Ways to Enhance Students’ Communicative Skills in ESP Teaching and Learning

Abstract

The ultimate goal of English for Specific Purposes teaching and learning is to develop students’ essential communicative competence within their professional field, enhance their speaking proficiency through different speech practices and drills simulating future workplace situations as well as to enable them acquire up-to-date professional information via foreign sources. Learners’ speaking proficiency is viewed as one of the most crucial skills by both teachers and learners and is measured in terms of the ability to carry out target language conversation. The author of the present article tries to analyze modern innovative technologies aimed at the formation and improvement of students’ foreign language speaking proficiency for professional purposes, determine efficient methods for learners’ communicative competence enhancement in the field of ESP studying, as well as adapt most popular ESL speaking activities to ESP classes. Research shows that communicative language teaching, based on true-to-life situations that require communication and collaborative approach serve best to promote speaking activities, specifying pair work and groupwork as the most efficient methods focused on improving students’ communicative competences. The author distinguishes class research, linear dialogue, pyramid discussion, information gap, unfilled crossword and role-play as some of the fruitful activities stimulating speaking practices in an ESP class, provides general recommendations for ESP teachers to promote students’ target language communication. Possible suggestions to encourage students’ interaction include organization of ESP class desks in a way that fosters learners’ cooperation; allocating a percentage of the final grade to speaking skill as well as continuous assessing of students’ speaking endeavours; creating a rich learning environment with authentic materials, implementing collaborative learning and shared knowledge strategies; teaching sentence starters and communicative scripts for common language functions and professional situations; reducing teacher speaking time and increasing students’ speaking time; always giving positive feedback to learners’ speaking endeavours; diagnosing difficulties that students encounter and providing additional practice to overcome them.