The Place of Writing in English for Military Purposes

Abstract

Since ESP language trainings are becoming increasingly popular in professional communities and among university students, their impact and therefore academic value seem to be enormous nowadays. As a result, apart from the very general language training, contemporary university education enables students to get access to professional corpuses, often containing the terminology that is simply unavailable in regular courses or at least limited to an absolute minimum. However, apart from teaching the intended professional terminology, ESP courses often require teachers to make their students familiar with a wide range of skills, such as negotiating the meaning or transferring specific cultural values from one language to another. When it comes to Military English, writing skills seem to be even more important than speaking and other language aspects, since it often requires military students and then soldiers to communicate various cultural phenomena when contacting professionals from other countries. This article focuses on the phenomenon of writing skills in Military English, including the phenomenon of mediation as a variable that often requires students to negotiate the meaning in order to transfer specific information. As a result, the theoretical part of this article presents the issues of ME from various perspectives, whereas the empirical part reveals the attitude of the students of the Military University of Technology in Warsaw towards the discussed issue and therefore the possible suggestions concerning the use of this type of a popular ESP framework.

Keywords

• writing
• military english
• esp
• stanag