Teaching grammar in esp classroom (in technical colleges) Introduction

English for medicine/ Medical English

Another example of teaching tenses could be taken for learners of medical English. There are some kinds of books offered specifically for the field of Medicine, but most of them do not involve teaching grammar. What is more important, few of them emphasize that the aim of the coursebook is to help the development of communication. In these situations, the teachers design their own materials which will help them deliver the message to the students and achieve the objectives of the lessons. Due to lack of enough materials, there is again need of creativity. The following example is just a suggestion how to make an attractive entrance to a grammar lesson for students who study medicine. Since Grey’s Anatomy is one of the most watched series all over the world, it is also known that is one of the favorite to the doctors. The image below is taken from a video on YouTube, where 10 short and emotional moments are taken of the movie. Some of those sentences could be used in introducing past simple tense.
A s it could be seen in the image, one of the sentences is “You happened to me”, whereas the video contain other sayings used in the past simple tense such as “You took a piece of me” and
“You died in my arms”. After watching the video, the learners can be asked about these three sentences and required to explain the tense used. Moreover, there is a very good way to introduce them to the past simple form of the regular and irregular ones. So, learners could see the difference between getting the suffix of –ed in the end, or changing completely from the root of the verb itself such:

1. 
   Happen-ed
   
2. 
   Die-d
   
3. 
   Take – took
   

English for science

It was mentioned previously that grammar is hard and that is true, but some parts are a little bit harder than others. One of those is the Passive and active voice. That seems to be very hard to understand by most of learners of English as foreign language, and therefore some teachers pay very little or no attention at all in order to avoid lack of success. The following practical example is related to English for Science or more specifically Chemistry. The text below is scanned originally from a Chemistry book, published by Oxford University Press. It includes some sentences used in passive voice.

The following sequences are taken from the text and they are in passive voice.

• 
  …metal is coated • …car bumpers are coated….
  
• 
  …the jug is used….
  
• 
  …the anode is made of silver….
  
• 
  …..attracted to the cathode….
  
• 
  ….silver ions are reduced…..
  
• 
  ….the jug is removed….
  

This paragraph in the book can be translated in the mother tongue of the learners, and then
easily explained why and how passive is used. After that, students can be given another text from the same book, and asked to find passive sentences and turn them into active. It is the job of the teacher to analyze the book and find a suitable text where learners can really find passive sentences. Moreover, they should be able to make the difference between active and passive sentences. If students of Chemistry are given a text about philanthropy or something they are not interested in, it will be very hard to catch their attention.