Concerning the teaching approach, we elected to collaborate in the ESP teaching between an experienced English teacher trained in language teaching and a physics professor specializing in physics. Both instructors chose the teaching materials together and collaboratively taught the experimental group (ESP class). The language teacher
taught two hours and the physics professor taught one hour a week. The same English teacher alone instructed the control group (EGP class) three hours a week for the whole academic year. The role of the ESP teaching is to activate the learners’ science background knowledge in English. Special attention was given to science content, paragraph organization, sentence structure and lexical analysis; while the role of general English teaching is to
enhance the foundation of general English skills. Building up vocabulary was an important component for both classes.