Exploration of an Innovative Curriculum and Pedagogical Approaches for IT Students

Abstract

The empirical research explores a cutting-edge curriculum and instructional methods that are relevant to IT students in general and Saudi IT- students in particular. The respondents were asked objective questions to obtain extensive information about the topic. In addition, they were asked open-ended questions to reveal their intensive opinions about the topic. Such empirical surveys were conducted on IT-students/faculties and professionals to ascertain what language skills and professional abilities the IT students really need to enhance in their educational and occupational domains. The overwhelming empirical findings indicate that the IT-English- curriculum needs to rely on integrated language skills, vocabulary and communicative grammar that are embedded in IT contents. With regard to the instructional methods, it was found that the ESP educators need to adopt such pedagogies that pertain to collaborative approach, learners-cantered and tasks-based instructional methods to let IT-students get adequate opportunity to communicate with their counterparts in their academic domain.