Peculiarities of teaching english in universities with agronomic profile. A case study

Abstract

In a changing world, the needs of those who learn English also evolve. In the last decades, the English courses for specific groups of learners have become highly important. English for special purposes found its way after the II World War. As for Romania, even if there was a certain interest in this field, it was taken to the next level only after 1990, when there appeared the economic and technological background for the development of this type of English. The scientific paper presents methods used for teaching the technical vocabulary to the first year students of the faculty of agriculture, the specialization of Technology of Processing Agricultural Products. The technical texts that are studied during the first year are those related to different types of cereals, such as wheat, maize, oats, barley, rice and millet. There is also a unit that deals with the history of food processing and types of preserving foodstuffs. The vocabulary awareness has in view various types of exercises, such as: true or false exercises and answering questions synonyms and antonyms, matching words, word-building types of exercises, find the mistakes in a given text, translation of technical texts both from Romanian into English and from English into Romanian. Typical mistakes have been found and we propose ways of correcting them. We noticed that during the students’ performance the most frequent mistakes were those related to pronunciation. When learning the new vocabulary, the students confused words, trying to use the more common one; moreover, they misspelled and misused words.