Awareness raising in teaching ESP

In a gathering with friends not long ago, I showed them a photo of me and my family taken in Australia. I was hoping they would ask where the place was so I could brag about it. But a friend started commenting how alike my dad and I were while another teased that my big belly showed in the photo. In the end, to my dismay, no one cared to ask where the photo was taken.

In the ESP classroom, sometimes the teacher thinks he has done his job by giving students samples of texts, hoping they would pick up all the important features of the specific genre. However, after looking at so many different samples of business letters in class, I almost fainted only to realise that nearly one quarter of the batch of students had written the date as 2008.6.23 instead of 23 June 2008 in their letter writing assignment. I honestly had not expected something like this could be an issue. Though in hindsight, I realised I had not done enough to raise the students' awareness of how dates are supposed to be written formally in English. I took for granted that the students should have been able to pick it up by themselves from the samples, but I was proven wrong. Similar to the experience about my photo and friends, students may not always notice what the teacher wants them to, unless they have been purposely guided by the teacher. From the students' point of view, a simple sample of business letter can consist of a mountain of information to be absorbed and digested.

I'm not saying that after awareness raising, students will not make any mistakes. In fact, I would fully agree that one has to make mistakes in order to learn. However, I also think that a well-planned and thought-out awareness raising task could help make our teaching more effective and class time more worthwhile. Students don't always have to wait until after the practice stage to learn what they haven't learnt.