Ensuring Equal Opportunities in an English-for-Specific-Purposes Course for Working-While-Studying Technical Students

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

A thorough English correction is required both grammatical and technical . Starting from the heading ESP was not expanded anywhere. Having done a research on Language,  the writing should be strong enough such couldn't be seen.  Systematic methodology and clear cut findings are not found. Discussion is superficial. Not much of contribution from the authors. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Overall flow of content and clarity is missing in the  entire document.

Author Response

Response 1:

Dear Reviewer,

We’d like to thank you for your useful feedback.

1. The native speaker being a specialist in philology was employed to improve the quality of the English language in the manuscript (p. 1- p. 17). Furthermore, we have used the special technical aid to make it correspond to the academic style.
2. We have used the full name of the course instead of its abbreviation (p. 1-17, lines 2 and 6).
3. All changes are highlighted in yellow in the article (p.1- p.17). If you don't mind, I'll give you an example.

With the increasing diversity of engineering students learning English, it is necessary to adopt more thoughtful and long-term teaching strategies to cater to them. As the needs of working engineering students learning English are becoming more diversified, so more careful and long-range teaching strategies are to be employed to address them [9]. The emergence of working students as a heterogeneous group at technical universities highlights the need for research into factors that promote their foreign language skills and facilitate their learning potential. The working while studying students representing a growing heterogeneous group at technical universities cannot be ignored and therefore the factors both contributing to the successful development of their foreign language skills and fostering students' learning capabilities need researching. In the view of this, the research questions put forward by the authors are the following: The following research questions were addressed:

- What insights and background do working technical students have? What are the working students' insights and background?

- What are the specific features of the English language acquisition by working while studying technical students? Are there any specific features of the English language acquisition by working while studying technical students?

- How effective is an ESP blended course in enhancing the four fundamental language skills (speaking, reading, listening, writing) of master's technical degree engineering students combining studies and work?

The study seeks a solution to provide equal opportunities for working while studying technical students learning English for specific purposes. The researchers have developed a complementing Moodle-based ESP course being additional to the classroom ESP course. Thus, we have equipped working while studying technical students with training materials while they are at work. To tailor the Moodle-based ESP course to the students' needs, we analyzed the employment conditions of working students and their professional-value orientations. The research hypothesis is that an ESP blended course can serve as an effective strategy for academic attainment of working while studying technical students and is efficient for honing working students' English skills.

4. The findings are stated (p. 8, lines 214-231, p. 11, lines 287- 311, p. 15, lines 384-392,394-397, p. 16 lines 440-447).

To make it clear, we've rewritten the section subheadings in the following way:

3.1. Outcome 1: Participants (p. 8, line 220);

3.2 Outcome 2: Specific features of the English language acquisition by working while studying technical students (p. 11 line 287).

Response 2:

Dear Reviewer,

We’d like to thank you for your useful feedback.

We have rewritten the Discussion section in order to reinforce our arguments for ensuring equal opportunities for working while studying technical students and non-working students as well as to discuss our research results comparing to the prior works in this field (p. 15-16, lines 394-439).

 Response 3:

Dear Reviewer,

We’d like to thank you for your useful feedback. Our mission is to support working while studying students in the ESP course as well as to develop materials to assist them in their studies.

The authors contributed in the following way:

1.We have identified the most popular types of working while studying students based on the literature review and the survey results (p. 8, line 220);

2. We have analyzed the working students’ needs (p.3, line 104);
3. We have designed the blended ESP course (p. 5, line 176-178);
4. We have developed and validated the scales for Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening assessment (p. 17-21, Appendix A such as Table A1: Speaking assessment. Scale; Table A2: Reading assessment. Scale; Table A3: Scale and criteria for assessment of the listening task and writing an abstract).
5. We have tested students of the experimental and control groups before and after the experiment,

6.We have validated the blended ESP course (p. 12-15);

7. We have made the statistical analysis using the chi-square test, Fisher's test, and Mann-Whitney Z-test in order to correlate the knowledge gained by students in blended learning and offline classes, validate Moodle-based ESP course and analyze students' perception of ESP e-course designed (p. 12 -15).
8. We have validated the blended ESP course and drawn the conclusion of its effectiveness based on the final exam results.

   The quality of English in this paper -Response 1:

   1. The native speaker being a specialist in philology was employed to improve the quality of the English language in the manuscript (p. 1- p. 17). Furthermore, we have used the special technical aid to make it correspond to the academic style.
   2. We have rewritten the whole manuscript to improve it (p. 1-17).

   3 solid references from recent years have been added (p. 25, line 622, p. 24, line 616, p. 24, line 618). One of them is of 2024 (Scopus).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Congratulations. Your research is a well-documented  and compelling case study with a detailed statistical analysis. 

Some minor issues or suggestions: 

1)You mention on page 3 a placement test? Which one? . It would be a good idea to state if you have created it or if it is a standard one, for example, OPT

2)You also mention on page 3 "intermediate" level. Is it a B1 or a B2 level of the CEFR ?

3) You assess speaking with an oral presentation that lasts 5 minutes (page 6) . Compared to the rest of the skills, it looks as if it is less important. Please explain the rationale for the five minutes

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The survey showed that 64% of students work during their studies. Among different 190 forms of the work schedule, permanent contracts are dominated (63%)> are predominant

Author Response

Response 1:

Dear Reviewer,

We'd like to thank you for your useful feedback. We agree with this comment. Therefore, we have corrected this sentence in order to make it clear. We have added "developed at the department of foreign languages" as well as some description to make it clear (p.3, line 119-123).

"At the preparatory stage of the experiment all first year Master's degree students took a unified introductory test standard for Saint-Petersburg Mining University developed at the department of foreign languages and went through a semi-structured interview to identify their needs and to figure out whether they are going to/or combine university studies and work. The placement test, being a standardized language proficiency test, assesses the English language skills and consists of 120 questions, starting from the easiest to the most difficult ones.

Response 2:

Dear Reviewer,

We'd like to thank you for your useful feedback. We agree with your comment.

We have, accordingly, specified the level of foreign language proficiency of the participants. "Based on two parameters—having an employment and proven English proficiency of "intermediate" (B1) we formed the experimental and control groups. (p.3, line 125).

Response 3:

Dear Reviewer,

We'd like to thank you for your useful feedback. We agree that it looks as if speaking is less important, but this period is taken from our 20-year experience in the ESP teaching and it is evidence-based.

Speaking is the most challenging task for our technical students. We don't want to put additional stress on them. That's why it doesn't take a lot of time, but it is as valuable for the English language proficiency assessment as reading, listening and writing. Among the four aspects, speaking is the most demanding one in the sense that it requires active mind, vocabulary, knowledge, and performance.

Students are given a cue card and 1-minute time to prepare. They have to speak 1 or 2 minutes on the given topic. During this time, an examiner controls their time length. Through the cue card, the examiner assesses students' ability of coherence and cohesion, vocabulary, pronunciation, fluency, and sentence structure sense in the situation given. It takes about 3 minutes. Then the examiner asks students 2-3 questions which are related to the previous part. This part of the test is also very much important and gives students the opportunity to discuss their opinion in front of the examiner. Speaking works out at about 27 seconds per question (including the time it takes the examiner to read the questions).

Response to Comments on the Quality of English Language

Dear Reviewer,

We'd like to thank you for your useful feedback.

We have corrected this word.

The semi-structured interview showed that 64% of the technical students work during their university studies. Among different forms of the employment, permanent contracts are predominant (63%) (p.8 line 223).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1. You need to clearly state the reuslts of your study in the abstract. it looks little bit confusing to undertsnad the main contributions. 

2. Again some statement are no clear. e.g. research question no. 2 "- What are the specific features of the English language acquisition by working while studying technical students?" Please revise the question again.

3. In table 5, You mentioned that "after the 1st semester of the Technical English course, the reading and writing scores of 248 the experimental group were higher than the listening and speaking scores" while in the table the value of P was 0.08 which means this differnce is insignificant. Please explain. 

4. In the same table 5, results show that control groups have better perfomance not experimental groups. This is not what you have mentioned in the abstract. 

5. In discussion, you mentioned "The research hypothesis was verified by means of multiple approaches,..." where are the hypotheses of your research!  Please clarify. The discussion part should include all the results and discussed in details comparing to prior works.

 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The language of this paper should be improved befor considering for publication

Author Response

Response 1:

Dear Reviewer,

We’d like to thank you for your useful feedback. We agree with this comment.

Therefore, we have checked the results of the research, found some misinterpretation and corrected them both in the Abstract and the Results section (p. 1, lines 16-17; p. 12 lines 316-327; p. 13 lines 328-344; p. 14 lines 347-367; p. 15 lines 401-403).

Response 2:

Dear Reviewer,

We’d like to thank you for your useful feedback. We agree with your comment.

We have, accordingly, specified features of the English language acquisition by working while studying technical students. To make them clear, we have rewritten the section subheadings in the following way (p. 11, lines 288-289).

3.2 Outcome 2: Specific features of the English language acquisition by working while studying technical students

All changes are highlighted in yellow in the article (p.1- p.17).

Furthermore, we have added the description of the specific features of the English language acquisition by working while studying technical students (p. 11 line 288- 313, p. 16 lines 452-453).

If you don’t mind, I’d like to give the following example:

“The study addresses peculiarities of the development of the language skills of technical students combining work and studies. Results of the semi-structured interview revealed the technical students' needs and indicated that they have some preferred assignments within the ESP course. In total, the technical students highly evaluated the ESP e-course designed. They are more willing to complete reading and writing tasks relevant to the engineering fields. Engineering students need to see the relevance of the language skills in their field of study. In addition, students of technical universities have difficulties in speaking, and excessive self-control over the speech they produce also hindered them. During the speech activities, technical students tend to use pre-learned phrases and texts, which they include in their own speech without prior thought. The students like learning words and word-groups belonging to the engineering terminological system being a very important aspect of learning languages for special purposes. The authors see a solution in a special instructional design based on the integration of traditional teaching approaches in offline learning, an ESP e-course based on the professionally oriented materials encouraging technical students' cognitive activity and performance and an opportunity to apply their knowledge to actual performance rather than summative assessment. Thus, contextualized meaningful English language learning based on learners' field of study is to be provided in order to enhance English language acquisition by working while studying technical students”.

Response 3:

Dear Reviewer,

We’d like to thank you for your useful feedback.

We have found a mistake in the scores of the experimental and control groups. The mistakes have been corrected (p. 12, lines 316-327; p. 13 lines 328-345, p. 14 lines 347-367). There is no statement in the text that P=0.089 means some significant difference.

Response 4:

Dear Reviewer,

Thanks to your useful feedback, we have identified misinterpretation of the results of the experimental and control groups. The results have been corrected (p. 1, line 16, p. 12, lines 316, 318- 327; p. 13 lines 328-344; p. 14 line 367; p. 15 lines 385-393, 401-402).

Abstract More importantly, through the Moodle-based ESP e- course, working while studying students got higher scores, especially in reading and writing compared to non-working students (p.1 lines 15-16).

Table 5 (corrected) (p.12 line 316)

Conclusion: Therefore, the Moodle-based ESP course within blended learning proved to be one of the key tools in mastering foreign language skills, especially writing and reading (p. 17 lines 458-459).

Response 5: Dear Reviewer,

We’d like to thank you for your useful feedback. We agree with this comment. Therefore, we have rewritten the Discussion part completely in order to reinforce our arguments for ensuring equal opportunities for working while studying students and non-working students as well as to discuss our research results comparing to prior works in this field (p. 15-16, lines 394-439).

Response to Comments on the Quality of English Language

Response 1:

Dear Reviewer,

We’d like to thank you for your useful feedback.

The native speaker being a specialist in philology was employed to improve the quality of English Language in the manuscript (p. 1- p. 17). Furthermore, we have used the special technical aid to make it correspond to the academic style.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Writing style not upto the standard

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Quality of writing is my upto the mark

Author Response

For research article 3017966

Ensuring equal opportunities in an ESP course for working while studying technical students

 

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments
1. Summary
Thank you very much for taking the time to review our manuscript. Please find the detailed responses below and the corresponding corrections highlighted changes in the re-submitted files.
2. Questions for General Evaluation	Reviewer’s Evaluation	Response and Revisions
Is the content succinctly described and contextualized with respect to previous and present theoretical background and empirical research (if applicable) on the topic?	Must be improved	According to your comments, we have made a thorough revision of the manuscript.
Are the research design, questions, hypotheses and methods clearly stated? Are all the cited references relevant to the research?	Must be improved	We have rewritten the following sections: research design, research questions, hypotheses, and methods.
Are the arguments and discussion of findings coherent, balanced and compelling?	Must be improved	We have rewritten the arguments section and the abstract completely.
For empirical research, are the results clearly presented?	Must be improved	The empirical research results have been corrected. Their description has been reviewed and checked for the second time.
Is the article adequately referenced?	Can be improved	All required references have been added.
Are the conclusions thoroughly  supported by the results presented in the article or referenced in secondary literature?	Must be improved	We have corrected the results both in the Abstract and in the Results section of the article for one more time.
3. Point-by-point response to Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Comments 1: Writing style not upto the standard
Response 1: Dear Reviewer, We are grateful for your valuable comment. To meet the English language quality requirements, English editing has been performed. We have revised our manuscript according to the journal requirements and the standards of widely recognized international research paper styles and APA style paper guidelines. All changes are highlighted in blue in the body of the manuscript. The following changes have been made: 1. We have rewritten the abstract of the manuscript (p. 1, lines 4-19); 2. We have shifted the focus in the first sentence (p. 1, lines 25-26); 3. We have corrected the literature review section (p.2, lines 75-76); 4. We have added some information concerning the placement test (p. 3, lines 103-104); 5. We have specified the experiment (p.3, lines 120-122); 6. We have rewritten Section 2.3 (p. 4, lines 152-156); 7. We have specified the reading test description (p. 7, lines 183-184); 8. We have corrected the statistical analysis section (p. 10, lines 228-242; p. 12 lines 292-300; p. 13 lines 322-326; p. 14 lines 337-343); 9. We have corrected the Discussion section (p. 15, lines 376-396); 10. We have corrected the writing style in order to make the manuscript more readable: p. 1 line 37; p. 2 line 71; p. 3 lines 120-124; p. 4 lines 145-146; p. 4 lines 158-159; p. 5; p. 10 lines 227-228, 243, 245; p. 12 line 290; p. 13 line 331; p. 14 line 334; p.15 lines 358-359; p. 15 lines 381-382; p. 15 lines 385-389.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf