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Teaching technical English
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Technical
English texts on
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Teaching technical
English in the language class
Technical
English is a variety of written English with which a majority of
English teachers are not particularly familiar.. or imagine that they
are not familiar. Most language teachers are
linguists, graduates with arts or humanities qualifications, not with
scientific or technical degrees. This is perhaps why many EFL or ESL
teachers are often a bit worried about dealing with texts in technical
English.
In actual fact, there is no need to imagine
that the language side of documents written in technical English will
be any harder to master than the language side of non-technical
documents. Language ( the medium) and subject-matter (the message) are
two different
things.
Additionally, when talking about "technical
English"; it is important to remember that "technical English" is not
something monolithic. There are a lot of different styles of technical
English, and a lot of different fields of technical English.
In particular, there are two essential types of
document in technical English:
- Documents that are aimed at a general reading public,
and do not require any high-level understanding of technical matters.
- Documents
that are aimed at specialists in a given field, and therefore do
require a specialist familiarity with the technicalities of the subject
matter.
In the framework of the EFL/ESL class, studying the second
type of document is generally inappropriate – unless, for
instance, one is teaching professional English to a homogenous class of
doctors or
nuclear-scientists, or oil-industry engineers.
In most
cases, the only technical documents that can be advantageously studied
in a class of English for non-native speakers – particularly
for student-age learners and at
intermediate level – are texts written for a non-specialist
readership; documents that talk
about scientific or technical topics in a language that can be
understood by all.
This is the type of technical English article
presented on Linguapress.com .
That
being said, there is some good news. Whatever type of technical English
document is being studied, at whatever level, it will tend to show the
same distinctive language features, in relation to articles or
documents of a
non-technical topics. And thankfully there are only four main
distinctive features of technical English, which are:
- The use of passives,
- The use of compound words,
- A predominance of non-count nouns
- Less or no use of human subjects.
These features are present even in easy-intermediate level texts.
Technical
English on
Linguapress.com
Index of articles in technical or semi-technical English for use with
students, technical or not.: (
►
See also
Texts on the
environment for more teaching resources)
Low intermediate level
Intermediate level English
Advanced level English
Technical texts accessible to a general reading public. Specialist
knowledge not required
More on the way
What
do we mean by "technical English"? Is it different from other kinds of
English ? If so, how different? Linguapress takes a short and simple
look at the answers to these questions.
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