The University of Malaya English for special purposes project

In this 1980 book, contributors involved in a seven year old University of Malaya English for Special Purposes project (UMESPP) describe various aspects of the project, which was devoted particularly to the development of academic reading abilities.

In the first chapter, Reading for meaning, Cooper provides a list of UMESPP course aims, describing the experience of the pilot year and considering its findings. In Strategies for reading, Chitravelu talks of low student motivation, and how the UMESPP practitioners had to prove to students that the Reading course would be useful and interesting to them. Next, Lieu Saw Peng explains how the course aimed to ‘develop the study skills the students require to extract and organise information from tertiary level science textbooks’. In Spoken interaction, Khong Chooi Peng reports on feedback from participants – students and teachers – following the pilot of the speaking course. The next contributor, Tan Soon Hock describes the testing programme in detail, while Chitravelu candidly describes lessons learned, concluding the book with The revised version of the UMESPP materials: a resume.

This book is free to download below as a pdf file.

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