Innovation in Language Learning
Indic Frameworks for Depth, Value and Professional Responsibility in ESP Presentations
Lali Banerji, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences (Germany)
Abstract
Specialised-language teaching often stops at terminology: learners recite the vocabulary of a discipline yet cannot reason about a decision, weigh its consequences, or speak to those it affects. This article presents a presentation-centred approach in English for Specific Purposes that treats the oral presentation as an act of inquiry rather than recitation. Working from real crisis and disaster cases – such as a flood barrier, a building collapse, or a cyberattack – students move through a structured topic finder that takes them up the levels of Bloom's taxonomy, from recognising a problem to evaluating what engineers achieved and what they did not. Storytelling gives the resulting account its fluency; a Nyāya-informed structure of reasoned inquiry gives it depth; and pañcha ṛṇa, the accountability owed to society, future generations and the natural world (the five elements, or pañcabhūta), reorients students from describing a technology to situating it within relations of consequence and responsibility. Students consequently choose authentic, audience-aware questions and present them with evidence, competing stakeholder perspectives and an honest reckoning of trade-offs. Drawing on practitioner action research across two courses – Civil Engineering and Information Technology – and on attendance, assessed presentations and learner feedback as descriptive evidence, the article advances this as a pedagogical design rather than a measured effect on student disposition. It argues that, in a context where written production can be automated, the live and reasoned presentation becomes a decisive space in which students must show understanding and judgement that are recognisably their own.
Keywords: English for Specific Purposes; oral presentation; crisis and disaster pedagogy; Indic knowledge traditions; professional ethics; sustainability
REFERENCES
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[3] Dasgupta, 1922;
[4] Egan, 1986;
[5] Ellis, 2003;
[6] Hutchinson & Waters, 1987;
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