ENGLISH FOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY TEACHING PARADIGMS WITHIN THE ROMANIAN TECHNICAL HIGHER EDUCATION CONTEXT

Foreign languages have always been regarded as passports to other worlds and cultures and probably the best means to bridge civilizations. The international context points to English as the widest spread language in the world, issue largely addressed by Crystal (2007) and McArthur (1998) in their work. Furthermore, it is the language used at international events, political meetings and scientific communications, in the job and trade market, economic transactions, transfer of technologies, etc. Romania has already entered the international market but, for the most part, we are still dependent upon foreign states and organizations. From the traditional fields of activity new branches have appeared and evolved on the market among which the technical and economic related ones occupy the leading positions. The amount of novelty required massive training of the old staff and increased the demand for young specialists able to keep up the pace with the latest innovations and theories in the field.
The new world Romania has been constantly struggling to integrate itself into since 1989, brought a whole new set of rules in all life sectors, different policies and mentalities to be adopted and implemented. As everyone knows, education is the key factor for success and each of its stages has its own importance in the hierarchy to the top. The transition to capitalism pushed forward an extremely powerful and feared concept: competition associated with the idea of equal chances. Colleges and universities are regarded as promoters of quality and high standards. Consequently, young people hope to easily attain their goals in life after graduating a top-ranked college. Furthermore, an ever increasing number of institutions and companies, both national and international, now require their employees to have some linguistic certificate to assess their good command of English.
The aim of my investigation is to offer some possible solutions to the problems that English for Science and Technology teachers in Romania have to deal with, due to the inherent shortcomings of a continuously changing educational system and to their own lack of experience in teaching EST. The first part of the paper is devoted to presenting the context of English teaching process in Romania and the second part introduces the data drawn from effectively working with the students who attend the courses of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Suceava and identifies its drawbacks. I conclude by offering practical and reasonable but urgent measures that should be applied, in order to provide our students with the best academic inheritance and realistic chances in achieving their future goals.