Enhancing students' oral communication proficiency. A preliminary study on the use of anchor with tourism ESP learners
| Autor | Yolanda Joy Calvo Benzies/Karen Jacob |
| Cargo del Autor | University of the Balearic Islands/University of the Balearic Islands |
| Páginas | 435-459 |
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CAPÍTULO 23
ENHANCING STUDENTS´ ORAL COMMUNICATION
PROFICIENCY. A PRELIMINARY STUDY ON THE
USE OF ANCHOR WITH TOURISM ESP LEARNERS
YOLANDA JOY CALVO BENZIES
University of the Balearic Islands
KAREN JACOB
University of the Balearic Islands
1. INTRODUCTION
As González-Ramírez (2015) points out, in English for Specific Pur-
poses (ESP from now onwards) contexts, exposing undergraduate stu-
dents to authentic-like situations they will most likely have to face again
in their professional lives is essential. Therefore, ESP teachers should
teach their students useful and authentic vocabulary, exploit the oppor-
tunities that ICTs offer and, most importantly, decide what skills and
language areas to focus on more, depending on the students 囲 specific
needs (Medrea & Rus, 2012). To exemplify, a good command of spoken
production and interaction skills is a must for nurses and doctors to at-
tend patients from abroad—especially those who work in areas influ-
enced by tourism (such as the Canary or the Balearic Islands)—whereas
lawyers, on the other hand, need to have strong reading and writing skills
to understand and produce official legal documents.
In the case of tourism and hotel management undergraduates, the funda-
mental skills they should develop throughout their university BA are a)
a good command of specific vocabulary related to tourism and business,
and b) strong speaking skills, both at a productive and interactive level.
Despite the importance of communication skills for these students, the
COVID-19 pandemic had a direct negative effect on the attention we
could personally pay to spoken skills in our classes since our students:
a) did not normally switch on their cameras in the online platforms used
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(Zoom, BBCollaborate), b) they only orally participated if specifically
instructed to do so, and c) the in-class social distancing measures made
it challenging to do traditional group speaking activities, etc. Conse-
quently, for the academic year 2021-2022, we designed a teaching inno-
vation project—called Desarrollo de las competencias en expresión
oral y vocabulario específico en inglés a través de la plataforma An-
chor—which mainly aimed at encouraging our ESP students to practise
their spoken skills outside the classroom with their peers. This project
also intended to enhance learner autonomy by placing the focus on more
student-led activities.
The basis of our project was therefore to find a way of combining tour-
ism and hotel management students 囲 needs (specific vocabulary and
speaking) with the opportunities that ICTs offer since these are all skills
that employers within the tourism and business fields will strongly value
when considering future candidates to work for them. The solution we
came up with was to introduce social networks and instant messaging
tools (IMs from now onwards) within our teaching contexts since they
are resources our students use daily to communicate with relatives and
friends (Ellison & Steinfield, 2006; Kuppuswamy & Naravan, 2010). To
the best of our knowledge, the previous message exchanges on social
networks and/or IMs are generally produced in the students´ native lan-
guage(s), namely, Spanish and Catalan (Majorcan variety); in contrast,
our ESP students hardly ever communicate in a foreign language like
English during these informal activities. We thus thought it would be
interesting to motivate them to practice their spoken English outside the
classroom on these interactive platforms.
More specifically, in this study, we will focus on podcasts, namely pod-
cast production via Anchor, a free tool for creating, editing, and publish-
ing podcasts to share with other members. It can be accessed on an-
chor.fm.
The term podcast, coined by Ben Hammersley, is a neologism formed
from the words (i)pod and broadcasting (Hasan & Hoon, 2013; Yaman,
2016), though another proposed explanation for pod is that it comes
from the acronym POD—Personal on Demand (Panagiotidis, 2021).
The popularity of the podcast can be seen by the number of well-known
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