Page 28 - Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

12 Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

Design of an Intermediate English Course for Administrative

Staff in the Manufacturing Industry

Francisco Javier López Soto
Myriam Romero Monteverde

Universidad Autónoma de Baja California

Key words: course design, engineering, English, manufacturing companies, specific purposes.

The following project states the basics for the development of an English course for administrative
staff in manufacturing companies based on analyzing their particular needs and aimed at improving
the critical linguistic skills necessary to perform their everyday activities; other than answering what
the most common habits and language needs are, the research aims at identifying shared patterns
in different areas of a company by designing a course based on the theories of learning and teaching
through English for specific purposes and content based approaches. The way to develop it initially
requires the implementation of a mixed-qualitative research in the form of a needs analysis applied
on one sample site with middle-lower management subjects; the data obtained will be quantified
and serve as a guideline for the course content, thereby proving the target can have difficulties and
formulating a tool with significant positive impact on the study group.

Background
The nature of the course requires thorough understanding of concepts such as, but not limited
to: a) ESP: English for specific purposes is a TESL methodology focused on developing commu-
nicative abilities for a specific function. For the development of an efficient course, something that
must be considered is the concept of b) Pragmatics, referring to a subfield of linguistics where the
central objective is the practical application of language to achieve objectives in specific contexts or
otherwise express ideas not through the literal application of the words, but through their practical
interpretation (Birner, 2013) All of this considered into designing an efficient c) Syllabus: In its most
basic form, a syllabus is a compendium of what is to be learned over an English course, divided
as time should allow in units or chapters, which may contain desired levels for the learner of profi-
ciency. (Thayniath, 2017); while still taking the primers expressed in d) Course design: Refers to the
development of content, objectives and teaching aims through a series of steps taking into account
the needs analysis performed previously (Woodrow, 2018). In the specific field, the materials used
will be designed through the implementation of e) CBLT: “Content-based language teaching is an
instructional approach in which unlinguistic content such as geography, history or science is taught
to students through the medium of a language that they are learning” (Lyster, 2018, p. 1).