ICT-ENHANCED MARITIME ENGLISH TEACHING AND LEARNING AT TERTIARY LEVEL. A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS
ICT-ENHANCED MARITIME ENGLISH TEACHING AND LEARNING AT TERTIARY LEVEL. A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS

Summary/Abstract: ICT-Enhanced Maritime English Teaching and Learning at Tertiary Level. A Contrastive Analysis. This article aims to investigate the academic impact of employing ICT means and approaches in the context of teaching ESP to Marine Electrical Engineering students at “Mircea cel Batran” Naval Academy, Romania. The research question to be answered is whether a switch from a face-to-face, paper-based learning setting to a face-to-face, digital, interactive one would influence the overall academic performance of our students, with a focus on elements such as student interest, motivation, and autonomy. The article reports on and discusses the findings of quantitative and qualitative research conducted by the author on two separate groups of second-year Naval Academy students. First, a control group was selected and offered the traditional, paper-based, face-to-face course in English for Marine Electrical Engineering for the second year of study, while the experiment group was exposed to the digital, interactive version of the same course, which had been uploaded on the Academy Moodle LMS platform. Both groups underwent identical mid-semester and final semester assessments, and their results were recorded and compared. A keen interest was taken in the exposed levels of specialized lexical content retention and its subsequent, successful communicative contextualization. Moreover, the research cohorts were administered an end-of-semester questionnaire that sought to identify how students related to the course materials in terms of their level of interest and motivation and the perceived relevance and efficiency of the course content and format, etc. In addition to the contrastive evaluation of the course methodology employed in both cases under investigation, the research study also looked at the students’ perceptions of the added value of several other factors, such as access to course materials and the possibility and ease of self-study, which correlate with the development of students’ learning autonomy and the acquisition of transversal skills for life-long learning. Ultimately, this article seeks to bring into discussion some key aspects of integrating ICT means into the teaching of ESP at the tertiary level, as technology-informed ESP has become an indisputable and inevitable evolution within 21st century language teaching practices.

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