Wordlists in ESP

I spent most of yesterday creating a wordlist for one of the books in my series, Cambridge English for the Media. I should be working on the wordlist right now too, but I needed a break. Creating a wordlist isn't exactly exciting. But it's important, I think.

Just to clarify, a wordlist is simply a list of words that apear in a course. There's one at the back of International Legal English, for example, with all the key terms defined in alphabetical order. (OK, so it's called a Glossary there, but you could equally call it a mini-dictionary). My students use it all the time, especially when they want to check my dodgy explanation of a tricky word. Here in Poland, we're lucky to have a bilingual version, which you can download for free from the Cambridge website (which also has plenty of other great wordlists).

There's another wordlist in the workbook for Business Benchmark. Yesterday, one of my students used it to demonstrate that my explanation or agent and distributor had things the wrong way round.

A different approach is to put the wordlist online, as we're doing with my series. For example, there's a unit-by-unit set of wordlists for Cambridge English for Nursing. The advantage here is that space is less of an issue. Even more importantly, you can listen to all the pronunciations by clicking on the icon on the pdf. (Before you print it out, I mean - technology's still not ready for that to work with the printouts). That's a huge benefit with all that hard-to-pronounce medical terminology. If you've ever wondered how to pronounce dyspnoea, apnoeoa and tachypnoea, check out the wordlist for unit 2. Again, there's a bilingual version on the Polish website ... perhaps your local Cambridge website also has a blingual version.

So what can you do with all these wordlists? Well, most obviously, you can use them as a reference, as my business student did last night. Students can also use them to manage their vocab learning. A student preparing for the ILEC exam (International Legal English Certificate) could learn 10 words a day from the wordlist and thereby (sorry) master the whole list in around a month ... and then use these words in his/her exam. Or in real life, of course.

As a teaching tool, they're also really useful. I've already mentioned my cut-up-bits-of-paper game on this blog. That's so easy to do with a printed out wordlist.

I mainly use wordlists to play "blockbusters", a teaching classic that I'm sure many teachers already use. For those of you who don't know it, you have a honeycomb grid, with a letter in each block.

There are two teams, reds and blues. Choose a letter to start with, and read the definition for a word starting with that letter. If students know the answer, they put up their hands (no shouting out, please!). If it's correct, it goes their colour and they can choose the next letter. The aim is for the reds to make a connection from top to bottom and the blues to connect side to side. They can go any route they choose, as long as they end up making the connection. Of course, they end up blocking each other, which is why it's called blockbusters. Good fun ... and of course it's just a vocab test in disguise.

(By the way, I have wonderful interactive whtieboards to make it look great, but I played it for years on ordinary whiteboards and flipcharts - just draw a grid and away you go.)

There's a shorter version of the game too, which doesn't involve a grid. Again, teams (not necessarily two teams) ask for letters to get definitions of words starting with that letter. If they get it right, write that letter on the board in that team's column, and they can choose the next letter. The aim now is to collect enough letters to make a word ... probably best if it's more than 3 letters long. Ideally, the word should be connected, however tenuously, to their ESP field, but that's up to you to decide.

One complication: some letters might not have many words starting with them. My legal English students soon work out that Q always leads to quorum, so they don't wait to hear the question. In that case (and also with Z and X), tell them you're going to ask for a word starting with, say, S, but if they get it right, they still get the letter they asked for. This allows you to focus on words you want to test, rather than the same words over and over again.

Anyway, I could go on all day - I'm really into vocab revision, but this wordlist isn't going to write itself ... I'll let you know when it appears on the site.

Related posts:
Vocabulary revision with a table and a guillotine
Fun with contracts
What do words actually mean?

In defence of course books

The blogosphere seems to be buzzing at the moment with reasons for not liking course books – most notably coming from Kalinago English (here, here and here), but also this wonderful parody of Headway on the TEFL Tradesman (although I’d warn sensitive readers that the humour is very close to the edge). Now, of course there’s plenty wrong with many course books, but that’s the same with any market for goods or services – there are good items and less good items, items of mixed quality and some truly dreadful items. But that doesn’t mean the whole concept is rotten.


Of course I would say that, wouldn’t I? – I’m an editor and writer and I’m seriously hoping course books will one day pay my mortgage and enable me to spend more time at home with my kids (and less time with other people’s kids). But I also think this is very true for me as a teacher … especially as a teacher of business English and ESP.

First of all, there have been some great books. You can read my article about two of my favourite old classics, Business Opportunities and Business Objectives, both by Vicki Hollett, here. What I liked about these books was the way they approached and practised grammar in a very systematic way, with plenty of personalised discussions and role-plays designed to practise whatever grammar point was the focus of the unit. The functional language syllabus was also excellent.

Secondly, and this relates closely to my debate on non-experts in ESP, certain course books have opened up new fields of ESP to non-expert teachers. The best example here is International Legal English, which really did transform the teaching of LE for many many teachers. Where before we had to make do with home-made materials of variable authenticity, quality and usefulness, now we had a solid syllabus and authoritative answers to guide us as teachers. Even more important, we now had realistic situational dialogues to listen to and to use as models for our students’ speaking.

Of course there are flaws in the book (just as there are flaws in BOpps and BObjs) – things that I would have done differently, exercises which don’t work as well as they could, but overall this is an incredibly important book. (Again, I don’t want to sound like a salesman – I know I have a kind of vested interest, having written the teacher’s book – but as a teacher I can’t help comparing the standard of my teaching of legal English before and after ILE was published.)

That was the guiding principal behind the Cambridge English for … series, but again I’m wary of sounding like a salesman.

Now I’ll be the first to admit there’s a lot to be said for course-book-free teaching. (I’ll avoid calling it dogme, because I use this technique as part of a course-book-led syllabus, which I’m sure goes against the dogma of dogme). I had a one-to-one student earlier this year who thrived on long discussions about her work, with error correction and spontaneous input from me. It was very satisfying for both of us. But it only worked because she was an expert in her field (IP law) and a naturally talkative person (also, I humbly admit, it helped that I knew more or less what she was talking about, thanks to my experience in this field, and was able to interact intelligently). It also helped that I always had plenty of teaching materials in my bag ready to use if and when the conversation dried up or stopped being useful.

But that wouldn’t have worked with my other students – my less experienced lawyers, my less talkative one-to-one, my low level group ...

Earlier this year I had two business groups that I was teaching without a course book. For the first few weeks, it was wonderfully liberating for all of us. I had plenty of texts and discussions and home-made exercises and student-generated exercises. But then the courses started to drag … and we all wished we had a course book.

Anyway, for most of my teaching, I need a course book to provide: 

• expertise;
• listenings – semi-authentic situational dialogues;
• language input;
• a springboard for discussions – even lesson-length discussions that go off at a wonderful tangent;
• ideas to practise the language;
• a sense of progress – both for my students and for their employers;
• a sense of structure – a psychological crutch that we were having a course, not just lessons (see my thoughts on DRIFT here);
• and, last but not least, a fall-back, a safety net, for when the ideas run out and you still have 20 minutes to fill.

OK, that last one may come as a shock to certain wonderful teachers, but I’ve had the sick-stomach feeling enough times. My wonderful worksheet, intended to see me through 60 minutes, has limped on for 40 and the students have had enough. Or it was too difficult. Or too easy. It’s at times like these that the trusty course book pops up like a loyal Saint Bernard to rescue you from the deepest, snowiest crevasse.

(Oh no, I’m getting into metaphor. I’m really sorry about that. It won’t happen again.)

Anyway, I’m glad dogme is recognised as a legitimate and solid approach / technique / methodology. I was getting sick of trying to justify to observers and even some students why all my lessons started with about half an hour of student-generated discussion and language work. But I think course books have their place, and would be sorely (Soar-ly? … Oh no, it’s ELT puns now!) missed.

Can non-experts teach ESP? Part 2: It all depends … but on what?

A few months ago, I wrote a piece about non-experts in ESP. To use myself as an example, I teach legal English but I’m not a lawyer. So I’d class myself as a non-expert in the subject of law. Should I worry about that? Should I leave it to the ‘experts’? Would I be a better teacher if I had a law degree? Am I ripping off my students by pretending to be something I’m not?

These are all important questions, and I won’t be able to answer them fully in this (hopefully short) post. Today I just want to move the discussion forward slightly. I was also planning to do a review of the various reactions I got to my initial discussion – there were plenty of great ideas, which I want to bring together on this blog. But I’ll save that for a later post (I want to do it properly and not rush it), and concentrate here on clarifying the slippery concepts of ESP and non-experts.

Seeing other people’s thoughts on this question really brought it home to me how diverse ESP is. I’m not just talking about the range of ESP subjects (Legal English, Technical English, English for Biotechnology, English for Counter-Narcotics, etc.), but also the range of teaching situations that we work in (e.g. in-company courses, open courses at private language schools, 1-to-1 lessons with practising professionals, ESP modules in vocational training courses, university degree courses, etc.).

The primary distinction here seems to be whether the aim of the ESP teacher is to develop general English skills (using the context of the students’ subject simply because it’s more interesting than talking about chimpanzees, for example), or whether there’s some element of CLIL (content and language integrated learning, i.e. teaching the subject and English at the same because in many ways the two are inseparable). Subject expertise is clearly more important in the latter than in the former.

There’s also a wide range of sources of course materials that we use (published course books, home-made courses written by the teacher, institution-made courses written centrally, dogme-style student-generated courses, etc.). Here I’d say the relevant distinction is between courses written by the teacher and those written by another person, an expert. It’s one thing to teach well-written materials created by someone else, someone who has decent subject knowledge and awareness of the learners’ professional needs. It’s quite another thing for an EFL teacher to try to write such a course from scratch.

My confidence as a teacher of legal English comes in a large part from the fact that I use a book written by lawyers and tested on lawyers. Five years ago, when I was using course materials I’d written myself, I was on much shakier ground. So although I’d spent six stressful months writing and teaching Advanced Legal English for the British Council, as soon as International Legal English (CUP) was published, I ditched my own course and used the one written by experts.

(I’ll explain one day how I came to write the teacher’s book for that course, despite my non-expertise at the time. In fact, I think being a non-expert really helped me with that book, because it meant I asked and researched lots of stupid questions that more experienced teachers would think were obvious, like “what does tort mean?”).

So my not-very exciting answer to the question “can non-experts teach ESP?” is “it depends”. But the rather more interesting follow-up is “but what does it depend on?”. When I write a blog posting to review other people’s thoughts on this topic, I think the two distinctions above (general English skills vs CLIL; teacher-written courses vs expert-written courses) will help to organise all the ideas.

There’s also, of course, a considerable grey area between the extremes of expert and non-expert that I described in my earlier post. When I called myself a non-expert earlier, I don’t mean I’m completely clueless when it comes to legal English. In fact, after five years of teaching legal English and with two books published on the subject, I’m very often treated as an expert (which can be quite scary, given all the questions I can’t answer off the top of my head). People tend to assume that because my books contain so much knowledge, I must also have that knowledge! In fact, I just copied it off the internet and forgot most of it straight away.

But last week I started unit 1 of International Legal English with a new group – the fourth time I’ve taught that unit in the last 6 months. And you know what? I did know all the answers. I predicted my students’ questions and was able to take the discussion off in new directions, confident that I knew what I was talking about. I also knew exactly how to make the exercises more communicative and fun. But all of this came from (a) having taught the book so many times recently and (b) having a great teacher’s book to support me. (Sorry for my lack of modesty, but the teacher’s book does make life so much easier for teachers.) So I actually felt like an expert – much more so than six months ago, let alone two or five years ago. And this time next year I’ll be further along the non-expert–expert gradient.

To take another example, I have a friend, Andrew, who has been teaching legal English full-time at the highest level for nine years (and who is a follower of this blog, so I’d better watch what I say). He’s also a partner in a legal translation company, so he knows all the right jargon and can speak intelligently on pretty much any law topic. Whenever I speak to him about the law or lawyers’ needs or legal writing or whatever, it’s blindingly obvious that he’s an expert. Partners in the top law firms in Poland trust his expertise and experience. But … he doesn’t have a law degree, so some people might argue that, on paper, he can’t be an expert. (I’d say expertise is about what you know and can do, rather than what pieces of paper you have.

An important point to make is that expertise and experience grow over time, so all experts started out as non-experts. My first legal English lesson was dreadful, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Andrew’s was not-so-hot either.

So my message to would-be ESP teachers is this. There’s no need to feel ashamed about lack of expertise. I’d advise you to start off with skills-based ESP rather than CLIL, and to use a course book rather than write your own materials, if at all possible. You’ll also need to manage expectations carefully (I’ll expand on this in a later post). But if you work hard and learn from your students (two very big ifs), you can move along the grey-scale from non-expert to become a real expert.

PS For more on this issue, see this great article by Alex Case.

Grammar syllabuses for ESP

(Apologies to purists who'd say the plural of syllabus is syllabi. To my mind, the word syllabus looks silly enough already without a fancy plural ending.)

One of the biggest differences between general English (GE) course books and ESP course books is that GE books tend to be driven by what I'd call a traditional grammar syllabus: Unit 1: Present Simple and Continuous; Unit 2: Past Simple; Unit 3: Present Perfect; Unit 4: The Future ... The syllabus may be prominent or disguised to varying degrees, but it always seems to be there.

Not so with ESP course books. Take International Legal English, for example. Here, the syllabus is very much topic-driven. We have units on contract law, company law, intellectual property law, and so on. The aims of the units are to help lawyers and law students to communicate in real-life professional situations such as lawyer-client meetings, contract drafting and discussions with colleagues. There may be some grammar input and practice to support those aims, but it's never the other way round (with the grammar aims leading the course and dictating the topics). What's more, the grammar is often field-specific, i.e. covering grammar topics that are unique to that ESP field. For legal English, field-specific grammar includes things like said/such, wherein/herewith/thereupon, and techniques for switching between legalese and plain English.

Another example comes from Cambridge English for Jobhunting, which teaches students how to write CVs and cover letters and how to perform brilliantly in job interviews. Now, imagine when we were creating that book we had started with a traditional grammar syllabus, and we were planning practice activities for present perfect. Hmmm ... how about job interviews? "Have you ever worked with children? How long have you worked for XYZ?".

The problem is, if you look at strong examples of authentic job interviews (as we did when we were researching the book), you find that present perfect isn't actually used in this way in real life. If the interviewers want to ask you about your experience, they'll ask you to "tell us about a time when you demonstrated ...". In other words, you'll need past simple, and perhaps some narrative tenses, but not present perfect. (There's also the issue that they won't ask if you've ever worked with children - that should come out of your CV, not the interview).

So what grammar do you need for job interviews? Let's look at this question: "Tell us about your weaknesses". It turns out there are several great techniques for answering this question. One is to talk about a weakness that you've actually overcome ("Well, I used to be a bit disorganised, but now ..."). In other words, it's worth teaching/practising used to. Another technique is to play down your weaknesses using phrases like "a bit", "very slightly" and "occasionally" ("Well, I can occasionally be a little bossy, but ..."). The interesting thing for me here is the use of can to show that the weakness is an occasional bad habit rather than a permanent character flaw. I've never seen can explained in those terms in a traditional grammar course, presumably because it's not an especially useful or common use of can. But it is an extremely useful piece of grammar for this particular situation.

So where does that leave the tradional grammar syllabus that I mentioned at the top of this post? I'd say that in modern ESP course books, there's no room for it. There are so many other teaching materials that contain systematic grammar syllabuses that we don't need to include them yet again in ESP books. Another way of looking at it is that there's so much specific language work that does need to be taught in ESP books (because it isn't taught in any other published materials), that it would be a waste of space to include traditional grammar. (This relates to my wish-list for ESP course design - we want course books to cover the difficult things like authentic listening materials and original language work, rather than the easy things that we teachers can make for ourselves).

What's more, ESP course books are often aimed at students with a much wider range of grammar needs than other books. For example, International Legal English will work well with students from B2 to c1 level and above, precisely because it doesn't focus on traditional grammar: the situation-based course aims will be broadly the same for both levels, where grammar-based aims would be very different.

The same goes for books aimed at different nationalities. My students in Poland need a lot of work on articles and present perfect, while native speakers of Spanish at the same level of proficiency would find that grammar work embarrassingly easy. And so on ...

BUT ... the key word in the above paragraphs was course books. There may be no room for a traditional grammar syllabus in the ESP books we use, but I'd argue we still need such a syllabus (tailored to our own students' needs, of course) in the courses we teach. But where do you get a grammar syllabus if not from your course book? You've got two options:

1. Create your own worksheets to teach and practise all the target grammar structures. This is what I do, although I'll admit it's very tough to be systematic and to actually integrate a whole grammar syllabus into an ESP course.
2. Supplement your ESP book with another book that does have a strong, systematic grammar syllabus. I'm talking about buying the book, of course, not photocopying it. Aside from the moral/legal issues surrounding photocopying, you and your students are more likely to be systematic if you have an actual book to work through. A grammar classic like Murphy would be fine, as would a GE or business English course book with a strong grammar syllabus. [My favourite used to be Business Opportunities, which had the best grammar syllabus of any book I've used. But it looks a bit dated nowadays, unfortunately.] So you could use your ESP course book on Mondays and your grammar-based book on Thursdays, for example.

Of course the ideal situation would be if ELT publishers brought out grammar books for each of the ESP areas, but for the time being at least, it seems there's not enough demand to justify the investment.

Perhaps one day in the future when I've got too much time and money on my hands I'll write them myself ... (I'll also try to post some grammar activities on this blog as I write them - look out for the 'grammar' label in the list of postings.)

So, what about you? Do you agree with my views on topic-based and grammar-based course books? Where do you get your grammar syllabus from (if you use one)? Or should we ESP teachers forget about grammar and leave it to the general English teachers? Add your comments below.

PS I've just been having an idle look around the blogosphere (still a very new experience for me, being very slow on the uptake) and I came across Alex Case's bank of 500 worksheets. I haven't checked them all out, but it seems to me you could make a pretty good free grammar syllabus for your ESP course just by exploring all the great ideas here.