hrvatski

Teaching Grammar in Academic English Courses

The aim of English Language Courses (ESP courses) at university level is to prepare students for reading academic texts and to tackle the basics of academic writing. Such courses are usually two-term courses, comprising 60 teaching hours per course at the most. The classes are large, frequently of more than 50 students, and multilevel as far as the students’ linguistic competence of English as a Foreign Language is concerned. In this presentation, the author shares her ideas on what grammar to teach and how to teach it so that it would be useful to students in their future encounter with authentic academic texts. An innovative approach to teaching English for Specific Purposes at the university level to foreign-language learners. The focus is on using an analysis of syntactically complex academic texts by means of the basic sentence structure: SVO. The main sentence functions are explained through nominal, verbal, adjectival and adverbial role of a unit of language within a sentence. Students are specifically instructed how to recognize finite verbs and distinguish them from non-finite forms. This helps them to build their analysis around the verb and to separate individual clauses. Strategies of reading for meaning are developed based on this simple method of analyzing sentences, which helps students whose language competence is not high enough to spontaneously deal with complex academic texts in English that they need to read for regular courses.

English for Specific Purposes ; grammar ; meaning ; syntax

Skup u organizaciji nakladnika Oxford University Press.