EFL Tech - France a Site for Teachers of English ( as a Foreign Language) for  Engineering

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Some discussions  about EST  on international Mailing Lists sometimes oppose contributors from English-speaking countries to others from countries speaking other languages.  It sometimes  seems almost impossible for the participants to be on the same wavelength , as if, although discussing the same topic, they were speaking different lingos. On may  wonder whether   EST actually means  the same thing  to a native speaker of English   and to   a non-native one.

To try and answer the question, this paper will examine two Internet documents:   the Writing Lab of  Austin Community College in Austin, Texas - USA. ( URL http://www.io.com/~hcexres/tcm1603/acchtml/acctoc.html ) and the  teaching resources  to be found in a French teacher’s homepage (URL: http://jcviel.multimania.com/efl.htm). It is obvious that  documents of both Websites are  different in size, format, type and  methodology. And yet, they both  deal with  English for Science  and Technology and their ultimate purpose is to train students in EST.  A further  similitude lies in the fact that both sites are aimed at fairly comparable students – as far as I know- Community College  ( USA) and Lower Technical College  (France). This means that, away from surface differences, both documents should  exhibit  the same underlying conception of EST, should insist roughly on the same problems and give more or less the same kind of tuition and advice.

A  look at  the Table of Contents of the American Writing Lab shows the following headings:
               Business correspondence and resumes
               Technical reports: structure and process
               Types of technical reports: an overview
               Business plans
               Proposals
               Progress reports
               Instructions
               User guides
               Organizational policies and procedures
               Recommendation and feasibility reports
               Abstracts, introductions, and conclusions
               Oral presentations”
The main part of the course deals first of all with  organising information into the structures which are commonly found in technical writing, such as description, definition, process description, etc. that is, the  rhetorical and macro structures  of EST. It also deals with the format and layout of the documents.  Pages concerning the English language per se  are to be found at the end and are limited to “Common grammar, usage, punctuation problems “ and  “Common spelling problems”.  It should finally  be kept in mind that the kind of communication referred to is almost exclusively written.

On the other hand when we examine the French  documents, we find out that the main concern is not the structure and format of documents but the vocabulary and syntax which they use. There are several references to language levels  ( low intermediate, intermediate, advanced ) and recurrent  use of phrases such as  ‘comprehension exercises’, ‘vocabulary’, ‘written and oral exercises’, etc can be noticed. Grammar exercises are  be found in a lot of pages and the general focus is clearly to improve the communicational language ability of  students - both  written and oral.

If the first impression is to discover two very divergent kinds of literature, however there are times when both documents seem to converge. Take the example of passive  verbs to  which a page is devoted in the Writing Lab and which are mentioned in almost every set of exercises  of the French site. But even then, the approaches are almost  poles apart: the American Professor simply  writes:” Passive voice pattern. The passive voice is not ordinarily considered a "pattern," but it is an important and often controversial construction. It reverses the subject and object and, in some cases, deletes the subject. “ and then he gives a few examples of  passive verbs with no further explanations.
In the case of the French pages, several exercises demonstrate in detail how the passive is conjugated and train the students into using it  with  a host of exercises requiring  ( among other things) to recast active sentences into passive ones - and vice versa).

Many other topics are discussed in parallel in both Websites, linking words, for instance: the Writing Lab examines them solely in terms of rhetorical structures.  This aspect is not totally ignored in the French pages, but the emphasis is clearly shifted to their syntaxic use, listing, for instance , those followed by ING verbs or those  used in subordinate clauses.

Another way to look at the differences may be to  examine what comes under two similar headings : ‘User guides’.
The American site focuses on readability: it is argued that the reader may not be a specialist and may read selectively, looking for some kind of information and forgetting the rest.
This is why the manual’s author has to be careful to use headings, graphics, formatted lists and physical highlighting in order  to give clear and accurate instructions. When turning to the French site, we never notice the same preoccupations. Indeed the whole page is devoted to examining the vocabulary, grammar, notions and  structural patterns that are found in such manuals. It is obvious that, at the end of the lesson, a student has not been taught how to write a cogent, useful and well-structured manual, but he has acquired ( or ought to have acquired!) the language tools that will allow  him to write a user’s manual in fairly correct English.
 

It is now clear that the two sample documents are extremely different in their  contents: the American Writing Lab  is focused on problems of methodology, on organising and  structuring documents using the rhetorical patterns and formats usual in scientific and technological written texts while the French Website  is concerned with   explaining  and practising the lexis, grammar and  structural patterns found in scientific and technological communication ( both  written and oral.)
 As a matter of fact, both Websites are aimed at teaching very different things which  bear the same name, EST, but one is English (for Science and technology) as a native language, the other is English(for Science and technology)  as a foreign language.

Jean-Claude Viel - Novembre 2000
This article will be published in the next issue of ESP IS ARTESESOL, the  ESP Interest Section of ARgentina TESOL  Newsletter.

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