Abstract:

For decades, textbooks were seen as the base for education. However, the experience of students is much different today. Contemporary higher education students are perceived as digital natives, the generation to grow up in a digital environment as an integrated communications context where the electronic devices are used as tools, which communicate and manage the content and activities within it. Observing the trend, teachers and policymakers are speculating that students’ inclination towards technology can be converted into better learning outcomes. With the proliferation of online sources, we –the academics seeking to improve students’ attainments– have recently announced the intention of looking at the possibility of designing a digital interactive ESP coursebook to improve their performance within the area of language learning. All things considered; the digitized content has profoundly changed the core of a longstanding term “a coursebook”. Digital coursebooks offer information through dynamic and interactive features and can also provide support features that just aren’t possible in a print textbook. Although, the cutting-edge forms of textbooks are more dynamic, accessible and portable, it would be wrong to be convinced that students will automatically be better served by them. Yet, with these advances, we consider digital coursebooks as engaging and exciting ways for students to learn. The text explores requirements set on ESP coursebook designing, supplemented by digital interactive intercourse.

The article aims to draw attention to the advantages and pitfalls of the process of creation of interactive coursebook with digitalized ESP content, intending to improve the learning environment and overall students’ outcomes. Previous researches have only focused on theoretical approaches to the creation of printed coursebooks; therefore we aim to re-examine these approaches and extend current knowledge of this problem and investigate differences in methodology of creating cutting-edge forms of textbooks with digital ones. It was decided that the optimal tool for this purpose was through the use of commercially available software which we aim to analyze and evaluate as a tool suitable for ESP teachers in the process of study materials digitizing. The results of our work are not only interactive digital coursebook itself but also findings which have the potential to an overall enhancement of ESP teaching.

Keywords:

Digital course book, ESP, language learning, design.