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Needs analysis is the key step to designing relevant and useful courses in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), but finding ways to deliver needs in a motivating and interesting way is also paramount. Therefore, investigating students' motivation to learn ESP is central in needs analysis. Few studies have investigated needs from the perspective of ESP learners' motivation. Focussing on engineering fields at three Iranian state universities, this study aimed to identify factors that affect engineering students' motivation for learning technical English in ESP courses. Using a mixed method design, this study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, semi-structured interviews with 40 undergraduate students helped to identify motivational variables, select a theoretical framework and develop instruments for the second phase. In the second phase, a survey using a 28-item questionnaire with 152 students, semi-structured interviews with 60 students, in-depth interviews with eight ESP practitioners and non-participant observation in seven ESP classes were done in parallel. Principal Component Analysis on survey data resulted in five motivational components of main sources of engineering students' motivation to learn technical English: 1) ideal-self, 2) ought-to self, 3) instrumentality promotion motivation, 4) learning conditions, and 5) learning experience. These components were in agreement with Dӧrnyei's L2 Motivational Self-system. Further quantitative and qualitative data analyses revealed that long-term goals and the practicalities of using technical English in every day life promote motivation more than a sense of obligation to learn technical English. Moreover, the results showed that Engineering students had negative attitudes towards elements of ESP learning experience, which best explained the reasons for students' low motivation. The findings also supported the significant effect of academic levels on motivation. The factors that motivated students call for modifications in ESP courses which are discussed as pedagogical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the design and implementation of a ten-week pronunciation module within a university technical English course as part of a broader study that investigates the efficacy of explicit rhythm instruction to improve engineering students' prosody in English. Sessions were adapted to the course contents and followed Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin's (1996) steps to teach communicatively. The participants were 298 Spanish/Catalan-speaking first-year undergraduate engineering students divided into three experimental groups and three control groups. The experimental groups received explicit rhythm instruction while the control groups did not. They all were recorded before and after the training. Ten sentences were analyzed acoustically and measures of rhythm (VarcoV) were obtained. Preliminary results revealed that students who took rhythm instruction tended to increase their VarcoV values, approaching English rhythm, while the control group showed a volatile behavior. The comparison of the effect sizes of each group's differences in performance before and after instruction was statistically significant. Findings suggest that rhythm instruction can be beneficial to enhance EFL students' prosody and that pronunciation can be effectively introduced within an ESP course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex nominal groups are common in technical English (i.e., English for Specific Purposes, ESP) since they allow lexical items to be tightly packed into a clause which consequently leads to increased lexical density and syntactic ambiguity. In this paper, we analyse (complex) nominal groups in technical English. We propose that, in addition to context and extralinguistic knowledge (i.e. shared technical background that the ESP teacher does not necessarily possess), the structure of the nominal group--or, more precisely, the position of modifiers within the group also plays a role in resolving of syntactic ambiguity and disambiguation of meaning. Thus, modifiers standing farthest from the head have the least specifying potential and are followed by other modifiers that restrict the meaning of the entire nominal group. In this way, the participle reciprocating in steam reciprocating engine (vs.*reciprocating steam engine) is more specific in meaning and is thus positioned closer to the head of the nominal group. Our results indicate the type of modification (i.e. linear or non-linear) lends support to the disambiguation of complex nominal groups. The paper's main contribution is in the field of ESP teacher education in the way that it helps ESP teachers who are not specialists in the field of (marine) engineering to process understand and successfully teach complex nominal groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article offers information about linguistics, highlighting issues about English resumptive pronouns. Topics being presented include a subset of languages that employ the filler-gap strategy as well as the concept of relative clauses and experimental studies that demonstrate English resumptive pronouns are consistently rated as highly unacceptable as well as nearly uniformly so across varying syntactic contexts.

The concept of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) gathers importance in engineering education as the engineering students' knowledge of particular terminology and ability to interact in a professional environment help ensure their adaptability in the global work culture. Despite a curriculum that advocates functional notional syllabus for effective oral and written communication, Technical English teaching in universities has failed to motivate the engineering students to build communicative competence in a progressive manner and reach the required standards by the end of the program. To eliminate this deficit, the teachers need to identify the tested approaches, methods, and types of instructional programs that could address the present problem of the engineering students' lack of oral and written communication skills in English. This paper deliberates on the different options in the language teaching approaches for the ESP teachers to choose from and prepare the engineering students to float abreast of the global tide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing technical texts is not always an easy task, but using the proper techniques makes our job less burdensome most of the times. Hence, in my article, I intend to present just a few of the techniques that I personally use when preparing the courses for my students studying technical English. And after four years of searching and improving my teaching I can say that they are really useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a pilot study of the Language of the Law (or Legal English), a subsidiary of a broader research project on the Disciplinary English (DE), from the perspective of SFL. It starts with reviewing Halliday's seven features or difficulties of scientific English that are presumably shared by Legal English. Then, the features of legal English identified by Forensic linguists, Mellinkoff and Tiersma among others are also perused. Subsequently, this paper focuses on and examines a particular feature, that is, the alleged 'popular use' of Latin and Law French in contemporary legal English. We build a small corpus consisting of journal articles (or academic papers) and legal textbooks to examine their frequency in the corpus and analyze their uses and users (authors and readers) by means of instantiation. The findings include Latin and law French are still active in legal text and they tend to occur more in legal journals than in legal textbooks. The findings are of implication to the teaching and learning of legal English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of engineering and its discourse are closely connected to the idea of translation, especially now when the field of naval architecture evolves at a considerably high speed and specialists from different countries and with different languages produce technical documentations, instructions and operating manuals in English. The multi-semiotic nature of naval architecture texts is as obvious as it is the emphasis on specific terminology and the general characteristics of scientific and technical jargons which also subsume the naval architecture jargon. Due to the strong connection between sciences, we need to study and understand both the general nature of scientific texts as well as their peculiarities and hence, from this comprehension to move the focus upon the best strategies successfully applicable in the translation of technical texts. Our approach explores naval architecture texts and their characteristics as the basis of the translation process. We underline the main features of the lexical, phonetic, syntax and morphology of the scientific and technical texts providing examples from the English naval architecture texts. It is our point of view that every translation process should begin with the language levels of the target language (English in this case). Since science is logical and well structured, when viewed as a whole, we strongly believe that it can be inspiring allowing us to borrow its structural nature when translating naval architecture texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review article I discuss some of the common controversies surrounding the idea of Euro-English by weighing out the most frequently upheld positions in the many debates this phenomenon has spurred in recent decades. I leave my own ambivalence fully exposed to the reader as the article is essentially built from a series of notes and reflections that I have developed reporting and deliberating on some of the current research on Euro-English. The text is also interspersed with anecdotal evidence that has inspired and influenced my thinking in this matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technical writing in English serves as an essential tool in communicating or conveying one's ideas, views, observations, instructions, and suggestions in a more logical and technical manner. Technical writing in English, in the field of engineering, requires specific registers, structure, and definite sets of vocabulary. Technocrats and professionals need to have good technical writing skills in the preparation of reports, presentations, documentations, etc. Technical writing in English is used for a specific purpose, and hence it needs to be precise, relevant, and without redundancy. Skills such as writing instructions and inferring data from graphs and charts require the above. This paper highlights the above ideas with exact examples, besides explaining the various writing skills required in the field of engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of teaching Technical English in engineering colleges is to improve the students' communication skills. It has been found that students who have good communication skills have a better chance of doing well in the job market. Most of the engineering students have technical knowledge, but they are poor in communication skills. To express their innovative ideas, they need good communication skills. All the four skills-Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing-are important. While much attention is paid to written and spoken skills, listening, the most important skill, is ignored. As language acquisition is based on listening, this paper analyzes the importance of effective listening skill in the process of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present scenario, honing English language skills related to one's profession is the need of the hour. Booming opportunities in the nursing profession have attracted many students from the backward and rural areas to pursue it. Generally, they are from the lower middle class, income-wise, with limited exposure to English. Reviews on non-English speaking nursing students show that most of them do not experience meaningful learning outcome and face negative experience due to their inability to cope with the expected standard of achievement. They also have less possibility to work independently as their language ability poses barriers. A review on case presentation skills states that only one-fourth to one-third of medical students indicated any training in handoffs, and approximately only a fourth of those with a little experience in handoffs reported feeling confident in the task. This substantiates the need to understand the perceived language barriers in presenting a clinical case. Presently, there is no tool exclusively to measure the language needs of student nurses with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) with regard to clinical case presentation. Therefore, the author, as an English teaching faculty for student nurses, has developed and standardized a measurable tool to determine the perceived language difficulty and the associated psychological barriers of the nursing students with LEP in performing clinical case presentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drowned in explosive amounts of information, new technology developments, globalisation, international job opportunities and large-scale job migration, ESP courses are faced with the increasing requirement of tailoring language-learning to accommodate employer/employee specialisations. This dynamism is currently being transmitted to courses at the university level, along with the accompanying challenges for all involved. This paper reviews these potential barriers to implementation of ESP courses for students with low proficiency of English, taking a pre-intermediate-level Technical English course at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague as a case study. After analysing various scholarly references aimed at ESP, the classroom-based research for this paper confirms the feasibility and efficacy of implementing ESP and TE, in particular, even into pre-intermediate classrooms. The self-motivating design of 6 TASKS, as well as authentic video sessions, combined with a student survey and teacher observations, all serve to point to ESP introduction on the pre-intermediate level as achievable in terms of application and resourceful regarding future life-career situations in which students will eventually find themselves.

The need to name and communicate to others new concepts in specific domains of human activity leads to the formation of new terms. However, many of the technical words in English are not new from the point of view of form. They rather derive from the common stock of general language: new lexical units are built from already existing forms and/or meanings. The original form is used for naming a new concept by adding a distinctive specialized lexical feature while keeping some semantic features of the original concept. In this paper, we aim at explaining and visualizing the nature of some of the processes that allow for the construction of new senses in technical words through a branching and expanding process, as explained in the lexical constellation model. The analysis is performed on three words widely used in telecommunication English: “bus”, “hub” and “chip”. The understanding of the process may be of great help for learners of ESP in general and technical English in particular.