Design-based research of an e-coursebook for ESP

The paper deals with the design-based research of an e-coursebook for English for specific purposes (hereinafter referred to as ESP) which can serve as an example of good practice for teachers in higher education. Despite a range and variety of coursebooks for ESP available on the market, it is still rare to find those meeting both the students’ needs and the course requirements. Often teachers have to either adapt existing learning materials or design their own materials. Therefore, the need arises to design a made-to-measure e-coursebook for the particular course of ESP and thus to offer considerable benefits to ESP learning and teaching in terms of space, storage, accessibility, availability and currency of information.

The aim of this research project is to establish a link between the design of an e-coursebook English for Information Technology and its iterative testing for the purpose of evaluation and re-design so that the coursebook would be the most appropriate teaching and learning tool for the target group of students. The coursebook was designed for the students of the Bachelor’s study programme English in Electrical Engineering and Informatics which is guaranteed by the Department of Foreign Languages of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication at Brno University of Technology. The first part of this paper frames the concept of design-based research as a research design which puts emphasis on the development of research-based solutions to complex problems in educational practice and development or validation of theories about learning processes and learning environments. The second part outlines the design-based research of the e-coursebook English for Information Technology. It focuses on the research objectives, individual stages of the research, description of research samples and development of data collection tools.