The Role Of Mother Tongue In ESP Teaching And Learning

As a branch of English teaching, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) attracts full attention because of its practicability. In recent years, with the rapid development of the cooperation and communication between China and foreign countries, ESP is becoming more and more important. Actually, as early as more than two decades ago, many universities and colleges in China have begun to offer ESP course, and now it has become a compulsory course required by college English syllabus. However, the significance of ESP has not yet been emphasized enough, There is still a lot of work to do both in ESP research and ESP education.With respect to ESP teaching and learning, the thinking language underlying students'ESP learning and use can not be ignored. This thesis tries to study the following problems from the perspective of students majoring in science and technology:(1) what roles mother tongue plays in ESP learning and use; (2) what students think about the role of mother tongue in ESP learning and use; and (3) what attitude students have to teachers' partly using mother tongue in ESP classrooms. There are six chapters in the thesis. Chapter One deals with introduction of ESP, background and purposes of the study. In Chapter Two, the relevant literatures are reviewed, involving various ESP teaching approaches, the role of mother tongue in each of the teaching approaches and in ESP lexicon learning, ESP listening, speaking, reading and writing. Chapter Three is about the methodology. It includes the design of the questionnaire and the interview. The questionnaire contains 51 items that are divided into three parts corresponding respectively with the three problems mentioned above. In the guide to the interview there are eleven items concerning the above three problems.80 participants take part in the questionnaire and 6 in the interview. Chapter Four is about the results and findings of the questionnaires and the interviews. In Chapter Five, the results and findings are discussed. Chapter Six concerns the conclusions. Through summary of the whole thesis the final conclusions are resulted. Finally, the implications and the limitations of the study are pointed out.The theoretical bases of the thesis are mainly ESP teaching theories, cognitive linguistics, psychological linguistics, and theories of discourse analysis. Based on above theories, the results of the questionnaires and the interviews are discussed. The results of the study show that students most frequently use mother tongue in ESP learning and use. They tend to agree with the positive role of mother tongue in ESP learning and use, and generally speaking, they strongly approve of teachers' partly using mother tongue in ESP classrooms.From the results of the study, it can be seen that compared with using mother tongue strategies in EGP (English for General Purposes) teaching and learning, doing that in ESP teaching and learning has the following special advantages:(1) ESP lexicon is belong to a certain register. An ESP word, especially an ESP specialized term rarely has multiple meanings, and it can always be explained by one Chinese word-group. But the English meaning of an ESP word is always a long sentence about its definition. Thus, to learn and retain the Chinese meaning of an ESP word is easier than to learn and retain its English meaning. (2) In most china's science and technology universities and colleges, the specialized or professional knowledge is taught with mother tongue, and students'relevant professional knowledge is closely related to their mother tongue. Therefore, if the professional knowledge is needed in students'ESP learning and use, they have to relate it to the mother tongue. And thus in ESP learning and use, mother tongue is a medium by which students associate their professional know ledge with the ESP discourses and texts. (3) The analysis on the five ESP teaching approaches and the discuss on the results of the present empirical surveys show that teachers' partly using mother tongue in ESP classrooms can promote ESP teaching.