The WEBQUEST – An Effective Web-based Tool
for Teaching ESP to English Non-Major Students
Nguyen Thi Thu
The People’s Police University, Vietnam
Abstract
The need to enhance technical literacy among students and the focus on content-based instruction as the most appropriate method to learn and construct knowledge have resulted in the development of activities to corporate the Internet into the classroom. WebQuests are activities designed to serve that purpose making full use of the resources on the Internet. Whereas WebQuests have been applied for educational purposes for a past few years; there exists little empirical research which demonstrates how to make full use of it in ESP instruction in a sound pedagogical way. This article describes how effective the integration of WebQuest in the ESP reading course to second-year students at the People’s Police University (PPU) was in enhancing the students’ reading competence. An action research which utilizes both quantitative and qualitative was used to fulfill the aims of the study. Data from questionnaires, pre-test, post-test and teacher’s observation sheet were analyzed and discussed. It would be suggested by the findings that WebQuest is such an effective way to improve students’ reading competence that should be integrated in the teaching of ESP at the PPU. Thus, this study would be useful for those who are interested in utilizing Web-based tools for their teaching of English in general and the teaching of ESP in particular.
Keywords: ESP, WebQuest, reading competence