EFL Tech - France a Site for Teachers of English ( as a Foreign Language) for Engineering

INTRODUCTION

    Those teachers of English who have subscribed to Mailing Lists such "English for Special Purposes" or "English for Science and Technology" will have noticed that, regularly, there are postings from colleagues who ask for help as they have been abruptly given an "English for Engineering Students" course. They say things such as :" I have not got any background knowledge or experience with engineering... Would anyone be willing to share their experiences with me, ideas for syllabi and class activities?" In addition, they sometimes have only a few days to submit a detailed syllabus. Of course, there are always some Listers ready to send a few lines and give a few immediate suggestions but they can't go into details and can only give brief and general replies.

    Hence the idea of taking one's time before the urge strikes and of trying to collect a maximum of precise and detailed information  in order to provide a "novice" EST teacher with some emergency teaching material,  advice and suggestions for him/her  to be able to plan a skeleton syllabus, to have a few basic documents he/she could immediately start using and to be given some helpful tips thanks to which he/she could go into the course feeling comfortable professionally. . (However, don't expect an E.S.T.  "cookbook" with pre-made recipes!)
 

Here is the compilation resulting from over 30 contributions.
 

    While working on this project, we have soon found out that there was a huge amount of variety among engineering fields and that the kind of problems / difficulties that an EFL teacher might encounter are largely different from those concerning the teaching of native English speaking students ; it seems the latter (as well as quite advanced NNS) concentrate on learning field-specific writing techniques such as writing reports and abstracts, presenting results etc, while for the former, the emphasis is on learning the mechanism of the language first and foremost. Because the two of us co-ordinating the project are EFL teachers, we have decided to narrow the scope of the project and deal only with EFL for engineering, that is to say with the teaching of general English adapted to engineering.
 

The file is organised in three parts:

PART I -  TEACHING MATERIALS  (Books, websites, software, videos and media, technical magazines)

PART II -  SYLLABUS  (needs analysis, vocabulary, grammar, planning a syllabus, learning about technology)

PART III- CLASS ACTIVITIES(written work, oral work, advanced students)
 
 

Mark S. Algren, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals , Saudi Arabia
Milan Davidovic, Sumikin-Intercom, Inc., Japan
Alison Dufour, Dieppe, France
Dennis G. Jerz,  University of Toronto
Robert Irish,  University of Toronto
Jozsef Karpat, Pecs, Hungary
Lakshmy Bhaskar Nanyang, Nanyang Technological University,  Singapore
Debra.Lee,  University of Augsburg  - Germany
Mike Mc Grath,  Perth  -  Scotland
Francoise Mizutani, ESL Institute of Virginia Tech  - Blacksburg  - USA
Kirsty Mooney, Technical University of Liberec - Czech Republic
Helen Morgan
Ocheltree
Denny Packard , Paris -  France
Steven Stagg, France
Tuula Sutela,  Producer of multimedia learning materials
Jean Roy, La Flèche - France
Doris Yaffe Shiffman, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
Roseline Tallet, Tours - France
Margaret van Naerssen, ,  Universty of Pennsylvania,  Philadelphia
Kristiina Volmari-Makinen,  Helsinki University of Technology
Renee Wahl

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