ESP and Internationalization of Higher Education and Research
ESP and Internationalization of Higher Education and Research

Summary/Abstract: The growing internationalization of higher education and scientific research and publishing, characterized by the dominant use of English as the language of instruction and publication, has spurred the need for highly specialized, tailor-made ESP courses for university staff and researchers. The proliferation of English Medium Instruction (EMI) has created a new requirement for university teaching staff to acquire not only general English and ESP proficiency, but also pedagogical and intercultural communicative competences. ESP for particular scientific and technical disciplines, as well as EAP and academic writing instruction in particular, have already gained some ground and acquired a sound tradition in non-Anglophone academic institutions. Therefore ESP, broadly understood as an approach to language teaching that targets the academic or occupational needs of learners, and focuses on the necessary language, genres and skills to address these needs, can now rise to the challenge of combining EMI, terminology-oriented ESP for particular disciplines, and EAP. The article presents a specialized course created for the purpose of developing competences for teaching in English and academic writing, as part of the Erasmus+ project Strengthening Teaching Competencies in Natural and Mathematical Sciences (TeComp). In the empirical section, the article presents the results of a needs analysis carried out among prospective learners (university teachers and young researchers) in the fields of natural and mathematical sciences at four Serbian universities, included in TeComp. The proposed course, based on the theoretical principles of ESP (Dudley-Evans; Anthony) and EMI (Macaro), as well as on the needs analysis, combines certain components of EMI and academic writing, while addressing particular scientific disciplines and learners.

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