ESP and distance learning

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English for Specific Purposes, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 115-128, 1994 Copyright 0 1994 The American University Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in the USA 0889-4906/94 $6.00 + .OO

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ESP and Distance Learning RonBoyle Abstract - Much effort and ingenuity has been devoted to helping non-native speaking post-graduate students at English medium institutions to cope with the varied demands made of them. However, those students most in need of assistance often have the greatest difhculty in attending in-sessional language classes, because their coursework is taking them so long. Although a presessional course could provide the preparation such students need, attendance is not possible in many cases. One solution to this problem might be distance learning (DL), a neglected mode of instruction in ESP. This article describes a DL preparatory language programme at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, and it argues that DL can make a valuable contribution to ESP.

Introduction Despite innovative and imaginative responses to the needs of overseas postgraduate students who are attending in-sessional courses at universities where English is the medium of instruction (Harper 1986; Johns & Dudley-Evans 1980; Trimble 1985), the problem of available time remains acute. As Swales (1988: 137-138) says: MA and MSc students have less time than other groups to take advantage of the language and language-related services offered to them; further, and even more paradoxically, those Master’s students with the least proficiency (and so in greater need of help) have least tune available because their departmental work is taking them so much longer.

This describes quite precisely the situation at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), which is an international, English medium, post-graduate institution located to the north of Bangkok. Viiually the entire student body consists of non-native speakers of English, and in 1991 they came from 25 countries, mostly in Asia. The faculty members are drawn from every continent and only about 10% are native English speakers. As the students are unfamiliar with the range of idiolects to which they are exposed, many have considerable difficulty in following lectures. By the end of the first semester, most students have become accustomed to the way their professors speak, but many have derived far less benefit from the lectures than the professors hoped, and too many have recorded grades lower than they deserve. Of particular concern is the fact that,

Address correspondence to: Ron Boyle, Lecturer, Department of English and Applied Linguistics, Brunei Darussalam, Gadong 3186, Negara Brunei Darussalam, Brunei.

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for some, the chance of obtaining the grades required for admission to a PhD programme might already have been lost. The Language Centre at AIT runs a pre-sessional course, but the course can only accept about 10% of any new intake. Hence, there are many students beginning a Master’s degree who are ill-prepared for their studies. Furthermore, those students who are most in need of help rarely find time to come to more than a handful of language classes during their first term. The resulting underachievement by many students and the classroom problems that professors report have caused concern to the Administration and have led to a search for solutions. The purpose of this paper is to describe one attempt at a solution and one which involves preparing the students for their courses by means of distance learning (Keegan 1990; Sewart, Keegan, & Holmberg 1983).

Distance Learning Distance learning is a mode of instruction which has evolved from study by correspondence, and Keegan (1990: 38) suggests that it can be defined by the following characteristics: l

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the separation of the teacher and the learner, which distinguishes distance learning from face-to-face teaching; the influence of an educational organization, which distinguishes it from private study; the use of technical media, usually print, which unites the teacher and the learner and carries the educational content; the provision of two-way communication, which means that the student may benefit from, or even initiate dialogue; the possibility of occasional meetings for both didactic and socialization purposes.

Distance learning is of particular value to adults with a high level of motivation who either cannot find a course that satisfies their specific needs or who may prefer to study at a time that is convenient to them, at a pace that suits them, and in a place and a manner of their own choosing. Hence, as Keegan (1990: 33) and many others point out, most distance learners worldwide are in metropolitan areas and have chosen distance learning for the freedom it allows them. They can communicate with their teachers by letter, telephone, facsimile, audio- or videocassette, or e-mail, and they may receive very considerable personal attention by so doing. Unless distances are truly considerable, meetings between student and teacher are an almost inevitable step. For students of the UK Open University, and many other distance learning institutions, periodic meetings are mandatory. The teaching of ESP would seem to be an area in which distance teaching methods could make a useful contribution, insofar as students are often relatively few in number, geographically dispersed, and with responsibilities at work and at home that cannot be neglected. The cost and inconvenience of

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releasing individuals from work to attend courses was one of the factors which led British Telecom to utilize distance learning (Mabey 1987). In a challenging field such as ESP, distance learning methods and modem electronic media can offer teachers the means of developing and delivering interesting and original courses for adult learners. However, as the next section will show, there are few examples to follow.

ESP and Distance Learning Although the literature on distance learning is abundant, a recent survey article suggests that relatively little has been written about the teaching of EFL or ESP by DL (Lambert 1991). A search of the ERIC, NTIS, and LLBA databases confirms this finding and shows that much of the work that has been done has not been published in journals, but rather in government reports, conference papers, and other fairly inaccessible documents. The English teaching undertaken by the Central Radio and Television University of China was mentioned briefly by Zhao (1988) and Howells (1989), but the details of this work and similar work elsewhere, for example, in Canada (Kuplowska 19871, in France (Lecourt 1988), and in Kenya (Young, Perraton, Jenkins, & Dodds 1990), are hard to obtain. With the exception of Davies (1977a, 1977b, 19781, Oxford, Young, Ito, & Sumrall(1993), and Selman (1984, 19881, the teaching of EFL or ESP by DL has not been reported in any of the better-known EFL, ESP, or Applied Linguistics journals, and a recent British Council publication which was devoted to DL contained only one passing reference to language teaching (Clarke 1991). However, the small amount of literature that is available shows that imaginative and stimulating teaching is being done by DL (Harris 1991; Perrin 1992). Perrin’s (1992) work, for example, involves the teaching of listening to students in the Bordeaux area who have a videocassette recorder and access to a fax machine. Two or three times a week, the students are instructed to videotape a particular television programme, such as a news broadcast. On the same day, the language teachers view the programme, prepare questions and exercises about it, and fax the material to the students. In the evening, the students watch the programme and complete the exercises. The next day, a transcript of the parts of the programme that the students were instructed to watch is faxed to them, along with the answers and comments about language. The students can telephone the language teachers at agreed times each week and discuss anything that is of concern or interest to them. In this work, Perrin and his colleagues are capitalising on an activity which appeals to certain French business and professional people, that is, watching satellite and cable TV programmes in English. For those who wish to understand the language of economics and commerce, for example, the appropriate programmes can be selected and the materials prepared. For those who work in the tourist or leisure industry and who have slack periods during which training could take place, a distance learning course of this sort has advantages. Furthermore, where groups of learners have videocassette recorders, but no

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access to satellite or cable TV broadcasts or fax machines, videocassettes and printed material can be sent to them and their responses and questions can be returned on audio-cassettes (Boyle 1993; Kaikumba & Cryer 1987; Laaser 1986; Lappia & Kirkland 1989). Alternatively, a DL language programme could make use of just audio-cassettes and printed matter, as the Australian Migrant Education Program’s courses do (Kleist 1986; Kozlowski 1986; Watts 1989). Despite the fact that there is as yet little contact between distance learning and ESP, many of the theories that guide the writers of DL materials and many of the techniques that they have developed will be very familiar to the ESP teacher. DL writers apply Ausubel’s (1968) theory of advance organizers which states, among other things, that advance organizers serve as introductory material which is aimed at bridging the gap between what the student has already learnt and what he or she needs to know. They follow Holmberg (1981) in treating reading as an interactive process and in trying to engage in a “guided didactic conversation” with the learner. From Bruner (1966) and Gagne (1970), the DL writer learns the importance of presenting materials in a logical order and of moving from the general to the particular, and from Bruner (1966), the advantages of a problem solving approach to the teaching of new concepts. Most of all, the distance learner is seen as an independent and self-directed person, and the materials writer accepts Rogers’ (1983) belief in the need to facilitate learning rather than to teach in the traditional manner. Thus, the DL writer is using ideas and techniques that are readily understandable by the ESP practitioner. Although the writers of DL materials are highly skilled at producing texts with the self-instructional adjuncts (e.g., learning objectives and in-text questions) that facilitate learning, Davis (1990) and Richards (1993) argue that the applied linguist has important things to teach the DL writer about the discourse structure of distance learning materials. Despite remarkable advances in technology, most distance learning materials still appear in printed form, and written materials he, as Richards (1993: 1) says, “at the heart of any successful distance learning course.” Richards (1993) demonstrates how a text which satisfies the DL writer’s criteria for effective writing can still be perceived by students as unsatisfactory or difficult to read, and he shows that what the writer has overlooked are aspects of the discourse structure such as the positioning of “theme” and “rheme” and of “given” and “new.” The communication of such insights from the applied linguist to the DL writer can help to ensure that texts are as comprehensible as possible. In view of this similarity of interest between the DL writer and the applied linguist, it is surprising that distance learning should be so neglected in language teaching. Lambert (1991), however, suggests that the unhappy experience that some teachers have had with technology might explain why DL in language teaching has, in his words, “a ghetto status.” He also suggests not only that many teachers regard DL as an inferior form of education, but that they also see it as a threat to their careers. An alternative explanation for the relatively small number of DL language programmes in existence, however, might be that teachers are simply unaware of DL as a mode of instruction. The

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purpose of this paper is to show how relevant and useful a DL programme in ESP can be to a particular group of students and how easily such a programme can be implemented.

The AIT Pre-sessional DL Project This pilot project was designed to meet the needs of a group of 23 postgraduate engineers who could not attend the pre-sessional course on the campus. Its aim was to give the students as clear a picture as possible of what their work during the first term at the Institute would involve, to help them improve some of their language skills and study skills, and to enable them to anticipate a number of the problems that postgraduate study in a foreign country involves. A further purpose of the project was to use the correspondence with the students as a means of establishing a bond with them, so that they would not be reluctant to visit the Language Centre when they arrived on campus, and that time would not be wasted in finding out about their abilities, needs, and interests. The first term language work, therefore, would build on the presessional DL work. Stage One: The Needs Analysis

As the identities of future students were unknown, the first step was to discover what preparation existing students had undertaken before coming to AIT, what information and resources they had had access to, and what sort of help they thought was important in the preparatory stage. This was done by distributing questionnaires and by talking to as many students as possible. Although a fortunate few had known graduates of the Institute, it quickly emerged that many students had arrived in a state of ignorance and had known little other than the title of their course. What also emerged from the questionnaires and discussions was the fact that students had great difficulty initially in understanding lectures. This is a common problem for international postgraduates, but the problem is exacerbated at AIT, because 90% of those who are lecturing in English are non-native speakers. In addition, as classes of just 15 or 20 students are common, there is no hiding place for the student who does not understand spoken English. Hence, providing help in understanding lectures became a primary objective of this project. With reference to this kind of problem, Lynch (1986: 13) says that, short of recording all the lecturers that EAP students will encounter on their courses and allowing the learner to ‘preview’ a number of performances of ali relevant speakers, it will never be possible to provide a complete answer to the comprehension problems caused by the inevitable divergences between lecturers.

Recording all the professors that the students would meet was precisely what this project aimed to do and, in view of the small size of AIT and the

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cooperative nature of many of the faculty members, it was not an unrealistic ambition. Following discussions with students and teachers, and the examination of the questionnaires, it was decided that the target group of students should be sent the following materials: l l l

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a description of first term courses; lectures recorded by each professor who would teach a first term course; transcripts, note-taking exercises, and comprehension, vocabulary, study skills, and other exercises; readings recommended by each of the professors involved; copies of assignments set during the first term and examples of papers marked by professors, so that students could see what was required in a good answer; copies of midterm and end-of-term examination papers.

To these items, it was suggested that we add literature about the department the students were entering, about the Institute and the local environment, and other general information. There was also a description of the resources available in the Language Centre and of the courses it offers during the first term. Stage Two: Getting Cooperation

Having received strong student encouragement for the project and having decided what needed to be sent to the students, it was necessary to gain the support of professors in one of AIT’s 13 Divisions. The average enrolment in each Division is only about 25 students and the Division selected was that of Water Resources Engineering (WRE), and it was selected solely because of the helpful attitude of its Chairman. He had been seconded by the German government from the Ruhr University in Bochum, which is close to the city of Hagen where the headquarters of the Fernuniversitaet, the German distance learning university, are located, and he was aware of the excellent quality of Fernuniversitaet’s materials. This knowledge of DL and his desire to have students receive as much help from the Language Centre as possible resulted in considerable cooperation from his Division. This support from the Chairman was also important in obtaining funds from the Institute. Stage Three: Preparing

the Materials

In preparing the materials, the main concern was to obtain from each of the nine professors who would teach first term courses the following items: recordings of lectures, recommendations for preliminary reading, copies of assignments, and copies of examination papers. Three of these requirements occupied very little of the professors’ time, but the recording of the lectures raised problems of location, time, content, and style. For a combination of

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reasons, none of the lectures was recorded in a classroom with students present. All were recorded in offices or seminar rooms with the professor either alone or in the company of the language teacher. Some professors spoke from brief notes and some from detailed notes, others read parts of articles and discussed them, and one read every word of his lecture. The speed and style of delivery for these recordings were not unlike the speed and style of the lectures delivered in front of the students. In fact, the students who received the audio-recordings commented later that they were fairly typical of classroom performances. The lectures were then transcribed; note-taking, comprehension, and vocabulary exercises were prepared; and questions and instructions which were designed to get the students to predict the development of the lectures were added to the tapes. The answers to many of the comprehension, note-taking, and other exercises were put in the answer key, but for some exercises the students were asked to send their work to AIT for checking and comment. In view of what Olsen and Huckin (1990) say about science students’ failure to understand point-driven science and engineering lectures, it was important to see how much of any lecture a student understood. Furthermore, in the light of what Robinson (1991: 21) reports about English teachers’ failure to understand science and engineering lectures, it was essential to have a specialist informant. As subject teachers are not able, under normal circumstances, to spare the time that the language teacher needs in order to have all of his or her questions answered, we chose non-native speaking doctoral students as substitutes. They proved to be excellent; not only are they subject specialists, they are also bilingual or multilingual, and they have experienced most of the problems that the course is endeavouring to tackle. Hence, they are capable of providing valuable insights into all aspects of the work. Stage Four: Delivery Twenty-three MSc students had been accepted by the Water Resources Engineering Division, and they were all included in this project, regardless of their country of origin. One reason for this was that no information other than their names and addresses was available to the language teacher. Some students could have been omitted on the grounds of nationality, for example, that a Bangladeshi or Philippino university graduate would be highly proficient in English and would not need this help. However, professors suggested that even if a Bangladeshi engineering graduate had had all of his education in English, he might well have spent the preceding 2 or 3 years gaining practical experience in a rural area and using hardly any English at all. This did, in fact, prove to be the case with some students. The second reason for not excluding any students was that they all needed the academic and social orientation. They were all new to graduate-level study; they were all going to study one or two subjects that they had not met at undergraduate level; they were all going abroad for the first time; and they

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were all being exposed for the first time to varieties of English with which they were unfamiliar. As so little was known about the students, it seemed sensible to send all the information and materials that were available to every student. The nine lectures and an introduction by the language teacher were transferred to six 90minute cassettes, and the printed material was put into folders. A letter was sent to each of the 23 students to say that the material would be posted on a certain day and that it would consist of so many parcels. They were asked to acknowledge receipt of the material as soon as possible by returning the printed slip which was inside each package. Because mail travelling between Bangkok and parts of the Indian subcontinent, for example, can take more than 2 weeks to arrive, and because almost 15% of the items sent were lost in the mail, some students did not receive all the material until a very late date. The problem the project faced in delivering the material was that it could not be despatched until the AIT Registry conlirmed who would be on a particular course, and that information was generally not available until about 12 weeks before a course began. Hence, it is difficult to distribute the materials at the pedagogically appropriate time. Distance learning institutions around the world deal with this problem by establishing a network of study centres from which students can borrow materials at any time. As a result, the effect on a student’s work of delays in communications caused by bad weather, political unrest, or strikes by railway or postal workers, for example, is minimized. The solution for an Asian university which is involved in DL in a small way might be to persuade branches of its alumni association to serve as repositories of tapes, books, articles, and other printed material. This point is discussed further in the next section. Student

Support

Unlike the UK Open University undergraduate (Ismail 1988) who faces years of part-time study and for whom family and academic support are of the utmost importance, the students who follow this course do so for only a few months at the most. In addition, they are young, highly-motivated, in the habit of study, and financially secure, as virtually all are in possession of scholarships. Their problem, however, is that they have to become accustomed to using a foreign language at an advanced level for almost all of their working day. Therefore, in the 3 to 4 months which elapse between their being offered a place at AIT and their arriving on campus, they have the greatest possible incentive to use the materials they are sent to communicate with teachers in the Language Centre. The introductory letter asks students to write a few hundred words about themselves, to evaluate their English on a form provided, and to record the results of any recognised language tests that they had taken. The letter encourages them to work through the material and to send their written summaries of the lectures and their notes to the language teacher. It also asks them to note any problems they come across and to ask about them. In sum,

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it urges students to communicate as soon as possible and as often as possible. However, because contacts were generally by post and because this method of communication is slow in many parts of Asia, the average number of letters received over a S-month period was only four or five. The speediest means of communication, e-mail, fax, or the telephone, were either unavailable to this group of students or beyond their financial means. As a result, it is necessary to consider what other means are available to help students prepare for their demanding studies. One source of help is from compatriots who are also going to study at the Institute, and another is from the local branch of the AIT alumni association. Students are encouraged to contact any fellow countrymen and women who have been offered a place at the Institute, and whose names and addresses they find on a list that is sent to them by the language teacher. The students can thus study the materials together and help one another in their preparation. This communication with compatriots is a real possibility in a country like Vietnam where students are drawn overwhelmingly from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, or in Nepal where most come from Kathmandu. Thai students, not surprisingly, form the largest single national group on the campus and many of these young engineers are recruited from just a handful of Thai universities. Hence, they routinely find old classmates in their new classes. In Indonesia or the People’s Republic of China, on the other hand, students might not even be within reasonable telephoning distance of one another. In the long term, potentially the most valuable asset for this work is the widely dispersed AIT alumnni, very many of whom take an active interest in the progress of the Institute. The AIT Alumni Association is a well-organized body, but unlike North American alumni associations, it is not much concerned with fund-raising, mainly because many students return to poor countries. Instead, members of the association play a valuable role in recruiting students. Graduates also provide information about the evolving needs in their particular fields of science and engineering, and this information helps faculty members to develop the courses they teach. Hence, the Alumni Association is an important channel of communication linking the Institute with past and present students for educational rather than financial reasons. Graduates who have been approached in connection with this project have indicated a real willingness to offer advice, information, and whatever other assistance is possible to students in their own locality who will study at AIT. Those graduates who work in universities or government departments could take control of a collection of books, articles, audio- and videocassettes, computer programmes, and other material that would provide information for a student interested in studying at AIT, or help to a student who had been offerd a place at the Institute. In addition, the alumni would also benefit from this enhanced channel of communication, because they would be in regular contact with a very well-resourced institution and they would be receiving articles and other material that would be of relevance to their work. If the student had access to such resources, therefore, he or she could begin preparation well before receiving official notification of admission. As many students are drawn

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year after year from certain government departments or universities, such a scheme could meet the needs of a significant proportion of students.

Evaluation This pilot project was the work of one teacher with a budget of about US$700, which was provided by the Institute, and it was done in addition to the teacher’s regular work. Of the $700, about $200 were spent on the typing of the transcripts and other material. This sum was large because the terms of the grant specified that only students could be employed on the project, and their standards were not those of the divisional secretaries. The remainder of the money was spent on database searches in the research phase, audiocassettes, paper, photocopying, ring binders, stationery, packaging, and postage, and the cost therefore worked out at about $30 per student. Two serious mistakes were made during the course of this work, the principal one of which was to underestimate the amount of time that the preparation required. About 300 hours were devoted to the project over a 7-month period, but this was at least 100 hours too few. The transcription of nine lectures, which were between 25 and 65 minutes in length, and the checking of the transcripts took close to 100 hours. The time required for other activities was also underestimated and, finally, the 15 or more hours needed for the preparation, sealing, and addressing of about 70 parcels, plus the form tilling for the post office, was not allowed for at all. The number of parcels was dictated by local postal workers who insisted that cassettes and printed matter be sent separately. As a result of this failure to estimate accurately the amount of time that was required, the scope of the work had to be reduced and the number and the quality of the exercises suffered. The second mistake was to accept student estimates of how long it took for a letter to travel between Bangkok and the parts of Asia from which they came. The distance education literature is unanimous in agreeing that the longer a student has to wait for a response to any communication, the greater the negative effect on his or her motivation. For the widely dispersed subjects of this project, 3 weeks or more proved to be quite usual, and to be too long. Hence, there is a need to start the preparation earlier, to establish collections of material in various places, and to consider how communication can be speeded up. Despite these problems, the project was successful in achieving one of its objectives, which was to get to know the students before they arrived at the Institute and to encourage them to take advantage of the help that was available in the Language Centre. The students were grateful that someone had taken an interest in them, and had supplied material which had introduced them to the Institute and which had allowed them to do some preparatory listening, notetaking, reading, and writing. For the teacher, the experience of walking into a room and meeting a group of students with whom he had been communicating, and who were eager to meet him, was very rewarding.

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The extent to which the project helped the students to understand lectures and cope with the academic demands of the first term is much less clear. Contrary to the predictions of professors, almost all of the students came from what Kachru (1992) calls the “Outer Circle” countries (the Indian subcontinent and the Philippines in this case), with only three coming from the countries of the “Expanding Circle” of English users, and two of these students were late entries. For students with near-native English speaker ability, the materials that were developed could only have made a very marginal difference to their knowledge of English and their study skills. Nevertheless, most reported that they had passed on the tapes and the other material to friends and colleagues in their own field who had an interest in studying at AIT. However, had half of the students come from the countries of the “Expanding Circle,” as they generally do at AIT, it is likely that they would have concluded that there were too few exercises to be of real help and that there was too little time to communicate with the teacher.

Conclusion If students need to undertake postgraduate study in a foreign country, but cannot prepare fully in their own countries nor attend a pre-sessional language course, distance learning is one means of providing the preparation they require. Teaching science by means of audio-cassettes has proved highly successful at the University of Waterloo (Leslie 1984) and at many distance teaching institutions. In the case of AIT, DL is a solution that students, in discussions and in questionnaires, have welcomed, insofar as it offers a means of helping them to achieve greater success in the difficult first term. On a much more general level, the teaching of ESP by distance learning could enable practitioners to reach widely dispersed groups of people who need ESP, but who, for various reasons, cannot attend regular classes. From the Baltic, to Vietnam and China, communist and former communist states are changing from command economies to market-oriented economies, and there is an urgent demand to learn about the latter through the medium of English. In the teaching of the language of Economics, the ESP practitioner can draw on a great deal of valuable research (Dudley-Evans & Henderson 1990; Henderson 1982; Henderson, Dudley-Evans, & Backhouse 1993; Henderson & Hewings 1987; Mead & Henderson 1983; Tadros 1985), but given the size of the demand, the isolation of many potential students, and the limited number of ESP specialists in this field, it is unlikely that this demand can be satisfied by conventional teaching. Distance learning was well-established in the former Soviet Union precisely because of the huge size of the country and because higher education could not be provided in every location where there was a need for it. Now that a sudden, and possibly long-term, demand exists for ESP in fields such as Economics, the time is surely ripe for practitioners to take advantage of developments in technology and to experiment with this mode of instruction. (Revised manuscript received December 1993)

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Acknowledgements -

I am grateful to Keith Richards and a reviewer for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. REFERENCES

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Ron Boyle is an Assistant Professor at the Asian Institute of Technology. He has an MSc in the Teaching of ESP from Aston University, and he has taught in Yugoslavia, China, and Saudi Arabia.