Abstract:

Modern courses of teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) are aimed at providing students doing their master’s degree with the necessary knowledge and skills to become active participants of the academic community. The research describes an attempt to create a short-term course combining teaching EAP with teaching English for specific purposes (ESP) to natural science master students at Ural Federal University. Carefully choosing the topics related to students’ academic and specific spheres, developing studying materials from authentic texts (including audio and video), setting tasks to develop students’ receptive and more importantly productive skills were seen as major requirements for the course developers.

The authors outline several aspects of course organisation, involving students’ feedback as an essential tool to address the course effectiveness. The course was supplied with a short anonymous questionnaire containing open-ended and closed questions with the aim to check students’ perception of the tailor-made course and mode of their work.

The results show the most course participants (85%) irrespective of their language proficiency found the course useful. The practical nature, usefulness, material relevance and various modes of presentation were claimed to be major advantages of the course. Listening, speaking and video tasks presented a certain level of difficulty to students. To assist themselves during task completion students tended to choose to work with the translators (to check the meaning and pronunciation of words) or look for the original texts/ audio and video materials to complete the tasks. Students also found it possible to share their answers with lower-level learners.

The analysis of the feedback demonstrates that students appreciated the attempt to create a tailor-made course supplied with material presentation in a variety of ways. The course participants also suggested several improvements such as the need for more speaking tasks. At the same time, learners’ habit of sharing their results while completing test tasks might point at a low level of learner’s autonomy, especially in low-level language learners, which ought to be addressed in future implementation of the course. The results could be used by other course designers to develop their courses.

Keywords:

English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Specific Purposes (ESP), EFL, teaching English to master students, blended learning, course design.