USING THINGLINK DIGITAL POSTERS IN TEACHING ESP TO BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS STUDENTS (A CASE STUDY OF BAUMAN MOSCOW STATE TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY)

Among interactive visuals being used in the contemporary classroom, digital posters are recognized as indispensable teaching and learning tools that help teachers to introduce a new topic, consolidate group and individual learning and promote students’ comprehension. ThingLink is an interactive media platform that empowers educators and learners to create digital posters by adding rich media content (videos, texts, graphics, sounds, data attachments, and more) to selected drawings and photos. With the recent addition of 360-degree images and virtual reality, ThingLink has become one of the most exciting tools in the educator's toolkit.

The current piece of research aims at exploring if using ThingLink digital posters in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classroom has had any positive effect on ESP students’ acquisition of English subject-specific terminology and comprehension of profession-oriented topics being taught in English. Business and economics students from Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU) (n=80) participated in a pedagogic experiment comparing ESP students’ learning outcomes obtained from ‘traditional’ ESP teaching based on standardized teaching materials (control group) and the outcomes resulted from visualized subject topics presentation by means of ThingLink multimedia posters (experimental group). The assessment of students’ outcomes was carried out by testing. The statistical analysis of the tests results showed that the experimental group exceeded the control group both in specific terminology acquisition and subject content comprehension.

The obtained results of the aforementioned experiment initiated BMSTU ESP teachers’ collaborative work on development of ThingLink digital posters customized for various BMSTU specialisms and their integration in business, economics and engineering students’ ESP curricula.