EXPLORING THE LEVEL OF SPECIALISATION OF A CORPUS OF SCIENTIFIC TEXTS AND STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS AND NEEDS IN AN ESP CONTEXT
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37536/ej.2018.27.1900Keywords:
ESP, EAP, reading, specialisation levels, lexical densityAbstract
The incorporation of some original texts combining the academic component with a particular scientific domain can be seen as an opportunity, in higher education and, in particular, in an English for Specific and Academic Purposes (ESP and EAP, respectively) context, to enable students to access authentic examples of the use of the language. This article investigates the degree of specialisation of some scientific texts that could be read and analysed in class in order to determine the pedagogical effect these might have when teaching the reading skill. In so doing, a corpus of twelve recent texts belonging to the domain of Biotechnology was analysed. Moreover, two different empirical studies were conducted in order to know more about students’ needs and perceptions throughout two consecutive academic years; 2017-2018 (qualitative analysis of their initial perceptions) and 2018-2019 (qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data provided by a questionnaire). Preliminary findings suggested that the selection of texts showed different degrees of specialisation.
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APPENDIX
LIST OF ARTICLES ANALYSED IN THE PRESENT STUDY (see Table 1):
A. Opinion Articles
A.1. Vervoort, Y., Gutiérrez, A., Roncoroni, M., Liu, C., Steensels, J. & Verstrepen, K. 2017. High-throughput system-wide engineering and screening for microbial biotechnology. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 46, 120-125.
A.2. Tsigkinopoulou, A., Baker, S. M. & Breitling, R. 2017. Respectful Modeling: Addressing Uncertainty in Dynamic System Models for Molecular Biology. Trends in Biotechnology, 35(6), 518-529.
A.3. Keidar, M., Yan, D., Beilis, I. I., Trink, B. & Sherman, J. H. 2018. Plasmas for Treating Cancer: Opportunities for Adaptive and Self-Adaptive Approaches. Trends in Biotechnology, 36(6), 586-593.
A.4. Malyska, A., Bolla, R. & Twardowski, T. 2016. The Role of Public Opinion in Shaping Trajectories of Agricultural Biotechnology. Trends in Biotechnology, 34(7), 530-534.
B. Review Articles
B.1 Regnat, K., Mach, R. L. & Mach-Aigner, A. R. 2018. Erythritol as sweetener—wherefrom and whereto? (Mini-review). Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, 102(2), 587–595.
B.2. Sprague, M., Betancor, M. B. & Tocher, D. R. 2017. Microbial and genetically engineered oils as replacements for fish oil in aquaculture feeds. Biotechnology Letters, 39(11), 1599–1609.
B.3. Backofen, R., Engelhardt, J., Erxleben, A., Fallmann, J., Grüning, B., Ohler, U., Rajewsky, N. & Stadler, P. F. 2017. RNA-bioinformatics: Tools, services and databases for the analysis of RNA based regulation. Journal of Biotechnology, 261, 76–84.
B.4. Löfblom, J., Rosenstein, R., Nguyen, M., Ståhl, S. & Götz, F. 2017. Staphylococcus carnosus: from starter culture to protein engineering platform (Mini-review). Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, 101(23-24), 8293-8307.
C. Original Research Articles
C.1. Raj, R. S., Thakur, S. V., Hussen, V. S., Joshi, M. N., TyagiSnehal, S. N. & Bagatharia, B. 2017. Development of PR genes panel for screening aphid-tolerant cultivars in Brassica juncea. 3 Biotech, 7(129), https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-017-0785-7
C.2. Naresh, P., Reddy, M. K., Reddy A. C., Lavanya, B., Lakshmana Reddy, D. C., & Madhavi Reddy, K. 2017. Isolation, characterization and genetic diversity of NBS-LRR class disease-resistant gene analogs in multiple virus resistant line of chilli (Capsicum annuum L.). 3 Biotech, 7(114), https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-017-0720-y
C.3. Nielsen, M., Holst-Fischer, C., Malmgren-Hansen, B., Bjerg-Nielsen, M., Kragelund, C., Møller, H. B., Mørck Ottosen, L. D. 2017. Small temperature differences can improve the performance of mesophilic sludge-based digesters. Biotechnology Letters, 39(11), 1689-1698.
C.4. Kroll, P., Stelzer, I. V., Herwig, C. 2017. Soft sensor for monitoring biomass subpopulations in mammalian cell culture processes. Biotechnology Letters, 39(11), 1667-1673.
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