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About a year ago I started 1-to-1 lessons with a young man named Alex. He was from my hometown but he was working in Warsaw, Poland. I was teaching him General English and he was doing fine when one day he asked me to teach him ESP. I knew he was in IT but he did not specify his department or position. I knew where to start so I googled “English for IT”. I found a very promising course book “Professional English in Use ICT” by Cambridge university press. Next lesson we started with the book and I was proud of myself as I had found the book we needed. From the very first minutes of the lesson, I knew everything went terribly wrong and now I know why. I should have: 1. specified Alex’s specialization (he worked in User experience design) 2. found material on User experience design 3. asked him about his duties, responsibilities and working routine 4. or at least googled job description. None of this was done and at that lesson, Alex told me that IT is not only connecting computers to networks and saving documents. I had to start the search over again. Here are the difficulties I encountered while trying to prepare myself for teaching User Experience design vocabulary (UX design): • There was (and maybe is) no course books on UX design; • There were no presentations, worksheets on this topic; • No videos, no audios or podcasts; • I was fighting the urge to give up on it. I searched high and low when I accidentally went to the website of Netguru. Turned out that they provide their e-books for free. There were two e-books, which were specifically aimed at web design including UX design. I sent one of them to Alex and asked him to have a quick look. He approved it and I started working with it. Here is how I organized out activities: • I set up a folder for Alex on my Google Drive and created a Word document; • I read the article and picked the words he might have needed to know; • He read the words and after my commentary and made up sentences with them; • Than he actually read the article; • He answered the questions I had prepared for him beforehand. Due to Alex’s workload, he hardly ever did any homework. Later, however, I grouped all the words that Alex had learned into a table and we reviewed them from time to time. As he progressed, he noticed that he did not have to use a dictionary as much as in the beginning, as we kept on reviewing them. Once a month I gave Alex progress test and we saw which group was troubleshooting. The activities seem to work out for Alex just fine. Such ESP lessons took place once a week. The revision of groups took up 20 minutes and the rest of the lesson was General English. From this point, I can definitely make some conclusions that are true for me: 1. Teaching ESP is a win-win thing: you teach people English and they guide you through their carrier and experiences. 2. A teacher should be ready for the absence of a necessary course book to meet his/her needs; 3. A teacher has work with authentic material and devise unique activities; 4. Failure is inevitable at some point; 5. Teachers should not be afraid to teach ESP; 6. Teaching ESP is very rewarding.
