WRITING OR PROGRAMMING AN ESSAY? AN INTERDISCIPLINARY SYSTEMIC EXPERIMENT IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

In this paper, the authors claim that language teaching, and especially the teaching of how an essay could be written, should be fully adapted to the particular audience. The target audience of the present research has been the students of the last year of vocational upper-secondary education and mainly those of the technical specialties (electrical, mechanical, electronic and computer technicians). This category of students exhibit a very low performance in essay writing, throughout the country (Greece), having a huge failure rate in national examinations for the particular course. Moreover, this low performance is rarely, if ever, improved later on when they become graduates, since the chances for it are extremely scarce. Consequently, in order to improve the afore-mentioned performance, the authors experimented by changing the traditional teaching methodology. Initially they searched for a familiar concept, being common to all the different kinds of specialties. Such a concept was found to be computer programming. Then they restructured the teaching method accordingly, so as writing an essay to look like programming in natural language. Finally, the new method was applied individually to a small group of students. Since the results had been very promising, the authors suggest that this approach can be presented to language teachers and become standard, after an experimental application in a larger scale is conducted.