A new approach to developing teaching materials for engineering students: From JSP to ESP

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25370624
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Foreign language education
• Research Institution: Nagoya Institute of Technology
• Principal Investigator: ISHIKAWA Yuka 名古屋工業大学, 工学(系)研究科(研究院), 教授 (40341226)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): KOYAMA Yukie 名古屋工業大学, 工学研究科, 教授 (20293251)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: ESP / JSP / 教材開発 / 語彙教育

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Vocabulary plays an important role in ESP (English for Specific Purposes). However, it is not easy for many of Japanese engineering students to master the vocabulary needed for reading academic papers. This is mainly because the students, especially first-year students, do not have enough knowledge in the target field. Just choosing the vocabulary from English papers and presenting them to the students is not necessarily effective.
Therefore, we attempted a completely new approach to selection of English engineering vocabulary to be learned. We developed two kinds of corpora: Japanese engineering textbook corpus and English engineering textbook corpus. By analyzing those corpora, obtaining Japanese and English academic word frequencies, and statistically integrating them, we finally succeeded in choosing the English engineering vocabulary that Japanese college students need to learn first.

Free Research Field

外国語教育