Exploring the level of specialisation of a corpus of scientific texts and students’ perceptions and needs in an esp context = Explorando el nivel de especialización de un corpus de textos científicos y las percepciones y necesidades de los alumnos en un contexto de inglés para fines específicos

Abstract

The incorporation of some original texts combining the academic component with a particular scientific domain can be seen as an opportunity, in higher education and, in particular, in an English for Specific and Academic Purposes (ESP and EAP, respectively) context, to enable students to access authentic examples of the use of the language. This article investigates the degree of specialisation of some scientific texts that could be read and analysed in class in order to determine the pedagogical effect these might have when teaching the reading skill. In so doing, a corpus of twelve recent texts belonging to the domain of Biotechnology was analysed. Moreover, two different empirical studies were conducted in order to know more about students’ needs and perceptions throughout two consecutive academic years; 2017-2018 (qualitative analysis of their initial perceptions) and 2018-2019 (qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data provided by a questionnaire). Preliminary findings suggested that the selection of texts showed different degrees of specialisation.