Projektowanie kursu ESP

Bibliogr. s. 20-21

Designing an ESP course in an academic setting is a multidimensional challenge. To meet it, we should address the needs and interests of our students, which in most cases means incorporating subject-specific content (specialized vocabulary, typical genres, authentic materials, discourse communities practices) into a language course. This on the practitioners' part involves tackling their lack of disciplinary expertise, which might be very diffi cult for various factors. One of them might be diffi culty in gaining expertise due to a wider curriculum and institutional policies (like teaching many ESPs at the same time). Another might be finding the right balance between discipline-based knowledge and pure language on such a course. It seems that the adequate language teaching expertise which the practitioners should possess in order to help students start using the language as a communication tool for their academic and occupational purposes, can be achieved through a careful choice of the syllabus type to be adopted, the academic skills and genres to be practised, the specialized topics for the language to be presented and reliable sources of materials to raise motivation and serve as an example. This paper describes taking the aforementioned elements into account when designing specialized English language courses for BSc and MSc students of Biology, Geography and Physics, at the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. It analyses which language course elements can be shared across the mentioned sub-disciplines of EST, and where their syllabi start to diverge.