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English for Business Purposes

Por:   •  3/12/2018  •  Trabalho acadêmico  •  3.115 Palavras (13 Páginas)  •  138 Visualizações

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UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE UBERLÂNDIA

INSTITUTO DE LETRAS E LÍNGUAS

CURSO DE GRADUAÇÃO EM LETRAS COM ÊNFASE EM INGLÊS

Bruna Soares Silva

Objectives

This paper aims to present an analysis about the course design process, in which both the needs analysis tool, the course plan and the lesson plan was developed to attend the final paper of the English for Specific Purposes subject. In order to contextualize the work to be done, a fictional context was created to direct the preparation.

For this contextualization, the environment chosen was a departament of a representative company in Uberlândia, where the employees deal directly with retailers, end consumers and technology. The manager of the area and the sales team participated in the study, and they were the supposed learners.

Introduction

Conceptualize English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is an embracing work considering how many specializations we do have nowadays. Even if some theorists as Dudley-Evans and St John (1998) date the begin of ESP in the 1960s, the path to all the even more specific teaching of English is harder to define. Despite that, it can be considered an approach in which the main purpose is to teach English according to the learner learning context, and needs.

While the teaching of English for General Purposes (EGP) is focused on the four skills equally, the ESP resort to the learners needs analysis. This assessment, done way before the course design, will help the teacher to understand and to focus on specific needs and skills to trace the learner’s track on the learning process.

An ESP course will worry about why, when and where the student need the language; the great concern will be about how this language is used in the particular contexts the learner will work on. EGP does not only differ from ESP on the contexts, but also on the content studied. As EGP focuses on generalized situations, language and use of the target language, ESP will focus on specific vocabulary, genres and skills learned - all based on the needs analysis done previously on the course and classes.

The English for Specific Professional Purposes (ESPP) or English for Business Purposes (EBP), requires deeper specificity from the course. Even though, EBP can also trace two paths through the general and the very specific context of learning.

To be clear, English for General Business Purposes (EGBP) - which is not the focus on this work - is dealing with the language focusing on the correct use of English, such as verbal tenses, spelling, listening and speaking. On the other hand, English for Specific Business Purposes (ESBP) deals with the specifics situations experienced by the learner and the manipulation of the target language to respond to this situation (DUDLEY & ST JOHN).

To start design a EBP course, the basic informations we, as teachers, need to know is what the intentions of the learner with that course are: what are their personal and professional wants, the company’s necessities and polices and what the learner already knows and what he/she doesn’t know - the needs analysis. It is based on this answers the teacher can prepare a course aligned to the expectations from all parts.

The place the classes will occur and where the language will be used influences not only in what the students will learn, but also on how they will learn. Commonly the need involving learning a new language is related to a promotion or job opportunity and this may be the the biggest concern of the learners on EBP: to know they are learning what they need to attend to the situation.

Since the EBP students have the awareness of learning purposes (VIVIAN JR) the EGP usually don’t, the EBP course will be student-centered rather than language-centered or teacher-centered accordingly to Hutchinson and Waters. Bearing this in mind, the two first concepts we have to search for is the target needs and the learning needs, but both of them has their own divisions.

Considering the target needs, it can be divided as the learner’s necessities, lacks and wants. The necessities are related to the demands of the target situation, or “what the learner need to know in order to function effectively in the target situation” (Hutchinson and Waters). The lacks are related to what the learner already knows and what from the necessities he/she still needs to learn to use the language the right way on their demand. Finally, the wants involve the students’ proper views of their needs, what they expect the course to be, ect. On this last, it is worth mentioning that it can, however, “conflict with the perceptions of the other interested parties: course designer, sponsors, teachers” (HUTCHINSON & WATERS).

In Hutchinsons and Waters’ words, the target needs are “what knowledge and abilities will the learners require in order to be able to perform to the required degree of competence in the target situation”.

The learning needs reveal about the learning process, how the learner learns. In this analysis, the needs, potential and constraints of this process must be taken into account. The learning needs will tell more about how the classes will be taught than the actual target needs itself.

So, in order to really get in touch with the learners real demand, the teach dispose questionnaires models and interviews to analyse. This analysis will be searching for tasks, activities and situations the students can apply the target language, discourses and specific languages explored in these target situations. But it will also get in touch with the students and teachers’ “interests, values, and beliefs about teaching, learning and language”. (Helen Basturkmen)

The course designed for the class presented, as all the ESP courses should, starts with a questionnaire applied aiming to know and recognize the students, their target needs and situations; an interview also was done to meet and identify students’ learning needs. The needs target needs, since the target situation was created by the teacher, who also works with the learners. The course developed and the analysis will embase all the creation of the course, determine the level of English used, the contents studied and the lacks explored. The path to the destination of learning a new language begins with the so common starting point.

Methodology

As a course developed in a fictional environment, but with real people and necessities, a questionnaire was developed to track

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