Text I

The purpose of reading and the balance between skills and language affect the teaching of reading in English for Specific Purposes. Two contributions to the approach to reading in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) are of prime importance, as in Urquhart and Weir (1998).

One of them is the shift from text as a linguistic object to text as a vehicle of information (JOHNS and DAVIES, 1983). The key principles for ESP learners are that extracting information accurately and quickly is more significant than language details; that understanding the macrostructure comes before language study; and that application of the information in the text is extremely important. The reader first processes the language and then links the ideas to prior knowledge.

The second significant contribution to teaching reading on ESP courses is the recognition that good reading requires language and skills. According to Hosenfeld (1977), less successful foreign language leamners had a fragmented approach to text, while successful learners went for overall meaning, guessing or skipping language and information. As referred in Alderson (1984), several hypotheses were tested about the role of language and skills, showing that poor reading in a foreign language is due in partto poor reading in L1, together with an inadequate knowledge ofthe foreign language. The learners need to reach a threshold level of L2 before they are able to transfer any L1 skills to their L2 reading tasks.

The reading component of an ESP course thus requires a balance between skills and language development. Some of the crucial skills to be learnt or transferred into the new language are, as referred in Dudley-Evans and St John (1998): selecting what is relevant for the current purpose; using all the features of the text such as headings, layout; skimming for content and meaning; scanning for specifics; identifying organisational patterns; understanding relations within a sentence and between sentences; using cohesive and discourse markers; predicting, inferring and guessing; identifying main ideas, supporting ideas and examples; processing and evaluating the information during reading; transferring or using the information while or after reading.

Most of these skills are composed of several processes, of which skimming and scanning are useful first stages for determining whether to read a text or which parts to read carefully. Once a text has been identified as relevant, then ESP readers need to read carefully, extract meaning and consider the author's attitude.

Adapted from: BOJOVIC, M. Reading Skills and Reading

Comprehension in English for Specific Purposes. The

International Language Conference on The importance of

Learning Professional Foreign Languages for Communication

between Cultures, 2010.

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