Teaching Technical Vocabulary at Universities: Which, How and When?

Technical vocabulary is generally considered a marginal section of the total vocabulary needed by language learners to communicate in the foreign language. As such it is not included in the main production of language textbooks, which brings several challenges to the language instructors who are required to teach it. This paper reviews several aspects related to teaching technical vocabulary: how to identify it and select it, how to present it to the learners, and at what stage of language learning we can introduce it. Although the examples of good practice were taken from the domain of engineering, it is assumed that the methods and approaches have a great potential to be applied in teaching languages to all university students.