Britannia: How did you start doing ESP?

Jeremy Day: I was teaching at a factory in Poland, and the Human Resources Manager asked me to prepare a course for the company chauffeurs. They were Beginner level and they needed to interact with people at the airport – to pick them up, help them with the bags and make a light conversation. I did not know at that time that it was called ESP, I was just doing what I was told to do.

Britannia: Was the course published?

Jeremy Day: No, it’s just something I made on the computer and distributed to the students. But then I was asked to do something for the security guards, or for the finance people, or the Health and Safety person. I did a course for production trainers, for regional sales managers. I still didn’t know it was called ESP, I was just writing courses and gradually I became aware that this is what I enjoy doing most of all.

Britannia: Do you enjoy particular topics, does it matter for you what course you are writing? It is said that a good sales person can sell anything – is it important for an ESP writer or an ESP teacher what field they are dealing with?

Jeremy Day: For some of them yes, some people have specializations. What interests me is learning something new, the challenge of doing something that nobody else wants to do. Then I was a teacher at the British Council a few years ago, whenever something really difficult came along I always volunteered – and I always regretted it afterwards, but I still volunteered for really strange courses: English for Counternarcotics Police, English for European Patent Attorneys, and so on. And I wrote these courses because they were difficult, because they were challenging, and that’s what I love about it – that I learnt so much, travelled around the world and I found out about different professions.

Britannia: You need to start from scratch with every new field, doesn’t that discourage you?

Jeremy Day: No. Basically, there are two types of course that I have written. There are some that I have written and taught myself at language schools, and this is where I tried to immerse myself in my students’ world and learn as much as I can. For the stuff I work with in Cambridge as an editor, my role is limited to focusing on the methodology. Other writers bring all the expertise, and I don’t have to worry about learning all of the area myself. I just ask them questions. Mark Ibbotson, who wrote Cambridge English for Engineering, is a very experienced engineer, he knows what engineers need to talk about. And Virginia Allum, one of the authors of Cambridge English for Nursing books, is a nurse and a nurse-trainer.

Britannia: Don’t your students think you “shouldn’t be here” because you don’t understand what they are talking about?

Jeremy Day: If you try to bluff, if you try to pretend that you know something and you don’t know it, then it’s awful and the students can see it straight through, and you want to crawl into the hole in the ground because it feels so bad. As English teachers, we can provide so much more than just a list of vocabulary and meanings – that’s not our job. Our job is to help students learn the language, to teach them learning skills, communication skills, get them confident. They should be able to bring the subject knowledge from their own lives.

Britannia: Do they accept that?

Jeremy Day: Generally, yes. In my experience, I’ve never had anybody say, “I want you to teach me about Law”. It’s a question of educating students at the beginning of the course, managing their expectations so they know what you can do and what you can’t do. And the things you can do are important and valid, and the things you can’t do are… also important, but your students can also get them from other sources.

I would add that just because you can teach ESP without being an expert doesn’t mean you should just say that’s fine and give up. You do need to keep learning all the way through. And what I’ve learned is: learn from your students, write things down, and it gets better and better. When I was teaching Legal English a few years ago, I had four groups all doing the same course. The first time I made some notes, some explanations of how this is different in their country and in the book. And when the second time I taught that course I was able to bring in that knowledge that I’d got and present that and get more knowledge from the students. And by the third and the fourth time I was pretty good – I knew “everything”! Everything that the students had given to me.

Learn from the students and learn actively, don’t just absorb the information from them but write it down, try to do some research. If they start with very low expectation of what you can do as a subject specialist, they will be pleased and impressed when you know more than they thought you knew. If you pretend you are an expert, they will always be disappointed when you are not an expert.

Britannia: Is there anything special about an engineer as an English student, a nurse as an English student?

Jeremy Day: A colleague of mine told me engineering students are very focused on problem-solving. That is why in this book we have got lots of problems for them to discuss and find the answers.

Most of my experience comes from teaching Legal English. The obvious thing about lawyers is that they are very intelligent and very analytical and they don’t tolerate people who don’t know what they are talking about. Have a dictionary with you or be ready to click on Wikipedia or other sources to answer questions, and if you can’t answer questions, write them down and answer them the next lesson. I think lawyers have this expectation: “I have an issue and I need it resolved”. If you resolve it in the next lesson, they are happy with that, but don’t just say, “Oh, that’s probably not important, don’t worry about that” – they won’t accept that. That’s something I learnt the hard way…

One thing I’ve really learnt, from teaching lawyers especially, is keep control of what the discussion is about. If they suddenly start going off into a completely different topic of Law, then it suddenly becomes very complicated and going out of control. Allow them to go there if they think it necessary but don’t pretend to be able to solve their problems. The biggest mistake I ever made, my first ever lesson teaching Legal English… I had an open-ended vocabulary discussion. I asked each student to think of examples of typical Legal English. Each group came up with ten, and those ten went up on the board. And then the students started asking questions. “What’s the difference between “let” and “lease”?” or “How do you pronounce this particular word?” and so on and so on. And I wasn’t able to answer any of those questions. I never did that again, I have been trying to control what’s happening in the classroom. In that situation I wrote all those things down, between the lessons I researched them, found the answers to all the questions, presented them as vocabulary matching exercises with words and definitions. It was a success, but that first lesson was a good lesson for me.

Britannia: How demanding should we be teaching pronunciation? How much time do you spend on phonetics?

Jeremy Day: Correct and understandable pronunciation is absolutely crucial, so the students need to know the phonemic alphabet and to be able to read how something should be pronounced. In the Legal English Teacher’s Book that I wrote and in the Nursing book there’s lot of pronunciation of difficult words. In the on-line glossary you can click on each of the words and listen to the pronunciation. But I certainly wouldn’t demand that they pronounce a word the same as I’d pronounce it. Your accent as a non-native speaker is a part of your identity and I don’t think we should try to destroy that.

Maybe I am lucky – I work in Poland, and in my experience, Polish people have generally very good pronunciation of English. I think the point is that Polish pronunciation is much more complicated than English pronunciation.

Britannia: What would you test at the end of an ESP course?

Jeremy Day: In the courses I teach my aim usually is to spend as much time as possible using the language, getting the students to communicate, so we do not need any end-of-semester test. But I know obviously that it is very important in many teaching situations. Some of the courses are test-driven, where the whole point of the course is to generate grades to measure students.

Definitely, focus on communication skills in the test – get them to do role plays and assess their role plays. If you just give them a list of vocabulary or, even worse, grammar points, it easy, because it’s measurable, it’s countable, and in some ways there are great advantages to doing that but if you really want to measure their ESP skills then focus on real life situations.

It comes back to the needs analyses: you start with what you want to achieve, what your aim is in the course, you work out what they can’t currently do, you then teach them those and you find way of identifying if they can do that at the end or the course.

ESP teaching is a little bit messier than we would like it to be. A lot of things which we expect to happen, don’t happen. But lots of additional things do happen though we don’t expect them to happen. So just because we haven’t necessarily met the needs we set at the beginning of the course doesn’t mean the course has been a waste of time.

Britannia: What is the lowest level to start an ESP course? Imagine an engineer who says, “I know nothing of English, just two words: “Beatles” and “New York”, but I am starting a job in America soon, please teach me something!”..

Jeremy Day: You can do it. I mentioned in the beginning my course for company chauffeurs – they were Beginner level. It’s just a question of teaching them phrases and drilling those phrases and doing really basic things, like numbers and greetings – you can do that with A1 level. The ideal, of course, is B1-B2. They have a solid background of grammar and vocabulary and some skills and they are ready for this. But real life is sometimes more complicated. We produced our Nursing course for Intermediate level nurses, but as the most of the nurses in our nursing colleges are A1-A2 level or A2-B1, we wrote the Pre-Intermediate level then. It’s very gentle, but the situations are very advanced and very practical. We’ve got a unit on dealing with dying patients. If you imagine doing that at Pre-Intermediate level, that’s quite… scary. You need a lot of guidance, a lot of support, but it is possible, and I am very proud of that particular unit, that we managed to do such an incredibly difficult job for such a low level.

Britannia: Which is the next ESP book you are going to write or what ESP book what would you like to write?

Jeremy Day: There are so many that I would love to write. All the time people keep coming up to me during this tour of Russia: “When is there going to be a book on this?”, “Please can we have a book on this?”… And I agree completely that it would be wonderful to have all of these books. The problem is all about whether the books will sell enough to justify the cost.

At the moment I am doing lots of Teacher’s books for Business English: for International Negotiations, for Dynamic Presentations. Basically, I am doing Teacher’s books for all of these series.

Britannia: Updating or writing them?

Jeremy Day: The courses that are out on the market do have Teacher’s books: Presentations and Communication Across Cultures, and their Teacher’s books are both on-line, free to download from the Cambridge websites. The next one is International Negotiations, for which the Student’s book is ready but not published, and I am doing the Teacher’s book. It should be out in January.