ESP Classes: Sharing a Report

Abstract

English for specific purposes, ESP, has been taught in Iran’s higher educational centers for years. For certain reasons, however, these courses have been marginalized and less exposed to expert’s criticism and evaluation. To evaluate the effectiveness of these courses in assisting the students to achieve the desired educational objectives, non-participant observations of ESP classes in two of the country’s institutions of higher education were carried out. Based on our observations, we found that developing the reading skills was the main objective of these classes. Moreover, it was found that the students in their struggle to comprehend the assigned reading texts had problems in recognizing the basic sentence structure, the grammatical functions of gerunds, polysemous words and passive voice. The level of difficulty of the texts was found to be the source of reading problems as well. Considering the findings from the observed classes, the paper offers some practical suggestions for qualitative promotion of the classes.