The User Manual as the Basis of a Didactic Sequence for an English for Specific Purposes Course

Abstract

The degree plan of Land Surveying Engineering at Universidad Nacional de San Juan requires that graduate students must be able to comprehend disciplinary texts written in English. In this context, discursive practices play a fundamental role in their academic literacy. However, understanding the disciplinary genres that are necessary at the university level often requires a skill that students do not frequently acquire at the secondary level. After conducting an analysis of the genres that students need to master in order to become part of their discursive community, the relevance of the user manual was identified. The aim of this work is to propose a didactic sequence based on the explicit teaching of this genre. Using the linguistic description provided by the School of English for Specific Purposes, the sequence seeks to provide explicit teaching of the linguistic conventions and social functions of the user manual in their discursive community. Firstly, the sequence focuses on activating prior knowledge by guiding the student during the comparison between the general characteristics of user manuals of electronic devices used in everyday life and user manuals of topographic equipment. The results demonstrate that the importance of explicitly teaching this genre for two reasons. On the one hand, activating prior knowledge, when it exists, facilitates reading comprehension and reduces student anxiety, thereby promoting motivation when reading a genre that they may already partially know. On the other hand, it is necessary to provide students with linguistic analysis tools that enable them to identify the peculiarities of the genre to enhance their reading comprehension within the discursive community to which they belong.