Research Information System
YABANCI DİL ÖĞRETİMİ VE YENİ YAKLAŞIMLAR II. ULUSLARARASI DİL KONGRESİ, vol.2, no.1, pp.25-38, 2022 (AHCI)
Many
Teaching/learning references discuss and highlight the importance of relevancy
when it comes to choosing the materials and tasks that should meet the
students’ needs. The same applies to teaching/learning any second language.
However, students’ needs may differ when they learn the same language as a
general language or as a language for specific purposes.
In
Turkey, the Higher Education Ministry issued a decree that Universities can
shift 40% of the classes to the virtual domain. The purpose of that is to
reduce the number of students coming to the campus at a time. Many universities
teaching practical sciences like medicine, Engineering... et c. decided to
include English for specific purposes ESP in the list of subjects to be offered
online. However, as David V. Kimball rightly stated, “with every innovation
comes a new abuse.”
The
question to address in this study is: would online English for Specific
Purposes be more appealing to the students than face-to-face?
The
researcher is planning to distribute a questionnaire to the students who did
their preparatory course (General English Course) online before joining their
program at the university. The questions will help the students draw a
comparison between both experiences. This in turn will show if they prefer to
learn their ESP course online or face-to-face by weighing the advantages and
disadvantages of online learning.
The
purpose of doing this study is to find out what kind of difficulties/advantages
students face when having their ESP classes online.
Keywords: Online
learning, ESP, English, face-to-face, advantages