ECEM - English for Civil Engineering Mastery

Download or read book ECEM - English for Civil Engineering Mastery written by Dr. Hidayet Tuncay and published by Tuncay (Yayıncılık) Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book entitled ECEM (English for Civil Engineering Mastery) as mentioned earlier is a reading-based ESP course book in professional English for Civil Engineering students. The book is so designed that students could succeed in acquiring the technical terminology through reading ESP texts. So, the primary purpose of the book is not to teach Civil Engineering to the students, but help them improve reading technical passages and develop a reading habit in their field of study. The course book includes eighteen units from general to specific and simple to complex. Each unit has a primary warm-up part along with various reading and vocabulary activities. The warm-up part is specifically designed to enable students to have oral discussions and debates prior to reading the actual texts. Reading activities urges students to read the text and then answer the questions given. A comprehension practice follows each passage and demands a comprehensive study of the text. In this part, vocabulary practice along with exercises and some other language activities are given for the purpose of motivating students to study technical vocabulary within the texts. Reading activities are designed to help students study the comprehension of the passages and vocabulary as well. In some units cloze tests are given relating to the same topic in the unit to check students’ vocabulary comprehension. Each unit has also translation and writing parts: in the translation part, students are required to translate the given passage into Turkish as an assignment; in writing part, various writing topics, closely related to the reading passages, are assigned to students as in-class activities or as homework. Since this is an ESP course book in Civil Engineering, the main aim of the passages is to motivate students to use technical English in their own professional fields and to enable them to master necessary technical terminology. Throughout their professional lives, almost all of the Engineering students will need English both technically and professionally in order to communicate with foreign people and companies they are doing business with. The course book is manly designed to be used in formal class sessions, but it can also be used by students and professionals of the field in self-study of the technical terminology. The design of the course book will enable students to learn new technical vocabulary and help them to comprehend technical passages with the aid of given almost 300 field-oriented vocabulary. The meanings of the new words are given as they are presented in the passages. That is to say, the contextual meanings of the vocabulary are given in the book. All in all, the book covers almost 400 exercises and various language study points. A Word to Learner: Discuss the given topics with your friends and make your own account of them Carefully study the pre- reading activities Make sure you study the topic – related technical vocabulary in advance Try to find out other related meanings of the vocabulary from an English Dictionary of Civil Engineering Read the passages in advance and study accompanying questions given As thought useful in the acquisition of language skills, translate the given passages into your native language without paying attention to linguistic details of the passage; just try to make them understand by your colleagues Writing tasks are designed for your use and make sure that they should be written academically and pay attention to the instructions given as well A Word to Teacher: Remember most activities in the book are pre-assigned activities to be assigned to students prior to studying the units. Warm-up discussion part should be done with teacher’s supervision in group, in pairs or individually. Pay attention to learners’ discussion technique; do not interrupt their conversation unless there is a communication failure. Encourage students to answer questions either orally or in writing. Make sure they use these questions to understand the passage better since they are text-related. In reading the text, let them first do a silent reading and then teacher can make a model reading. Make sure they understand the passage very well and encourage them to understand the passage after studying the vocabulary without referring to a dictionary. In reading activities, check their comprehension through given questions and related exercises. Assign them the cloze test. It is recommended less time be spent on this activity in class. Assign translation passages in advance and do not allocate more than 1 class hour for them in-class translation. Writing is also an important part of the unit, encourage students to write the assigned topics at home and discuss some students’ writing papers in class. Make sure feedback studies should be done after each unit and weak points are to be determined and additional studies can be done with students in class. In general, each unit can be allocated 6 hours in class study, but some units may take longer than this estimated time, so in designing the weekly/monthly or term lesson plans or programs, the time allocation can be taken into reconsideration as well.