Mostly it is not possible to rely to just one textbook, as the needs and the teaching context is... just specific. Well, it is LSP!

Identify the needs of the learners. The higher and vocational education institutions have the curricula and objectives that set the general aim; lifelong learners of language courses describe what they need the language for.

For example, a group of journalists or lawyers need to grasp the nuances of complicated grammar; engineers are generally more straightforward but have to understand there’s no need to translate user manuals word-for-word (Push the button with your finger: if you include the ’your’ in Estonian, it implies as if in some cases it would be acceptable to push it with someone else’s finger), and doctors or veterinarians have to be able to speak the ’human language’ as well, to explain the problem to the patient or the patient’s owner.

Consider the number of teaching hours you have and how many learners are expected to participate, think carefully what could realistically be achieved within the timeframe.

Course design as described by L. Dee Fink (A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning, https://www.deefinkandassociates.com/GuidetoCourseDesignAug05.pdf ) is efficient.

For example, the learners need to prepare for doing a presentation. That is the aim and final point to start planning backwards from. The skills for a presentation are speaking and preparing visuals. The activity before the final presentation (Step 3) could be discussing the drafts in small groups, to become more confident with the material and edit the visual (Step 2). To prepare the draft presentation, the learners need to know about visuals and highlighting information, which would be a chance to practice speaking in peer discussions (Step 1). These 3 basic steps could be taken according to how much classroom time you have for each activity.

Be prepared for very varied language skills – always have a ’survival kit’ for the slow and for the fluent learners.

Teaching LSP often includes MSP, mother tongue for specific purposes, as the learners are learning their speciality and terminology in their mother tongue as well, and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL).

Work hand-in-hand with teachers of the speciality. If that is not possible, you can teach language for learning the speciality.

Our experience in EMÜ is that learners have to realise that their work actually matters more than ’getting the grades and credit points’. Therefore, the community aspect is relevant to make the learner feel what they do is of importance for the society. In EMÜ, the LSP task of writing an article for Wikipedia is the learners’ contribution to develop terminology and specific texts in Estonian.

To sum up, a quote on teaching LSP: “Language for specific purposes (LSP) courses are those in which the methodology, the content, the objectives, the materials, the teaching, and the assessment practices all stem from specific, target language uses based on an identified set of specialized needs.“ (Jonathan Trace, Thom Hudson, and James Dean Brown. An Overview of Language for Specific Purposes http://nflrc.lll.hawaii.edu/media/docs/NW69-01.pdf ).