• Put the following chart on the board for the students to copy. Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?
• Tell the students that they are going to see the video sequence two more times. Their task is to watch, then to watch again and take notes about the “five W’s and H” of the topic:
Who is it about? What is it about? Where did it happen? When did it happen? Why did it happen? How did it happen?
• Play the sequence twice. First, the students watch. The second time, they make brief notes to answer the question words.
• Students compare answers with their partners. • Volunteers report how much they understood.
Stage 3: Follow-up
As a follow-up, students can write a short news article based on the video sequence.
Acknowledgment
The techniques used in this activity are adapted from Susan Stempleski and Barry Tomalin, Video in Action (Prentice Hall, 1990).
Activity #10
ENERGY CONTRACTS
Aims
● to practice using gerunds ● to motivate “green” behavior ● to practice writing and discussion
PrePArAtion
Make enough copies of the “Energy Contract” shown here to give one to each student (or copy it on the board).
Procedure
● Write the following sentence stem on the board:
I can save energy by . . .
● Introduce the topic of energy conserva tion by
reminding the class that energy production is one of the main causes of problems such as air pollu tion and acid rain. Ask them to think about how they might complete the sentence on the board. Write an example on the board, e.g.,
. . . turning off the light when I am the last person to walk out of a room.
● Elicit ideas from the class. As students give their
ideas, list them on the board.
● Distribute the contract (or write it on the board for
students to copy).
● Ask the students to complete and sign the contract. ● Tell the class that they have now made a contract
and that they must now do as they have promised. At the end of two weeks, they will have the opportunity to evaluate their results.
Follow-uP
At the end of two weeks, conduct a whole class dis cussion centering on the following questions:
1. Were you successful in meeting the en ergysaving goals you set for yourself two weeks ago?
2. What difficulties did you encounter?
3. Do you think you will make any of your goals a regular part of your lifestyle? If so, which ones?
Energy Contract
I, _____________________________, promise that I will help to conserve energy for a period of two weeks by
1. 2. 3. (signature) (date) AcKnowledgment
This activity is an adaptation of “An Energy Contract” in Linda Schwartz, Earth Book for Kids:
Activities to Heal the Environment (The Learning
BIBLIOGRAPHYBrinton, D. M., M. A. Snow and M. B. Wesche. 1989. Content-
based second language instruc tion. Boston: Heinle and Heinle.
Cates, K. 1990. Teaching for a better world: Global issues in lan guage education. The Language Teacher, 41, 5, pp. 35.
Cazden, C. 1977. Language, literacy and literature. The National
Elementary Principal, 57, 1, pp. 4052.
Derwing, T. M. and J. Cameron. 1991a. The envi ronment and
you. Calgary, Alberta: Detselig Enterprises.
———. 1991b. Who cares about the environment? Calgary, Alberta: Detselig Enterprises.
Maley, A. 1992. Global issues in ELT. Practical En glish Teaching,
13, 2, p. 73.
Martin, S. 1991. Tropical rainforests. London: Macmillan.
National Wildlife Federation. 1989. The big pic ture. Nature
Scope, 4, 4, pp. 318.
Nimoy, L. 1978. Come be with me. Boulder, Co.: Blue Mountain Press.
Rabley, S. 1989. Youth culture and the green world. London: Macmillan.
Schleppegrell, M., K. Rulon and J. Braus. 1992. The environ ment makes a world of difference. Workshop presented at the 26th Annual Convention of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Vancouver, B.C.
Schwartz, L. 1990. Earth book for kids: Activities to heal the envi-
ronment. Santa Barbara, Calif.: The Learning Works.
Stempleski, S. 1993a. Earth watch. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Regents/Prentice Hall.
———. 1993b. Focus on the environment. Engle wood Cliffs, N.J.: Regents/Prentice Hall.
Stempleski, S. and B. Tomalin. 1990. Video in ac tion: Recipes for
using video in language teach ing. London: Prentice Hall. This article appeared in the October 1993 issue of the English
9
The Use of
Local Contexts
i n
t h e de S i g n
o f eSt mat e r i a L S
R O B E R T J . B A U M G A R D N E R A N D A U D R E Y E . H . K E N N E D YThe Asia Foundation • Islamabad, Pakistan
one oF the hAllmArks oF englIsh For specIFIc Purposes (ESP) as it developed more than two decades ago was that English Lan guage Teaching (ELT) should be learnercentered, i.e., it should respond to the lan guage needs of the learner in whatever form those needs might take. In this view each languagelearning situation is unique and should be thoroughly studied and delineated as a prerequisite for the design of lan guage courses. This relatively recent emphasis on the specificpurpose aspect of language teaching rejects the idea that the learning of English must necessarily be accomplished through the traditional teach ing of literature or other culturally oriented language cours es. As ESP, or more specifi cally EST, is concerned with the teaching and learning of English for Science and Technology, it skirts altogether the prob lems of cul turebound materials—for science, it is often said, is international, without boundaries or borders, and is virtually devoid of culture.
This notion is in fact not entirely true. Certainly, there are aspects of science that transcend culture; sci ence, however, also has its humanistic aspects. It has, for example, both a popular and a classical literature, legends and myths, and moral and aesthetic concerns which vary from culture to culture (Strevens 1971). Simply consider different cultures’ attitudes towards space travel, testtube babies, euthanasia, or abortion. Rhetoricians (Kaplan 1972; Connor and Kaplan 1987) have also found culturespe cific organizational pat terns in the exposito ry writing of students from diverse cultural backgrounds.
There is, furthermore, a typically West ern way of pre senting scientific or technical exposition, which has been
This is a revised and expanded version of a paper that appeared in the SPELT (Society of Pakistan English Lan guage Teachers)
Annual Newsletter, vol. 2, no. 4, 1987.
inherited in great part from GrecoRoman forensic argu mentation. As Peter Strevens (1980:143) has observed, in certain contexts “the simple statement of scientific princi ples may look like a new kind of colonialism and be justi fiably resented if it is not made in the knowledge and acceptance of cultural differences.” Strevens continues: “Many of the learner’s difficulties with the foreign lan guage, English, reflect not just linguistic problems but problems of his adjustment to a culture and a language which requires the expression of some subtly different presuppositions and attitudes towards, for exam ple, causality, precision, quantification, etc.”
The English language program
It was with considerations such as these in mind concerning the cultural aspects of science that we embarked on a program of localization of EST materi als. The English Language Program, a joint project spon sored by the University Grants Commission of Pakistan and The Asia Foundation, com prises four English Language Centers at four universities in Pakistan: the University of Balochistan, Quetta; Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan; the NWFP University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar and the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. These centers offer courses to both undergrad uate and gradu ate students of science and engineering in basic scientific English and study skills. The core textbook in each center is the highly successful Nucleus
General Science by Martin Bates and Tony Dudley
Evans (Longman, 1982), which has provided a solid basic framework for localized supplementary materials.
Localization of scientific content in text books may be carried out in two principal ways: (1) through the contrasting of rhetorical differences in the scientific
discourse of two cultures where these differences exist and can be pinpointed and (2) through the use of local contexts in the design of materi als for science students. With regard to (1): the physical description of an apparatus in an experiment within a Western scientific context, for example, proceeds from left to right and from large to small, i.e., the description begins with the largest appara tus on the left and moves to the right. Small appended or adjoining apparatus are then described, again from a lefttoright perspective. We have noted that this leftto right/largetosmall move ment is often not the way in which our students in Balochis tan, for example, describe apparatus. With regard to (2): we have found that interest level and rel evance, and hence learning, are greatly enhanced if local contexts are also used in the teaching of scientific English. To this end we supplemented our core text with our own locally developed EST materials, which have proven to be both popular and effective with our Pakistani students. The remainder of this article will focus on some of the materials using local contexts that we have developed.
The English Language Program course has been designed to provide lowproficien cy Pakistani univer sity students with basic scientific English through the integration of the four skills: reading, writing, listen ing, and speaking. Every writing assignment, for exam ple, has an accompanying speak ing and/or reading exercise as the warmup for the written exercise. Reading exercises generally include listening and speaking activities and may include writing as well. Several examples from our localized sup plementary materials are presented here to illustrate how we use local contexts.
Reading exercises
Reading is a laborious task for many Pakistani uni versity science students, as they have been taught pri marily to read aloud. This not only slows their reading speed and hinders comprehension but also makes the task of discerning discrete bits of information unusu ally difficult. Thus, the first exercise we created for reading dealt with skimming and scanning. Scanning lends itself easily to localization.
The exercise that we developed makes use of three familiar sources for scanning: local Pakistani telephone books, the Pak istan Railways timetable, and locally
pub lished Englishlanguage newspapers from which we chose material such as the sports page, the TV schedule, and short news items. A page chosen from each source was photocopied and given to the stu dents. Five questions for each source were prepared, and students were instructed to listen to the ques tions and find the answers as quickly as possible by referring to clues on the pages. Students were initially surprised that scanning is indeed a type of reading, but they quickly saw its usefulness for their studies. Thus, through the use of familiar local materials for the teaching of scanning, we were able to extend this con cept easily to the more challenging academic scientific contexts of the textbook.
A reading/speaking exercise was creat ed to supple ment Nucleus General Science, Unit 4 on Measurement, which deals with the metric system. Officially the metric sys tem is currently in use in Pakistan, but there is also an older, indigenous system of measurement that is frequently seen used in the newspapers and heard in the vegetable, cloth, spice, and gold markets throughout the country. When the topic of indigenous measurement was first brought up, the students ridiculed the study of these so called “oldfashioned” terms. However, the les son we created showing them how wide ly the terms are used in Pakistan piqued their curiosity.
The lesson consisted of two handouts. The first one contained several articles from the local English press. (See sample article). The second sheet was a chart of Pak istani terms of measurement and their equivalent in the metric system. Students were asked first to read the articles, and then in pairs to define the terms by looking at the metric equivalents. There was a great