Abstract:

Teaching English for Political Science, International Relations, European Studies, and Sociology using ICT aims to enhance the English proficiency level of those students who learn English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in their first year of academic studies at the National University for Political Science and Public Administration based in Bucharest, Romania. We acknowledge the fact that knowing English is as necessary as being endowed with computer skills in almost every field of activity. With the purpose of attracting and keeping as many students as possible for the full extent of the academic year, we’ve introduced virtual interaction, self-study, research, and debate in the teaching process, teaching means much closer to young adults’ frame of mind and to their daily activities. Our research encompasses several components of ICT, available to educators today, i.e. Moodle, Facebook, short videos, relevant to their field of study during class, virtual dictionaries and pertinent study materials such us specialized texts, trivia information and general vocabulary development exercises. Although teachers still preserve their main status as educators, our experiment emphasizes the mentoring role they also fulfill in facilitating the acquisition of English for Specific Purposes, English structure and grammar, communication strategies in virtual settings, and not only. In order to make things happen, the weekly feedback, received individually, was our students’ main incentive, although it does not seem much. Students were also introduced to Summative Intelligence Concept (SiC) and Controlled Linguistic Immersion (CLI), plus Blended Learning and Flipped Classroom methods. The present paper introduces part of my ongoing PhD research, the data collected so far and computed in SPSS, displaying learners’ interest towards an innovative way of teaching/learning ESP, in the specific field of their specialization. We are confident that interacting with students using new technologies, teachers’ enthusiasm and determination will manage to increase students’ degree of learning English as a foreign language (ESL) and their ability to effectively use it while communicating as proficient speakers, fully integrated in a genuine international working environment whose lingua franca keeps being English.

Keywords:

ICT, ESP, CLI, SiC, Interactivity.