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, 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 of pronunciation. When
learning the new vocabulary, the students confused words, trying to use the more common one; also they misspelled
and misused words.
