Exploring the use of an online collaborative glossary to foster specialized vocabulary acquisition

Abstract

Identifying useful and relevant specialized terminology is a goal that language instructors have to bear in mind when teaching English in technical and scientific contexts. The most significant qualitative approaches include analyzing concordances from corpora, using technical dictionaries, surveys, questionnaires, glossaries, or case studies based on teachers and learners’ decision-making processes. It was consequently thought that enabling students to participate in the process of selecting vocabulary, related to their main subject matter areas and based on the specialized content which they have already learnt, could have a beneficial effect on the language learning process in terms of motivation, relevance, usefulness, and effectiveness. Additionally, it was considered that including the collaborative learning component could foster their teamwork skills and motivate them to adopt a more active role when watching videos or reading articles closely connected to the fields they are specializing in. Our study is aimed at ascertaining, by means of a qualitative and a quantitative analysis (i.e. based on observation and by tracking the number and type of entries), students’ contribution to this joint task. Preliminary findings show how the use of online collaborative tools can have a positive effect in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classroom.