NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC LEARNING AND CONTENT-BASED INSTRUCTION OF ENGLISH FOR AVIATION

English for aviation industry is one of the most internationalized and content-language consistent areas of English for Specific Purposes, and it urgently requires new methods for teaching it, especially for the purpose of aviation safety. ICAO guidelines for Aviation English Training programs (Cir 323, 2003) demand to teach content-and-language integrated courses of English to the professionals of the aviation industry with the listening skills, speaking skills and vocabulary as key targets. A teacher of aviation-related English at the university level is aimed to integrate students into communication process in English in professional context, and therefore, has to create this context for them. Watching documentary films in English on aviation topics may be one of the effective and efficient tools to make the process of learning English a content-based one and encouraging cognitive abilities of students. While there are many different non-fiction films on aviation, not any film can be integrated into the educational process of university students, though. Films of the National Geographic Channel provide the new learning initiative built around a set of attitudes, skills, and knowledge that embody the attributes of a student-explorer. They are a source of the language and content to observe and document, they stimulate students to communicate new knowledge, motivate a new type of understanding of the professional world and its language from spoken language and audio-video media. Films of the National Geographic channel have been the subject of the study, and documentaries Inside Miami Airport, Megastructures: Airbus A380, Megafactories: Boeing 747 are considered to be relevant to the English-learning objectives during the introductory aviation-related English course (about 100 academic hours), which goal is to level off the English command of students after high school, introduce students to basic aviation concepts, prepare them to the specific professionally oriented English program (English for air-mechanics, air-logistics, ground services, economics, avionics etc.). Watching films in the classroom places students into the general aviation context, encounter them with real-English professional background and terminology, master their listening skills (both general and for detail), interconnect visual content with its verbal implementation, as authentic information is presented in a dynamic and emotional manner. The paper summarizes the personal perspective on classroom exploration of video-studies and focuses on criteria for film selection for students of civil aviation background, shares the language-and-content teaching model, looks at the stages of film studies, discusses in-class challenges.