Development of ESP courseware via the world wide web (WWW): a computational linguistics analysis approach

Abstract

english language programmes that are being designed to meet specific needs of the learners would benefit not only the learners themselves but also their stakeholders. An example of an English language programme that has been designed to meet the english for Specific Purpose (ESP) needs of Civil Engineering (CE) students of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) is the programme called English for Civil Engineering or ECE. This programme was a three- semester programme that has been planned through very close collaboration between the faculty of Civil Engineering (FCE) and the Department of Modern Languages (DML). The ECE programme ‘rests on the principle that language learning is and should be part of the mainstream CE programme (DML of UTM, 1996). Its ultimate aim was to be able to assist CE students in using English for executing their academic work assigned by their faculty, the FCE. In general, the ECE programme was mainly intended to ‘serve as the foundation of the long term objective of enhancing the marketability of CE graduates by integrating language training into the overall training plans of the FCE’ (DML of UTM, 1996). The ECE programme offered three different courses which are UHB1312, UHB1322, and UHB2332, to the CE students. Although it is subdivided into three courses, that is, one course per semester, the courses should be regarded as a continuous and coherent training scheme. Hence, in general, the ECE programme intends to assist the CE students in extracting information for written and oral communication for both academic and professional purposes. In relation to the second course of the programme, UHB1322, in every phase of the course, the students are required to perform two parallel and complementary types of activities – the core activities and the support activities (also called pedagogic activities). The core activities are activities which would train the CE students to extract information from texts related to Civil Engineering Materials (one of the core topics in Civil Engineering), that are written in English, and consequently, make notes from them. These notes would then be used to write essays and reports related to Civil Engineering Materials (CEM). As for the pedagogic activities of the UHB1322 course, they are activities which lead to and support the core activities of the course. All pedagogic activities such as the reading of texts, vocabulary/glossary work and language exercises, will be related to the topic on Civil Engineering Materials. In relation to the above pedagogic activities, they are very time-consuming as they require several classroom sessions with the language instructor. They also require frequent referencing to an extremely limited number of monolingual and bilingual Civil Engineering dictionaries as well as English CEM textbooks in the UTM library. In order for the CE students to perform the pedagogic activities much more efficiently and efficaciously, a unique self-access courseware that can be accessed via the WWW (World Wide Web, Web or Internet) using the computational linguistic analysis approach, has been designed for the ECE programme in UTM, which will be referred to as ‘UNITEKMA ECE Courseware’. This chapter aims to describe the process of producing the prototype of the above courseware in which its lessons focus both on content words and language structures taken from texts on Civil Engineering Materials. The following sections of this chapter will discuss related literature to the design of the courseware.