27 marec 2006

Kako daleč v specifičnost želimo?

Ko predolgo poslušam kolege okrog sebe, ki nikakor nočejo razumeti razlike med učenjem splošnega tujega jezika in tujega jezika stroke, ko nikakor ne razumejo, da pri tujem jeziku stroke razvijamo neko vrsto strokovne pismenosti, za kar je potrebno veliko časa in truda s strani študentov, ko se znova in znova govori o nekih jezikovnih centrih, ki naj bi prevzeli poučevanje tujih jezikov in ga prilagodili množici študentov z različnih šol, začutim potrebo po tem, da poiščem podporo svojemu videnju pomena tujega jezika stroke.

Tako sem poiskala in ponovno prebrala članek Kena Hylanda "Specificity revisited: How far should we go now?" (English for Specific Purposes, 21/4 (2002) 385-395) Ga poznate? Izjemen je. Dovolite, da povzamem samo zadnja dva odstavka.

"Together, all this leads to the important conclusion that expertise in a subject means being able to use its discourses in the specific ways that one's readers are likely to find effective and persuasive. While we may often talk about reports, memos, oral presentations, and so on as overarching genres and universal skills, these take on meaning only when they are situated in real contexts of use. Put simply, students do not learn in a cultural vacuum: their disciplinary activities are a central part of their engagement with others in their disciplines and they communicate effectively only by using its particular conventions appropriately.

ESP therefore involves developing new kinds of literacy, equipping students with the communicative skills to participate in particular academic and professional contexts. Establishing exactly what are the specific language, skills, and genres of particular groups on which we need to base learning priorities may well be expensive, time consuming and skill-intensive. But it is this research which both makes our teaching effective and our practices professional, and we should not give these up easily. There is, then, only one possible response to the question posed in the title of this paper: effective language teaching in the universities involves taking specificity seriously: It means we must go as far as we can." (Hyland, 2002:393-394)

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