Designing a set of English for specific purposes study materials for welding students at Viljandi Vocational Training Centre

Abstract

The aim of this master thesis is to design a set of study materials for welding students at Viljandi Vocational Training Centre (VIKK). The author’s interest in the topic arose from the practical point of view; namely, from the experience of lacking suitable study materials for ESP courses generally and more precisely, for welding students at VIKK. The main research question that arose when compiling such a study was what vocabulary should be taught for welding students at VIKK? The first chapter of this paper gives an overview of ESP and materials design; in addition, examines ESP and corpus studies and analyses the national curriculum and school curriculum of welding. The second chapter describes the Brigham Young University Wikipedia corpus and how a welding sub-corpus was built by using its online application. The results of the analysis were used for creating a welding word list for students at VIKK. The created vocabulary list includes terms in English and Estonian. Additionally, based on this vocabulary list six exemplary exercises were compiled.