How to Encourage Your Students to Speak When Teaching ESP Online
How to Encourage Your Students to Speak When Teaching ESP Online

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the students’ exposure to online teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) to determine which computer-mediated learning methods, exercises, and practices were considered useful and should continue to be integrated into traditional face-to-face teaching. Since ESP is widely acknowledged to evaluate the needs and interests of students, focusing on combining motivation, subject matter, and content for the teaching of appropriate skills, such as reading, writing, listening, and speaking, the role of the teacher would be to design productive and efficient classroom communication skills to encourage them to get actively involved in various communicative tasks even when the teaching process takes place online. When students are given the chance to grasp and master a language within a certain context which is strikingly interesting, relevant, and appealing to them and which can be used and practiced upon in their professional career or future studies, they will be eventually enlarging their vocabulary, becoming increasingly fluent and coherent in their fields, and adapting their linguistic practices to new circumstances or additional roles. In this article, we will explore some relatively low-tech tools and a wide range of straightforward activities to get students to speak/ talk during an ESP lecture. We will also see how working in these ways can help us resolve some of the problems we face when assessing speaking. Apart from highlighting the importance of synchronous computer mediated communication and of using digital public speaking as a newly-emerging phenomenon, this paper thereupon advances the hypothesis that teaching speaking skills to ESP students should embrace a mingled environment, based on traditional, face-to-face classroom interaction and online technology.

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