How we made an 'English for maths and science' course

The use of a traditional coursebook in preparatory university programs presents a predicament for students who go on to study science-based degrees, as there is often a bias toward social sciences and away from natural sciences. Nevertheless, setting up an ‘English for Specific Purposes’ course is not something that every tertiary level institution can easily manage. Indeed, the journey towards implementing such a course often requires a number of duties that go beyond the classroom walls and need to be defined long before anything happens in the classroom (Basturkmen, 2010). In my presentation I offered a model of how such courses can be created by focusing on every stage of the process, thus delivering a set of ‘guiding principles’ for those seeking to initiate a university level ESP program from scratch.