Facilitating content acquisition through language : the “Wall Poster” Technique

Abstract

The ‘wall poster’ activity is one of the tasks conducted in English for Civil Engineering (ECE) classrooms aimed at facilitating learners’ acquisition of the content area of the subject in their specialized discipline of civil engineering. The English for Civil Engineering programme is based on a research project on English for Specific Purposes conducted in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The research was an attempt to create a programme which is derived from and integrated with the Faculty of Civil Engineering’s mainstream academic programme through collaboration between the English language instructors and the subject specialists. (Please refer to Khairi et al, 1995 for a description of the programme; Masputeriah et al., 1995 and Abdul Halim et al., 1996 for a discussion on the approach to materials preparation, nature of activities and the role of language instructors and language learners).