Two Types of English (continued)
…..
Making use of a foreign language the student acquires profound professional knowledge. So the
language becomes a means of teaching profession and appears to be significant in the context of the
professional world. Nowadays the student has access to the Internet, and the knowledge of English opens
him the doors to getting global information and the exchange of the information on the items he is interested
in. Therefore, teaching/learning ESP is said to be speciality-oriented as it is submitted to specific
(professional) needs of the student. Specific skills come from the selected texts which present special
vocabulary and show the richness of the language in that field. Thus, it is difficult to determine where
language learning ends and where subject learning starts or vice versa.
On the other hand, language study at a higher technical school does not confirm itself as a discipline
in its own. Language becomes an interdisciplinary subject, a kind of intermediary directed towards
increasing one’s professional career having in view of possible studies abroad according to a great variety of
students’ exchange programmes or in search of a job which gives satisfaction – the task not easily achieved
under conditions of competition in the labour market.
If the student is aware of difficulties of communication he solves this problem by learning
languages. In order to provide a proper and thorough foundation in the use of English for professional
purposes it is necessary to revise and further develop the student’s command of general English, particularly,
for many different everyday uses of English. The student, of course, is expected to use English in his
professional environment as well as in everyday situations. He must be able to take part in real life events –
to ask questions and to answer them demonstrating his knowledge.
V. Cook asks “What does another language do?” And the answer is: “Learning another language
makes people think more flexibly, increases language awareness and leads to better understanding of other
cultures.” (Cook 2001: 197). But this is one side of the matter. The other is that the person becomes
competent in his professional field. Communicative competence is the term which “has come to be used in
language teaching contexts to refer to the ability to convey the meaning to successfully combine a
knowledge of linguistic and sociolinguistic rules in communicative interactions” (Savington 1983: 123). H.
Pham thinks that in order “to attain effective communication in international settings, nonnative speakers
must use linguistic and cultural norms which are mostly set by native speakers of English” (Pham 2001: 7).
Here we again approach to teaching the two types of English – the General and the Specific. Both of
them develop one’s ability to communicate in any form – oral or written. In both cases linguistic knowledge
includes the correctness of grammatical structures, proper choice of words and precision of their meaning.
The primary goal in teaching ESP is to provide the student with practical use of English revising the
knowledge built earlier. ESP concentrates not only on the recognition of particular structures of sentences or
word combinations, but also on the choice of terms and meanings of words in different kinds of texts.
Grammatical competence is the domain of linguistic studies proper, while specific competence includes
interdisciplinary field together with the understanding of the particular context the language is used in.