Collections of Professor Dr David Ngin Sian Pau

Teaching English to non-linguistic students means achieving a variety of objectives: acquiring knowledge about the language, developing and practicing all four language skills, getting language and cultural awareness, integrating specialist knowledge and communicative skills and even enriching overall knowledge. One aspect of teaching ESP is teaching thinking. To be able to speak about what your feeling is begins with the ability to think what to say. Thus, thinking is very important otherwise student may not be able to talk any further apart from what the teacher taught in the classroom.

It is perfectly possible to apply a linguistic approach to teaching by picking out techniques and ideas from the work of linguists and using them eclectically. It must be said, however, that a linguistic approach can be unified and coherent. That is, it is possible to combine pedagogy and linguistics at every level of learning and teaching.

3.2. The Importance of Literariness

Teaching ESP to someone means to provide a person well grounded English knowledge in terms of speaking, writing and reading. Having the knowledge of high standard English literature will implement the success of an ESP teacher. Literariness is not only important but also necessary for a teacher of ESP without which students may not learn from the teacher to obtain academic qualification needed to achieve the learner’s goal.

Literariness, however, is often misunderstood in a way that has provoked much of the confusion which dominates today’s polemics. It is frequently assumed, for instance, that literariness is another word for, or another mode of, aesthetic response. The use, in conjunction with literariness, of such terms as style and stylistics, form or even “poetry” (as in “the poetry of grammar”), all of which carry strong aesthetic connotations, helps to foster this confusion, even among those who first put the term in circulation. Literariness can be classified into six functions of language: the emotive, referential, phatic, methalingual, cognative, and poetic functions.

3.3. Academic Writing

In order for students to succeed, academic language needs to develop at the same pace as the construction of curriculum knowledge in the content area. Although perfectly fit for informal oral and written communication, some writing does not display the features of academic language needed to communicate in the context of schooling. Written language is relatively more complex than spoken language. Written language has longer words, it is lexically more dense and it has a more varied vocabulary. It uses more noun-based phrases than verb-based phrases. Written texts are shorter and the language has more grammatical complexity, including more subordinate clauses and more passives. Academic writing is to some extent: complex, formal, objective, explicit, hedged, and responsible.

Written language can be seen to vary on a continuum of formality from extremely informal text which is reminiscent of spoken language to highly formal or academic texts. Many factors