Abstract:

Biotechnology for health is a professional field where innovations are constant, shifting the boundaries of what we consider as natural regarding living organisms. This pace of change leads to linguistic variation that needs to be explored in order to teach it, all the more so as few up to date language resources exist for this public and as it is demonstrated that English is a necessary professional language in this field (Chauhan 2015). Therefore, designing an English course tailored to the needs of these students, requires thorough needs’ analysis, to understand the characteristics of this specific type of English, and adaptability, to respond as precisely as possible to heterogeneous learner situations.

The course we have designed in Grenoble Alpes University aims to enhance the communicative skills of students of Biotechnology for Health from the first year of studies to the completion of the master’s degree. In this presentation we start by detailing the resources we drew on for the preliminary needs’ analysis: dialogue with specialists from the field, feedback from the English teaching team and students on most common difficulties, constitution and analysis of specialized corpora. In a second stage we explain how and why we came to choose flipped learning as a pedagogical frame, to take into account the heterogeneous levels of the students we are teaching and to focus on oral communication in class (Lee & Wallace 2018, Hoskins 2019). Finally, we present the main teaching tools we have selected and how we chose them to accompany our students in a multimodal and adaptable teaching environment.

The course is designed for the students to spend half of the learning time online and half of the learning time in relatively small tutorial groups. Online they have access to interactive powerpoint presentations, videos, audio documents and questionnaires they need to answer. There is no time constraint for their online work and according to their level, they can spend more or less time on each resource which is a huge advantage when one is teaching groups with heterogeneous levels. Their online performances are marked through the work provided in the answers to the questionnaires which focus on specific grammar points, specialized terminology and oral or written comprehensions. During tutorials, the students are asked to explain the content learned online and to perform tasks to reuse this content in context. The students who encountered some difficulties with the online material, are identified through their answers to questionnaires and they benefit from more time in tutorials in smaller groups.

References:
[1] Chauhan P. 2015, “English for Biotechnology: A need analysis of first year graduate students of Biotechnology at VNSG University, Surat, India”, English for Specific Purposes World, Issue 46.
[2] Hoskins L., 2019, “Course Design for First-Year Undergraduate Human Science Programmes: A Blended Course in English for Academic Purposes”, ASp [Online], 74 | 2018, Online since 01 November 2018, connection on 01 July 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/asp/5558
[3] Lee G. & A. Wallace, 2018, “Flipped Learning in the English as a Foreign Language Classroom: Outcomes and Perceptions”, TESOL QUARTERLY, Vol 52, N° 1, 2017 TESOL International Association.

Keywords:

Flipped Learning, Hybrid Course, English for Health, Biotechnology.