BUSINESS AND LAW VOCABULARY ACQUISITION IN THE ESP CLASSROOM

Abstract

Undergraduates of the University of Economics in Bratislava need to receive decent economic and legal education to be able to work successfully in different areas of the national economy and in the management structures of all levels. The previous research has shown that Slovakia follows a significant negative trend with performance in reading. Online learning platforms like LMS Moodle are ideal for students in higher education. This paper is a part of the KEGA Project carried out at the Department of English Language of the Faculty of Applied Languages. It demonstrates the work of an experimental group of sixty-four first- and second-year students of the Faculty of National Economy in a course “Business English for Advanced Students III” supported by an e-course “Business Communication”. During the semester, students developed reading skills and improved communication by reading and investigating written discourse for unknown words and idiomatic expressions. The rationale for the quantitative research is to compose a corpus of professional articles from English-language periodicals read by “Economics and Law” students. The rationale for the qualitative research is to identify important business, legal and academic vocabulary in them. The method of “Statistical Hypothesis Testing”, T-test, tests the significance of the difference between the knowledge of idioms of the experimental group and the control group (33 students doing a traditional course). The results indicate that LMS Moodle increased students’ motivation to study English. The results prove that “Economics and Law” students enlarged greatly their legal vocabulary and that both groups were interested in learning idiomatic expressions.

Keywords

• reading text
• term
• idiom
• business
• economics
• law