Designing an English for Specific Purposes Programme to Nurture Global Citizenship

Proceedings of The 5th International Conference on Advanced Research in Education

Year: 2022

DOI:

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Designing an English for Specific Purposes Programme to Nurture Global Citizenship

Cissy Li

ABSTRACT: 

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals suggest that by 2030 that all learners should acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including global citizenship (UN 2030 Framework). Educational institutions have been charged with the responsibility to promote global citizenship by teaching their students to be contributing members of the larger global community with their skills and education. This paper reports on the design of an ESP (English for Specific Purposes) project that puts language learning and practice in the context of global citizenship with global themes including environment, intercultural communication, media and technology etc., themes of global concern, for learning activities. As an ESP project, it focuses on the pragmatic demands of language and multimodal texts using critical ESL (English as a Second Language) pedagogies. Through engaging in group projects on topics of their choosing, participants will be exposed to authentic English used to communicate global issues and reflect on their observations and advocate changes. It is hoped that participants, while developing their English language skills, will develop a critical awareness of the world and take action to improve it through this programme.

keywords: critical EFL/ESL pedagogy, ESP, global citizenship education, higher education, language learning.