The Language Teacher

This is a report on a series of mini-lessons focused on abstracts written in English from specialized journals in engineering fields. The series was well received by students, and seems to be a promising approach to using authentic and specialized materials in the English classroom. The use of bilingual materials (English and Japanese) was felt to be one factor in its success.

Background

In an informal survey of engineering faculty members, when asked what students' primary need for English is, 90% said, "Reading journal articles." Some went on to list other needs, such as writing articles, giving presentations at international conferences, or interacting with overseas students and researchers. But the overwhelming need as seen by the faculty was for comprehension of specialized journal articles written in English.

Students do not seem to perceive this need. Student surveys have consistently placed the need for spoken communication in first place, with a need for reading or for science and technical English coming midway down the list. However, once students enter graduate school, they too begin to shift towards an emphasis on the ability to read journal articles.

In this university, most students' first exposure to journal articles in English is in the fourth year of the undergraduate course. Usually it is in a seminar, and the articles pertain to the research focus of the research group. The most common approach seems to be rindoku, that is, each student is responsible for a certain portion, and they take turns reading. However, the reading should probably be thought of in most cases as translating. In fact, the two activities are so intertwined in many engineering professors' minds that they cannot separate the two.

It may be worth noting that students are first required to read journal articles in Japanese at about the same time that they beginning to read them in English. There is, thus, relatively little background experience for them to draw on or transfer to English journal reading.

Why abstracts?

I began this course with three assumptions. The first, that one fairly immediate need is the ability to read journal articles written in English. The second, that student motivation can be affected positively by perception of relevance. The third, that having some familiarity with written scientific and technical English will be helpful for students when they begin to read articles, either in their seminars or on their own.

However, there is an obvious barrier to studying whole journal articles in class. Such articles are written for fellow specialists in the field, and are often very difficult for non-experts to comprehend. In most English classes, students are gathered from various areas of engineering and would lack the necessary background informationﾑas would the teacher. The amount of time involved in using entire articles would also be impractical.

I decided on abstracts as being more manageable, both in size and knowledge required. The structure of an abstract often echoes the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion structure of the typical research article (Swales, 1990). A general idea of the relation between parts can often be gained even with little understanding of the technical terms used.

There are some other inherent advantages to focusing on abstracts. Abstracts are read much more often than full papers, as researchers seek out pertinent articles among the vast number of articles published. The "screening device" role of abstracts (Huckin and Olsen, 1991) is especially important when one considers that researchers searching databases decide whether to obtain the full article only from the information contained in the abstract. Abstracts are also likely to be written more frequently than full articles, often in the form of abstracts for conference presentations or to accompany research articles written and published in Japanese. At this university, students in many departments are required to append an English abstract to their masters theses.

The mini-lesson series

Each lesson was thirty minutes long, and one was held each day as part of an eight day course. The students were ten third-year engineering students in a national university. While I would change some things next time, I will present what we did for each 30-minute lesson. Notes: the lessons were conducted in both English and Japanese, about 50% each. Student comments were written in Japanese and have been translated by the author.

Day 1: Materials: a handout of an entire paper in English only, with fairly typical section headings (introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion).

Procedure: asked students to identify the sections, and after this, went over a few variations. Asked students what the purpose of each section is.

Day 2: Materials: abstract in English and Japanese versions

Procedure: students read the English version, then the Japanese, and the English again. They were asked to search for the key words (given by the author in English only) in both versions.

Day 3: Materials: 20 abstracts, each with a Japanese version (labeled with a letter) and English version (labeled with a number).

Procedure: students randomly chose two Japanese abstracts, sat in a circle, and passed around the English abstracts until they found the matching versions.

Day 4: Procedure: went with students to the library, assisted them in finding English language journals related to their fields. Students copied abstracts of five papers.

Day 5: Materials: handout of several titles of journal articles

Procedure: explained the categories of technical terms and function words. Had students cross out these words in the titles and their own samples. Suggested this as a technique for identifying words (those remaining) that would be useful to learn.

Day 6: Materials: handout of four abstracts from various fields, with dividing marks at different areas corresponding to introduction, purpose of research, methods, and main results.

Procedure: Explained the role of tense (introductionﾑpresent perfect, present; purpose--present; methods and results--past). Students were asked to identify each section (and found that the order varies). They then did the same with the abstracts they had selected on Day 4.

Day 7: Materials: handout with sentences from a short abstract in scrambled order.

Procedure: students were asked to identify the section of each sentence and to place them in the correct order. Explained the role of "to" in showing purpose.

Day 8: Procedure: Demonstrated identifying collocations (explained as 'words that are often used in combination') such as "have an effect on" or "the use of A in B", students searched in pairs. Also pointed out nominalization (the tendency to use nouns instead of verbs).

Looking back-and forward

The students were even less familiar with the subject than I had anticipated. Several of them had never even walked into the journals room of the library before. This led to cutting a few activities planned for the end of the series. While I feel that the major points were covered, there are some changes that I plan to consider next time.

Rather than jumping in with abstracts, it might be interesting to spend a lesson or two with titles first. The matching activity on day 3 was well received, and matching Japanese and English versions would be a good opportunity for students to read a quantity of titles. A brief survey of our library's collection of journals published in Japanese revealed that the majority include titles in English.

I feel quite strongly that exposure to a number of authentic samples--the more the better--is very important. Besides the obvious advantage of seeing both patterns and variations in pattern, it is important in convincing students that it is possible to approach a text without full understanding of its vocabulary; that it is, indeed, possible to read without being chained to translation.

Conclusion

I do not expect that the students who went through this series of mini-lessons will have become experts in abstracts or scientific English. However, I hope that exposure to various features of abstracts will aid them in their future reading. The overall impression given by students was that they felt more in control and less intimidated by the idea of reading English journal articles (or at least their abstracts). There was also overwhelming acknowledgment of their lack of even general vocabulary. Ideally, having seen a connection between their studies and English will encourage them to continue to study English independently.

References

Huckin, T. and L. Olsen. 1991. Technical Writing and Professional Communication for Nonnative Speakers of English. International edition. 2nd edition. Singapore: McGraw-Hill.

Swales, J. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.