HEJ, HU ISSN 1418-7108
Manuscript no.: LIN-001101
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The abolition of Russian as a compulsory language in the late 1980's
resulted in Russian for Specific Purposes (RSP) teaching falling into
the background and giving way to the teaching of foreign languages in
institutions of higher education, in many cases at the basic or
lower-intermediate level. However, since the middle of the 1990's LSP
teaching has been gaining ground with revised objectives, content and
teaching techniques, as distinct from former RSP teaching mostly
aiming at equipping students with specialist terminology.
The needfor LSP teaching is clearly justified by several needs analyses
carried out among university students and in-work professionals
(Fister, 1994, Koster-Radnai, 1997). A most comprehensive language
audit carried out by Teemant, Varga and Heltai indicated that students
are motivated to study the Russian, Italian and Spanish languages
mostly for the general purpose of everyday communication whereas they
consider the learning of English, German, French and Latin as
important from the point of view of their future career (Teemant
et. al: 1993, 91-99).
LSP teaching aims to satisfy these pre-work and
in-work needs. Let me remark it here, that the "professional language"
term we use in Hungarian, tends to refer exclusively to
vocationally-oriented language learning and teaching whereas the
English term ESP includes the former as well as academic purposes. The
above-quoted needs analysis also suggests (as does common sense) that
"professional language" teaching in the tertiary sector, most of all
at universities, should cover the skills needed to conduct studies or
to do scientific research in a foreign language (e.g. note-taking or
research article writing skills) as well as skills needed to function
effectively in the workplace.
In an ideal case, students can acquire
these skills while using the terminology of their specialist
area. However, the nation-wide reduction of language contact lessons
(and the staff of language departments), together with the broadening
of training areas and increasing number of courses offered by colleges
and universities, makes it impossible for a language teacher to
specialise in one subject area.
Our task is to identify the areas
which students of diverse specialist fields can benefit from. One
possible solution is to integrate different fields into specific
purposes language teaching for engineering students, law students
etc. which is an already-existing practice, or an even broader
integration under the umbrella term of business communication. These
processes can be justified by the trends of knowledge relativisation
and the transformation of traditional professional training in order
to train "convertible experts" who can easily move between specialist
areas.
| HEJ, HU ISSN 1418-7108
Manuscript no.: LIN-001101
|
|
|