Innovation in Language Learning

The value of learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is gaining greater and greater significance today. This growing demand for ESP courses addressing occupational requirements derives both from the accelerating globalisation in the workplace and the widespread use of English as a medium of professional communication (Marra, 2013, as cited in [3]).  In the context of tertiary level, these developments have even inspired a shift from the learning of traditional “College English to ESP [1].  ESP has, therefore, grown to become one of the most prominent areas of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching today.  ESP may be defined as an approach to language teaching in which “all decisions as to content and method are based on the learners’ reasons for learning’’ [4]. This presentation sheds light on the process of revisiting an ESP university course with the aim of enriching it in a way that it prepares undergraduate students for a civil engineering bootcamp.  Simply put, the bootcamp refers to an educational program or training that provides participants with hands-on experience in the construction industry.  The primary objective is to work towards equipping students of the Department of Civil Engineering and Geomatics of the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT), who are non-native speakers, with the language needed in the context of an English-speaking bootcamp.  To this end, this presentation, aims to discuss the path of revising the existing course in the light of this bootcamp challenge, while paying particular attention to some of the “key stages of ESP” [2], such as needs analysis, syllabus design, and materials selection.