The pragmatic goal-based approach to ESP teaching with «Why» as the leading aspect 

The article suggests a goal-based approach to teaching effective methods of dealing with professional Eng­lish-language materials in dynamic, integrated, and fast developing disciplines like Information and Commu­nication Technology and Enterprise Architecture. The main leading aspect of the approach is «Why» — as­pect which determines the learner's goals, and it is shown how the methods comprising the discussed ap­proach are subordinate to those goals. The authors suggest replacing isolated learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP) with studying professional materials in English in close collaboration with subject experts and on their request. Educational methods including teaching effective reading, written summarising, and de­veloping learner autonomy are described, and results of practical utilizing the approach is presented. 

In this paper we address the problem of overcoming fundamental difficulties that working specialists and students face when dealing with English-language resources because of particularities of dynamic, inte­grated and fast developing professional disciplines like Enterprise Architecture (EA) [1] or Information and Communication Technology (ICT). In this article we will call such disciplines DIDD (Dynamic, Integrated and Developing Discipline). In such DIDD integrating closely-related disciplines, the usual need to know well the current situation in their professional area becomes a burning issue because of effects of continuous inconsistent changes in the abovementioned closely-related areas. This problem is caused by constantly changing terminology, lexicon, and concepts, as well as the volume and rate of changes. EA discipline is not the only one of the kind causing such a problem for professionals and learners, but it presents a typical ex­ample pressing educators to determine innovative approaches to teaching all kinds of learners to overcome such problems effectively.

In both ICT and EA, English is not only a means of international communication, but also a language of prevailing majority of fundamental professional publications and systems documentation. Moreover, EA might be the most meaningful example of DIDD, as it is a very young agile discipline dating back to the be­ginning of 90-s. Besides, it is one of the most complex disciplines integrating methods of economics, man­agement, theoretical informatics, ICT, social psychology of labour, systems theory and engineering, and spe­cific disciplines related to a concrete industry type.

Due to all these reasons, EA specialists have to be not only well informed about the methods and stand­ards used in this area, but they should also be aware of existing trends, new ways of application and even changing the principles of the discipline. At the same time, both students and working EA specialists often don't know comprehensively the current situation in this area, achievements evaluation and causes of exist­ing problems.

Traditional approach to helping students and specialists produced a classical way of teaching, called English for Specific Purposes (ESP). However, efficiency of classical ESP methods has been questioned lately. The necessity of shifting an educational paradigm in ESP has already been discussed for some time, and many educators claim that ESP should be taught in collaboration with subject experts [2-4].

What is important, the problem of teaching ESP to students in non-linguistic universities is not new, and attempts to shift the traditional educational paradigm in order to meet the needs of modern education are well known. For instance, such renowned educators and course writers as Scrivener, Underhill, and Kirk [2], [3, 4] argue that the old structure of the syllabus when English is taught at the beginning of the university education is not effective anymore. They suggest teaching ESP not separately, but in parallel with profes­sional subjects. However, there are still no specific recommendations about the most efficient ways for such structuring education, especially when such recommendations are needed for teaching ESP in DIDD.

So far, educators have thoroughly discussed the issues of «What» and «How» to teach ESP to various audiences. The authors of this article claim that not only just collaboration of educators in ESP and in professional disciplines is called for, but also that it is time to look closely at the ultimate purpose of teaching, and to transform traditional «What & How» into educational imperative «Why». Educators, especially working for DIDD, should analyse what urgent professional or educational tasks ESP should enable, examine interre­lations of ESP courses with other disciplines. They should realize why working specialists and students in reality need to master English; what and when they are expected to be able to do with their knowledge and skills in English. For instance, our learner has to write an analytical review by the set date, or to analyse a white paper or a professional standard within a professional subject like EA with following course work in perspective. Thus, we place concrete professional tasks together with their deadlines in the centre of educa­tors' attention.

Having analysed the mentioned issues, we set ourselves a goal to develop a rational and pragmatic goal-based approach to teaching students of non-linguistic departments to acquire skills of effective methods of dealing with English-language professional resources, concentrating specifically on teaching learners work­ing in DIDD like EA.

This article discusses the salient features of the practicality and pragmatic validity of the suggested ap­proach which include dealing with transforming priority goals by means of «Why»-aspect, solving termino­logical problems, using summarising as the main core method, selecting meaningful and appropriate educa­tional materials, and developing learner autonomy for learners in DIDD. So, «Why»-aspect is employed as the leading factor for organizing all the methods and educational activities of this approach due to the fact that the learner's goals begin dictating what and how should be taught. The architecture of educational courses implementing our methods is presented, and conclusions are drawn from the research of the devel­oped methods. Besides, the article describes results of actual teaching students and working specialists to employ effective methods of reading and writing English-language texts, and some additional meaningful results disclosed during the research and practical teaching.

The Rationale. The problem of inadequate information awareness is conditioned by the fact that profes­sional informational English-language resources reflecting international experience are insufficiently and often erroneously read and poorly compared or analysed by specialists who should know their professional area in depth to make their work more valuable, adequate, and relevant. The situation is aggravated by the lack of available translations of articles and international standards whereas available translations are often not of high quality which distorts representation of the real state of affairs in the professional area. In addi­tion to that, learners' time resources are limited, which dictates the necessity to define the most rational methods of assisting specialists and students in acquiring skills necessary for dealing with professional re­sources effectively. Logically enough, many educators worldwide have been vigorously developing ideas and methods of integrating teaching ESP and mastering real professional activity, as well as improving learner autonomy. Effective methods of dealing with texts include fast reading and correct understanding texts of any length, selecting relevant text fragments requiring more thorough analytical examination accord­ing to the task, and creating secondary texts for later usage. The skills of summarising and annotating are also included in the mentioned effective methods.

Traditionally, university students used to be taught General English, while lately, students have been al­so taught Business English or EAP/ESP. Having studied such a course, students are supposed to be able to independently work with professional resources when necessary. However, experience shows that students may have successfully passed exams, but when they are required to write an analytical review, they are not able to process and digest required huge volumes of professional information in English, and to write fast a correct and relevant summary, not saying a word about composing an analytical review.

Recently, professional discussion of a shift in the educational paradigm has led to understanding of nec­essary and unavoidable rethinking of ESP role and place in the education structure [4]. Partially, this under­standing is reflected in some typical curricula. In fact, it is time to speak about the paradigm shift in the di­rection being discussed and to revise ways of teaching ESP and its place in tertiary education structure. Learning English preceding students' immersion in studying professional resources is being replaced with the course architecture where studying ESP is moved towards studying professional context. It should be noted that even abbreviation EAP is sometimes interpreted as «Enabling Academic Participation» [3]. By analogy, we suggest interpreting ESP as «Enabling Specialist Participation)).

Suggested pragmatic approach. According to the abovementioned, the authors set the goal of defining, investigating, and practical applying the approach and methods of improving efficacy and quality of students and specialists' work with English-language professional resources, in particular, in the areas of EA and ICT in EA. The methods should support both students' educational process and students'/specialists' autonomous performance in their professional work. It should be taken into consideration that in both cases it is necessary to deal with actively forming glossaries and concepts structures, and a great number of inconsistent glossaries which necessitates mastering complicated skills usually not taught in traditional English language courses.

The core idea of the suggested approach is not just a standard ESP studying, but studying professionally meaningful English-language materials and appropriate skills when they are needed in the main professional course. This is accompanied by studying some particularities of English specific for the subject area, and writing parts of own professional materials in English. Teaching ESP in such an approach is incorporated as a special (maybe elective) course in the architecture of a special professional course like EA. The term «spe-cial course» is understood here as a set of modules studied concertedly with topics of the major professional discipline (in parallel, together with main topics, or sometimes even ahead of schedule). In addition, re­quirements to modules can be divided into two categories, namely, requirements from the major professional discipline and requirements from necessary language and cognitive skills.

Rationality of the suggested approach in the given context is conditioned by meeting the following re­quirements:

• Modular course structure when each module of a special course has a practically applicable outcome and can be included at different stages of the main professional course;
• Immersion of ESP modules in the process of mastering profession;
• Teaching is conducted only on professionally meaningful materials, necessary in the main course which acts as «a generator» of requirements and professional texts;
• Constant work on analysis and integration of relevant parts of glossaries, as students should be taught to cope with the «chaos» in terminology;
• Absence of strict entry requirements to the level of English language proficiency;
• Improvement of learner autonomy and enabling blended learning with the purpose of training skills that will be necessary in independent professional work and for lifelong learning;
• Possibility of intensive teaching without excessively detailed studying ESP, but studying only a min­imal number of structures and mechanisms crucial for the specific task or activity;
• Development of reusable teaching materials (assessment criteria for summarising, glossaries etc.). The approach described in this article provides possibility for utilizing various methods adequate for the

described needs, including such methods as teaching effective analytical reading, correct using existing re­sources avoiding plagiarism and others, combining specially designed and well-known methods used, for instance, in teaching EAP/ESP or Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL).

The comprehensive list of requirements to educational tasks addressed in individual modules is not pro­vided here because of the article length limits, but the salient educational tasks that aim at teaching can be enumerated:

• effectively and efficiently reading professional English-language texts without word-by-word transla­tion into Russian, but with correct understanding all the main points;
• analyzing existing subject glossaries, selecting consistent and adequate interpretation of terms and concepts, and synthesizing harmonized interpretations;
• reading and analyzing professional standards, bodies of knowledge likeВABOK (A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge®) or BIZBOK (A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge™);
• analyzing and evaluating the quality of materials translations into Russian;
• comparing information from various resources and analyzing their reliability and relevance;
• composing so called secondary texts, for instance, reviews, annotations, or summaries;
• writing own correct materials in English, for example, reports, documentation, articles and other pa­pers according to the specific task and in accordance with international standards;
• evaluating independently the quality of own summaries, analytical reviews, and other texts according to the set criteria, setting immediate goals for improving the written works quality.

Commentaries to separate modules and methods. The basic set of modules corresponds to the above-mentioned educational tasks and includes, in particular, such modules as «Written summarizing», «Effective reading», «Evaluating the quality of translations», «Main principles of Academic writing», «Writing an ana­lytical review», «Writing articles in accordance with a selected standard». What is important, the module for training written summarising skills is especially meaningful, as mastering these skills enables:

• active reading and eliciting main ideas and supporting facts;
• concise, correct, and logical presenting other authors' ideas;
• comparing and analyzing texts, composing analytical reviews;
• expanding and activating essential professional vocabulary;
• creating and reusing secondary texts;
• correct referencing and avoiding plagiarism.

Various methods were developed or adapted for solving various educational problems that the authors faced. [5, 6]. For instance, in the «Written summarizing», one of the core modules, some of employed meth­ods were tested in a specially designed Action research (AR) carried out in a group of EAP learners [5]. The learners were set a series of tasks on writing summaries of academic texts of gradually growing complication and length. Summarising tasks were also becoming more complicated during the educational process along with texts difficulty. Special techniques were developed, and the learners were expected and encouraged to use them. Effectiveness, efficiency, suitability, and applicability of the developed techniques were purpose­fully explored. AR was carried out for learning in the blended mode, i.e., teaching face-to-face was com­bined with teaching in the Internet.

The following levels of summarising and methods were employed in this module enumerated in the or­der of increasing difficulty:

• summarising a sentence in three to five words;
• summarising a paragraph in one sentence using own voice;
• developing skills for dealing with glossaries;
• annotating;
• writing an informational summary;
• composing an analytical summary;
• developing skills for dealing with huge resources.

Learner autonomy improvement and others effects. It should be highlighted that effectiveness of meth­ods for learner autonomy (LA) improvement was also explored within the scope of the AR. LA understood as learner's ability to be responsible for own learning and was interpreted according to Nunan's concept [7] where Nunan defined nine steps for developing LA and «moving learners along the continuum from depend­ence to autonomy» [7; 193]. This sequence of actions might help educators gradually build students' autonomy.

What is important, specially designed assessment rubrics built on IELTS-like, CEFR, and other criteria like the ability to use own voice were used independently by the teacher and the learner for assessing an as­signed summarising task. These rubrics were treated as a special tool explicitly presenting unambiguous de­scriptions for evaluating separate aspects of an assignment at defined levels of proficiency, enabled analyz­ing crucial aspects of written summaries, helped learners better understand the target quality of summaries and analyse their own strengths and problems, and, in addition, facilitated setting immediate goals for sum­mary improvement on their own. AR clearly demonstrated that such using assessment rubrics undoubtedly facilitates many of steps, mentioned by Nunan, for example, step 1 — «Make instruction goals clear to learners». Moreover, it is already known that explicit use of assessment rubrics complemented with setting specific goals improves LA, which in turn corresponds to Nunan's [7] step 2 — «Allow learners to create their own goals». This method mastered by learners in the carefully planned educational process will help learners independently improve their performance in future.

To sum up, the conducted AR showed that these methods not only enhanced students' performance in writing summaries for difficult professional texts, i.e., the quality of their summaries improved noticeably, but also promoted their LA while improving skills of self-evaluating, self-monitoring, and setting their own educational goals. Furthermore, it was observed that written feedback from teachers participating in AR de­creased significantly, and scores given independently by teachers and learners were converging. All this con­firms improvement of students' ability to work autonomously.

Interestingly, some not preplanned results of conducting this module were observed. For instance, the habit for active analytical reading was observed, learners' self-esteem rose, and reading comprehension also improved which was acknowledged by results of international tests like IELTS and GMAT taken by the par­ticipating learners. Besides, other unprogrammed results of the described study were registered; high order cognitive skills (analysis and evaluation) and critical thinking improved which was justified in AR, because without these skills high quality of the written summary is impossible to achieve [5]. Students realized from their own experience that such study skills as creating secondary texts might be indispensable for note taking for lectures or huge resources in future education or professional work. It is important that students' percep­tion of employed educational activities and their achievements in terms of summary quality improvements was also analysed, and conclusions about the feasibility of described methods and students' positive percep­tion of the suggested techniques for mastering written summarising were drawn.

In fact, having designed, conducted, and researched this module, we have endeavoured to demystify and employ in the classroom one principle introduced actively used by Scrivener and Underhill, that of «Learning-Centred Teaching» [8]. They suggest doing a seemingly simple thing, «the raw idea that we can ask more of our students, that we can challenge them and base our teaching around going where the learning is, working at each individual's learning edge».

Designing special courses for Enterprise Architecture discipline. Particularities of developing special educational courses were considered in two aspects, to be specific, such as combining modules from the basic set in the target course and selecting special professional materials on EA for different educational pur­poses and different stages of teaching.

What is significant, as each module can be utilized both in combination with others and independently, duplication or repetition of solving some specific educational problems in different modules is acceptable. One example of such a case is presented by «Effective reading» and «Written summarizing» where summa­rising skills might be studied in both modules. Such repetition should be avoided while designing a special course for the concrete educational situation.

What is essential, the professional materials for EA course are selected from the set of examined and tested reusable materials. For instance, excerpts from BABOK, BIZBOK, the foundational article written by EA originator and expert J. Zachman where he introduced his famous framework [9], the article defining the reasons for failure of most EA projects [10], significant materials from professional blogs, and other similar resources are used. On the one hand, these materials are significant for students' professional development, and on the other hand, even students with a modest level of language proficiency could understand main ide­as of these papers with little support of the teacher. This not only improved students' professional worth, but also promoted their self-esteem.

Results of conducting special educational courses for EA. Initial experience was gained in conducting a mini course in EA for master students aiming at writing summaries of English-language resources about four years ago. Later preparing and conducting short intensive courses became a pragmatically meaningful direc­tion of our pedagogical activities. One of the latest special courses of that kind was designed for educating students majoring in EA, both undergraduates and graduates, and it was called «Basics of written summaris­ing and composing analytical reviews of professional informational materials written in English». It aimed at teaching basics of rules, methods, and standards for writing summaries and analytical reviews of professional English-language materials, as well as improving effective reading skills for dealing with professional Eng­lish-language resources.

What is significant, ESP was not taught separately and independently, but was immersed in studying professional EA issues. Target skills were trained using meaningful English-language materials required at certain stages of EA course, and the timetables of both courses were coordinated with the leading role of the professional EA course. Thus, on the one hand, learners were acquiring essential target skills, and on the oth­er hand, they studied meaningful materials needed for mastering EA course. In this course the authors used the constant collaboration of teachers conducting ESP special course and the major professional course to the maximal extent both during the course planning and conducting.

It was a kind of breakthrough not only for subject experts, but also for students who realized and re­ceived evidence of their ability to understand complicated professional texts. Interestingly, the initial levels of English language proficiency in the group varied from A2 to B1+, but all the students managed to write parts of analytical reviews for their future dissertations or research papers having autonomously read the ma­terials assigned by the teachers. This supports the claims of Scrivener and Underhill [8] about the necessity of «Linguistic challenge and Cognitive challenge» in the educational materials for best students' motivation. (The course was conducted at the department of Economic Informatics in Novosibirsk State University of Economics and Management in 2015).

These educational endeavours have been in line with the authors' previously conducted analysis and de­sign of prospective architectures of complex educational environments [11].

Conclusion and recommendations. The goal-based approach to teaching effective methods of dealing with professional English-language materials in dynamic, integrated, and fast developing disciplines was developed, explored, and tested in practical teaching. The authors showed that the main leading aspect of the approach is «why»-aspect which determines the learner's goals. Moreover, it is shown how the methods comprising the approach are subordinate to those goals. Basing on the research and practical application of methods comprising the described goal-based approach, the following practical conclusions and recommen­dations can be provided.

Professional materials studied in the special language course must be selected with participation of sub­ject experts. Materials should be relevant, professionally meaningful, ranked in terms of complexity and dif­ficulty, accompanied with specially developed glossaries if necessary. Standards of professional knowledge, Body of Knowledge, and existing subject glossaries should be included in the educational materials.

Teaching skills necessary for effective reading and writing some professionally meaningful papers is advisable to begin after students reach A2 (CEFR) level taking into account what students are majoring in.

It could be recommended to retain invariance of teaching such issues/topics as, for instance, Academic Writing, Writing a Research Paper, and Complying with Standards for Publication for students from differ­ent university departments without considering their major specialization.

The teacher of such a special course should not be an expert in the specific professional discipline, but he or she should understand its main concepts and be able to evaluate the correctness of learners' understand­ing and performance, and the authors agree with other educators about this vision of the situation [4]. It is essential that preparing/training adequate and relevant teachers of such courses and their professional devel­opment is an issue of the utmost importance. So, practical implementation of the presented approach implies thoroughly planned methods and practicalities of preparation of teachers capable of conducting such a course. Obviously, such teachers may emerge from both professions, namely, subject experts with the high level of English language proficiency, C1 or C2, willing to grasp main educational ideas employed in ESP and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), or English language teachers able to understand main principles, terminology and particular features typical of the target subject, or even having some back­ground knowledge and experience if teaching English is their second profession which happens not so rarely. Accordingly, the problem of preparing adequate teachers capable of educating learners in the mentioned sit­uations seems to become one of the central ones in improving teaching non-linguistic learners effective methods of dealing with meaningful professional English-language materials both while reading and writing them. More thorough investigation of this complex problem goes beyond the scope of this article.

Finally, it is highly advisable to continue exploring effectiveness of utilizing the suggested method in various student groups and teaching modes, in particular, exploring potential effects of collaborative distance learning in groups while employing special modern software. 

References

1. ISO 15704:2000(en). Industrial automation systems — Requirements for enterprise-reference architectures and methodolo­ Last reviewed in 2010, 43 p., [ER]. Access mode: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:28777:en
2. Scrivener J. Learning, Teaching: The Essential Guide to English Language Teaching,3rd, Oxford: MacMillan, 2011, 414 p.
3. Kirk S. Teaching 'EAP': Enabling Academic Participation, E-merging Forum 5, Moscow 2015, [ER]. Access mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXIvK-tuxaA
4. Kirk S. Demand High EAP. Posted on 6 January 2013,[ER]. Access mode: https://theteapingpoint.wordpress.com/
5. Yunatova I. Mastering summarising as a way to mastering high order thinking skills. SPELTA Newsletter, June 2014, Special Jubilee Issue, p. 7.
6. Yunatova I.G. On Saturday. scientific works of the 18th Russian scientific and practical conference ((Engineering of the En­terprises and Management of Knowledges, Moscow, 2015, 305-311.
7. Nunan D. Designing and adapting materials to encourage learner autonomy, In P. Benson & Voller (Eds.), Autonomy in language learning p, 1997 London, England: Longman, p. 193-203.
8. Scrivener J., Underhill A. Demand High Teaching. English Teaching Professional,2013, 85, 16-17.
9. Zachman J.A. IBM Systems Journal,1987, 26, 3, 276-292.
10. Roeleven S. Why Two Thirds of Enterprise Architecture Projects Fail, 2010, [ER]. Access mode:http://www.homeworkmarket.com/sites/default/files/ea-roeleven_broer-enterprise_architecture_projects_fail_-_aep_en.pdf
11. Zinder E.Z., Yunatovа I. Modern information technologies and IT education. Doizdaniye of the collection of the chosen works V of the International scientific and practical conference, 2010 Under the editorship of the prof. V.A. Sukhomlin, Moscow: INTUIT.RU, 2011, 137 p., p. 25-72.