AN ESP TEACHER AS THE IMPLEMENTER OF STRATEGIC THINKING AT THE TERTIARY LEVEL OF EDUCATION

Abstract

Being dependable upon development in numerous scientific fields as well as trends of everyday life, education has never before been faced with such an urging demand for dramatic changes, implying a pressing need for continual self-evaluation and flexibility on the first place. The implementation of the Bologna Process into higher education institutions poses certain criteria ahead of higher level institutions that have not yet been uniformly adopted by all higher education institutions in Serbia. The most radical change is certainly the one of the modified role of students who are now not only beneficiaries, but equal partners in the process of education. Another call imposed by the Bologna Process is market oriented education, which places students’ needs, i.e. the needs of their future workplace, into the focus of education. Such requests are particularly demanding for societies where lectures are widely delivered ex cathedra and students are traditionally treated as instruction receivers. Both the viability and sustainability of this concept of education primarily depends on the carriers of those changes, i.e. teachers and students alike. The traditional role of a tertiary-level teacher changes in the sense that he/she is now not only the source of knowledge, but gets more involved in students’ progress by mentoring, i.e. monitoring and evaluating the progress of each and every student. In so doing, the focus of his/her attention is to teach students how to learn. This means that the focus of the lecture is not only subject matter, but the processes that need to be developed in order to help students achieve better learning results, which would eventually lead to better exam pass rate. All this would be hardly possible unless the students are self-aware and confident individuals prone to proactive reasoning, highly motivated to succeed and make progress by mastering their learning process. However, being overdependent upon teachers, students increase their expectations concerning teacher contribution to and responsibility for their learning process and exam outcome. Consequently, developing independent learners who are able to connect different aspects of knowledge concerning different subject matter and self-manage their own learning process would become the primary aim of any tertiary-level classroom. Learner-centered education has a-few-decade-long roots in contemporary language teaching methodology, yet this is something that still has to be adopted by Serbian higher education institutions. The aforementioned points to the necessity for changes in both teacher and student role(s) within a classroom. The proper driver of these changes is development of strategic thinking, i.e. implementation of strategy-oriented teaching instruction. In the group of learning strategies, metacognitive ones stand out as those which act as a basic students’ tool for managing the process of learning. Another critical characteristic of metacognitive strategies is their transferability to teaching and learning different subject matter. This means that the burden of strategy building can be shared among teaching staff members, which implies close collaboration among teaching personnel of an institution. The aim of the paper is to discuss the idea of introducing the concept of learning strategies primarily into the tertiary level of education and look into the newly imposed role(s) of the ESP teacher as the implementer of the process. By looking into the role of an ESP teacher, we are generally looking into the roles of all tertiary-level teaching staff members.