To err is human, to forgive — divine.

TEACHING EFL AND ESP

After graduation from the Minsk State Linguistics University in 1984, I used to teach EFL at different educational establishments and for different categories of learners (secondary school, tertiary level professional students, tertiary level non-professional students, certain aspects of language (grammar, speaking practice, stylistics), courses for adults).

In 1991-1994 I did a post graduate course at the same university. Now I am finalizing my Ph.D. thesis dealing with difficulties of decoding syntactical constructions in texts on economy. My major linguistics interests lie in the field of text structure, pragmatics, functional styles and sociolinguisitics, problems of communication. I was also involved in doing hypertext product and thus had to investigate its properties in comparison with a linear text. One of the problems I am thinking about at present is how the proportion of modus to dictum (the terms by Ch.Bally) in the language of radio affects the society.

At present, I have concentrated on designing a course and teaching English for Business for tertiary students trained to be business interpreters/advisors. We believe that the course has to be a comprehensive one, covering such areas as business correspondence, information technologies, economics, business law, foreign trade, finance, accounting, management, marketing. As we train interpreters, we are making a bi-lingual (English-Russian) course and thus have accumulated some authentic material in both the languages.

There are also teachers doing similar courses for French, German and Spanish.

In our work we try to use learners centered method, role play and problem solving. Learner centered approach looks very promising, although it is fraught with some problems. How to change our attitude to teaching and learning? How to make a course flexible on the one hand and insure a high quality of knowledge on the other? Evaluation criteria? Efficient organization and use of resources?

Probably there are teachers and/or students who would like to share experience and exchange learning materials. So, we would be glad to hear from you

 

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