NILE runs a wide range of professional development courses delivered in various modes. In this series, NILE's Senior Trainers look at some of the key concepts, activities, tips and tools which feature in our NILE courses.

 

Teaching English for Professionals

Teachers moving into domains of professional English can find the change interesting and motivating. Typical Business English learning focuses on areas of business operation that can usually be applied to most commercial and administrative organisations with similar language and interactive communication. Language learning can be easily facilitated whatever the domain of the learner. Move one step further, however, into professional fields where learners require the language and communication skills for their own highly technical operations, and this can be much more of a challenge for the English teacher.

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is a great opportunity for those with the technical knowledge to enter the world of teaching as a change of career, but the language teaching may not be quite so evident. For the experienced language teacher, moving into a highly technical domain, such as: medical, legal, maritime, aviation, etc., can seem like a whole new world, full of incomprehensible technical phrases, expressions and uses. It may seem like a language in itself, alien to the lay teacher, compounded by the fact that learners will usually have undergone years of intensive training and experience even to communicate in their first or main language.

Training courses for ESP teachers should therefore help language teachers become accustomed to the technicalities of the language in the specific domain. They should also assist those coming into teaching with the domain knowledge to give learners new skills and competencies to enable them to learn and use the correct language at the correct time. They may well have taken the language for granted for many years without giving it much of a thought.

NILE tutor, Neil Bullock suggests that such training programmes bring together teachers new to the domain and domain experts new to teaching in a programme so that both groups can better understand the technicalities and the language. Many such technical professional domains have English as a common language which helps in standardizing course material for learners wherever they may be in the world.

Neil also suggests that teachers in ESP domains aim to adopt the following principles:

  1. Use your students as subject matter experts, learn from them.
  2. You are there to educate in English, not to train technical skills.
  3. Your own professional development should optimize site visits and discussions with technical instructors.
  4. Understanding that the language and communicative activities help provide a clear course focus for learners.
  5. Become familiar with technical documentation and language to provide your students with their needs and to help you develop technical knowledge.
  6. Knowing that language learned applies to real-world communication increases intrinsic motivation for learners and provides sponsors with quality teaching which is efficient and effective.

Such principles can be applied to any such technical domain and highlight the need for specific courses to be developed for teachers in all ESP domains.

NILE Online offers Teaching English for Aviation as our specialist English for Specific Purposes course, starting in January and September.

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