A BLENDED-LEARNING APPROACH TO ESP TEACHING: DESIGNING A VIRTUAL PLATFORM
A BLENDED-LEARNING APPROACH TO ESP TEACHING: DESIGNING A VIRTUAL PLATFORM

Summary/Abstract: The demand for English courses particularly tailored to specific needs is ever growing in today’s higher education system. We teach a generation of undergraduate students who will most likely use English as a medium of instruction for their master’s degree, whether they decide to apply for one in Romania (the University of Bucharest offers 20 such programmes) or abroad. A greater emphasis, therefore, should be laid on meeting the competence standards required by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, so that, upon graduation, the student will be an independent user of general English and have a good mastery of the terminology of his field of study. Since the undergraduate English course spans anywhere from two to five or six semesters, during which time the instructors have the task of bringing students with various language levels up to the same proficiency par - when they would ideally be able to apply for the abovementioned postgraduate programmes, a solution to the problem is offered by digital technologies, which can complement the traditional teaching methods already in use. Based on students’ answers to a questionnaire which led us to conclude that not only are they conversant with the new technologies, but they also consider that their language skills would improve, should the virtual medium be used during the in-class activities, we have devised a rough draft of an online platform specifically designed to facilitate the students’ access to and assimilation of information through online applications.

• Details
• Contents