The Mechanics of Teaching Mechanics: Experiences Teaching Military Aircraft Technicians

By Dr. Dugald Sturges, Bundessprachenamt, Hürth

In an ideal world, English for Special Purposes classes are provided as a professional supplement after students have achieved a relatively high level of proficiency in the target language. However, what options does an instructor have when confronted with the need to teach very specialized technical language to pupils who have limited general language skills? This is precisely the problem posed to the teachers at the Bundesprachenamt (Federal Office of Languages), when the German Navy needed to rapidly prepare their technical staff to train and eventually to work on the P-3C Orion aircraft.

The technicians, many with limited English language proficiency, and who up to the date of the course had worked in an almost exclusively German language environment, needed to develop English language skills in order to read technical documentation and to communicate with foreign colleagues in an English-speaking working environment within a short time. The challenge was made all the greater by the incongruence between the learners’ advanced technical experience and knowledge of specialist vocabulary of on the one hand and the lack of basic English language structures and grammatical concepts on the other. This required among other things a rethinking of the way grammar and lexis are presented to this particular type of learner.

Dr. Dugald Sturges, Instructor of English and since 2006 Head of the English Language Teaching Group at the Federal Office of Languages in Hürth was tasked with developing a course to prepare the Navy’s mechanics, both in uniform and civilian employees, to meet the linguistic challenges of the new aircraft.

In the German armed forces a general language proficiency examination based on NATO STANAG criteria is normally required before students are permitted to continue to specialist language training courses. In this particular case, due to a transition from Breguet Atlantic aircraft, for which extensive German language documentation was available, to Lockheed-Martin Orion aircraft purchased from the Royal Dutch Navy, it was necessary that technical staff be confronted almost immediately with entirely English language documentation. The usual presentation of language qua language, the usual progression of “everyday” grammatical and structural topics (e.g. the contrast between different tenses) needed to be replaced by a concentration on the functions and specific structures needed in a working situation and those employed in the technical handbooks. This meant that grammatical structures that normally are treated as “advanced” topics (e.g. differentiating between the various uses of gerunds) had to be addressed at a very early stage in the language learning process. It required that the instructor rely on the specialist technical knowledge and experience of the students to bridge the gaps in their language skills, in order to facilitate the communication process. A dialectic between simplified language structures on the one hand and the complicated technical content on the other became increasingly apparent.

The presentation at the “Sprachen und Beruf 2007” conference will address some of the strategies used in this course to facilitate specialist use of the language while at the same time addressing the particular needs of the “unschooled” EFL learner. In particular the basic premises of “Simplified Technical English” and the possibilities and limitations of task-based learning will be discussed. These include in particular “hands-on” approaches designed to make a connection between the language being learned and tasks already familiar from work. Although this sort of approach is anything but new, the particular needs of this particular group of “unschooled” learners did require a stronger balance between visual and manual materials with the highly sophisticated language required than is usual in an ESP teaching situation. Above all the need to recognize the learners as experts in their particular fields while at the same time providing remedial language instruction needs to be stressed. The extensive employment of realia and visually supported descriptive tasks were found to be one way of bringing the workshop into the classroom and allowing students to bring their own technical expertise into the language learning situation.