Developing Materials for English for Specific Purposes Online Course within the Blended Learning Concept

Developing appropriate language materials for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is an essential component of its practice. The paper addresses the issue of adapting authentic technical texts to make them more suitable as well as attractive for a particular type of a learner. Firstly, the main problems teachers usually face when designing ESP courses have been discussed. Then, the author gives some suggestions as how to select and evaluate authentic texts highlighting the principles that could be taken into consideration when designing the English language course for technology students. After that, the author presents the way how authentic and highly technical texts on advanced machining processes that are being studied and researched at the Faculty of Manufacturing Technologies were selected, adapted and consequently integrated in the form of online course into the existing Moodle platform of the Technical University. Finally, several extracts from the online ESP course showing how specialized authentic texts can be modified to serve the interaction purpose have been presented.