Enhancing the teaching effect of ESP for engineering students with interactive tools based on WeChat

As a prerequisite for EMI (English as Medium of Instruction) specialized courses, ESP (English for Specific Purposes) is supposed to help the engineering students learn the academic vocabulary and terms, discuss the related topics, and improve their research skills. Besides, comparing to the EMI specialized courses in which the teachers usually have pressure to cover a lot of academic contents, ESP might be the most suitable course for Chinese engineering students to improve the interacting and presenting skills in English. Nowadays, WeChat is the most popular social app in China. WeChat public platform provides an efficient way to share and spread information. In order to enhance the teaching effect and the student engagement, two WeChat-based interactive tools, Rain classroom and Formtalk, were adopted in the ESP classroom for 40 electronic engineering students. The students' feedbacks were also collected by the interactive tools before, during and after the lectures. The purpose of this paper is to describe the methods and share the experiences.