Abstract:

The present paper aims at analysing, after a semester of use, the major impact of technology for English classes that approach specialized terminology in higher education. English for Specific Purposes is a well-established practice for faculties other than foreign languages and, therefore, specialised language has to be assimilated. As the higher education system uses technology in its different forms - tools for teaching purposes such as overhead projectors, audio and video support, platforms for data storage or applications that facilitate constant communication between the instructors and the students such as Facebook and WhatsApp, it is common to make use as much as possible of the available free online applications, such as Google, other than the Google Suite for Education, which can easily be converted into a teaching tool. Under these circumstances, I have imagined the Google spreadsheet as a database for specialized language terminology with students from the University of Bucharest. The reason for choosing this software is the fact that it is free, easy to use and students can access it from their mobile devices and work on it even in the offline mode. Although the spreadsheet was initially designed for statistics and bookkeeping activities, I have found that its simple interface makes it easily convertible to teaching purposes as it facilitates the gathering of specific terminology in one place, easy to access at any time from any device connected or not to the internet, has an invitation-based access policy and 25 people can simultaneously work in real-time within the application. In order to evaluate the software usefulness from the students' perspective, I have initiated a focus group discussion regarding its effectiveness for the learning process and the possibilities for its improvement. The results confirmed the main assumption regarding its efficiency although a series of drawbacks are worth mentioning such as the limited number of real-time participants for the session. Nevertheless, after a 3-month lag time between its implementation and the examination date, the learning process has become easier for the students.

Keywords:

Spreadsheets, ESP, databases, language teaching, language learning.