Mother tongue interference in translating engineering ESP terminology: Issues and implications

Background and Purpose: English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instruction in Iran is still mostly focused on traditional ways. This study aims to investigate ESP teachers’ and students’ perceptions of integrating Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in ESP instruction to solve traditional ESP instruction problems in Iran.
 
 Methodology: This concurrent parallel mixed method study investigated students’ and teachers’ perceptions of solving ESP instruction problems through ICT. The sample concluded 300 undergraduate engineering students and 24 experienced and novice ESP teachers. In the quantitative phase of the study, data were collected through two adapted questionnaires. In the qualitative phase, data were obtained from interviews with 12 undergraduate students, three experienced, and three novice ESP teachers.
 
 Findings: The findings revealed that the participants had positive perceptions of integrating different ICT tools for solving the problems with traditional ESP materials and methods, problems with low language skills, lack of autonomy, demotivation problem, inactivity problem, and problems with lack of exposure to real-life situations. The findings also showed that integrating different ICT tools and ICT-based interactive activities promote students’ communication skills subconsciously through experiencing direct participation in communications.
 
 Conclusion and Contributions:he findings might contribute significantly to change the ESP instruction status quo in Iran, which is not based on the ESP students’ communication needs, and replace it with innovative approaches to meet the needs of the modern ESP student. The results also provide a unique outlook of promoting ESP instruction in tertiary education by integrating ICTs through divergent stakeholder perceptions.
 
 Keywords: English for Specific Purposes (ESP), Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Perception, Promoting English for Specific Purposes instruction
 
 Cite as: Keshtiarast, B., Salehi, H., Tabatabaei, O., & Baharlooie, R. (2022). Solving ESP problems: Students and teachers’ perceptions of integrating information and communication technology into ESP instruction. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 7(2), 444-472. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol7iss2pp444-472

This study focuses on examining four Indonesian English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teachers’ experiences regarding their identity construction and negotiation in a language institute. Given the concern on an analytic framework by an adapted model of TESOL teacher identity, the teachers’ experiences were explored through life-history interview. The results revealed a complex process of transforming professional practices and constructing identities in relation to the struggles of becoming ESP teachers. The participants constructed ESP teacher identities through acquiring subject knowledge via professional development activities and building a sense of intrinsic fulfillment in becoming ESP teachers. However, the participants found challenge to cope with the students’ demands of learning ESP. Furthermore, a need to equip the ESP teachers with ESP skills in various subject knowledge areas became the participants’ concern in order to meet the students’ expectancy as well as to enhance their professional development.

The consideration of mastering English nowadays brings advanced concept in order to reach better education and career in globalization era and the mindset changes of English language education, particularly in nursing as a familiar job within public health. Related to that phenomenon, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teacher should also notice that in teaching ESP they have to play their roles to help students in the teaching and learning process. Considering the importance of the teacher’s roles in teaching ESP, this study aimed at finding out the teacher’s roles in the teaching and learning process of ESP to nursing program students. Besides, this study also aimed at finding out the students responses towards the roles in the teaching and learning process of ESP to nursing program students. This qualitative case study focuses primarily on understanding in depth the teacher’s roles in the teaching and learning process of ESP to nursing program students. The data to cope with ‘the roles played by the teacher in the teaching of ESP’ were both verbal and nonverbal performance when the teachers were playing their roles in classroom while the data to deal with ‘the students’ response towards the teacher’s roles’ were the students’ opinion and attitude towards the teachers’ performance in the classroom. For both research questions, the data collection and analysis procedures were done using classroom observations (using audio visual recording, observation sheet, and fields note), questionnaire and interview (for both the teacher and students). This study found that the kinds of roles played by the research subjects were as the lecturer, clinical or practical teacher, role model, facilitator, mentor, assessor, curriculum assessor, resource developer, and study guide producer. This study also found that the students’ responses towards the teacher’s roles were that they liked when the teacher could do their roles well in the class. The students could also be able to understand their response towards the teacher’s roles that would have impact to their learning process, thus they became active and enthusiastic. While each of the nine of the eleven roles played has been described separately, in reality they are often interconnected and closely related one to another. The teacher’s roles in the teaching and learning process of ESP to nursing program students could be used by teachers as

This study aims to identify novice English for specific purposes (ESP) teachers’ professional development needs with regard to academic practice, ESP students, curriculum development and program implementation. The research was implemented at a foreign languages department of a foundation university. Research sample was composed of 12 non-native English instructors teaching ESP courses to undergraduate students. A mixed-methods sequential explanatory design was utilized in the study. Findings revealed that the teachers did not know how to cooperate with the faculty and promote students’ higher order thinking skills in ESP courses. The results indicated a scarcity of textbooks and materials on ESP teaching besides a need for support during pre and in service teacher education on how to teach ESP. It was also found the teachers felt insecure when working individually so they sought more collaboration with faculty members and other ESP teachers.

Along with the growing practice of teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in non-English departments of tertiary education, it is essential to investigate the challenges faced by ESP teachers. It can be a basis for proposing policies for the improvement of ESP practice. This study was driven by the fact that ESP classes in non-English departments are allocated limited credit hours, and the teachers are generally General English teachers with no experience and training in teaching ESP. Thus, this study attempted to investigate the fundamental challenges faced by ESP teachers in one state and four private higher education institutions. The data of this qualitative study were obtained through interviews with five ESP teachers. The interview questions were mainly concerned with the knowledgeability and competence in teaching related to subject-specific contexts, adequacy of ESP training, needs analysis, and classroom condition. The findings reveal that the evident challenges encountered by ESP teachers were: lacking knowledge on students’ field of study, lacking of ESP training, lacking of proper needs analysis, large classes, and various learners’ English competencies. The findings of this study suggest that policymakers (stakeholders) should pay more attention to the practice of ESP teaching, especially in non-English departments, by reforming policy in order to minimize the problems faced by ESP teachers and to improve the practice of ESP teaching.

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teaching is considered a separate activity in the domain of English Language Teaching \cite{dudley1998developments}. ESP primarily aims to prepare and fulfill a set of the communicative needs of ESP learners in academic and professional contexts. These needs serve as a guide to design relevant course content and adopt appropriate teaching method with particular emphasis on the kind of English to be taught and the topics to be covered. The current study attempts to investigate through the perceptions of ESP teachers and ESP learners the effective role of subject matter specialists (henceforth SMSs) in the teaching of ESP courses at postgraduate level in Pakistan. The sample size taken for this study comprises of 10 ESP teachers selected through snowball sampling technique and 50 ESP learners chosen through purpose sampling from three different disciplines of management sciences. Open ended questionnaire and interviews were used for data collection. The data were thematically analyzed. The analysis of ESP teachers' data suggested English language competence, pedagogic competence and awareness of the learners' prospective communicative needs in academic and workplace contexts. The analysis of ESP learners' data indicated that subject matter specialists along with content area knowledge need to have good command of English language as well. From the comparative analyses of ESP teachers and ESP learners' data, this study concludes that for effective ESP teaching to any group of ESP learners, an ESP teacher irrespective of the academic background (ELTs or Subject Matter Specialists) needs to have English language competence, pedagogic skills and how much they know about the learners' target communicative needs.

The use of the monolingual method in the teaching and learning process has drawn a lot of criticism from education professionals as well as language learners, in line with the growing use of translanguaging in language learning. Translanguaging allows users to use their linguistic resources as a new paradigm for utilising more than one language when learning a foreign language. The current study examined how English for Specific Purpose (ESP) teachers and students utilised and interpreted translanguaging in healthcare learning contexts. This study used a mixed research method using the instruments of observation, semi-structured interviews, and questionnaires, involving 150 nursing students and 5 ESP lecturers as the study participants. The study revealed that nursing students generally have a positive attitude towards translanguaging practice in ESP classes. The five ESP teachers are aware of the efficacy of translanguaging for content instruction to improve comprehension, foster solidarity in the classroom, and produce better learning outcomes, especially for those with lower ESP language proficiency. Most teachers also call for the continuation of the translanguaging philosophy and practice by supporting language policies that relate to its use in ESP learning. This paper also confers the insinuations of the study's findings concerning the requirement for contextualised translanguaging implementation and system construction. It is advised that the use of translanguaging by multilingual learners in ESP learning should be seen by instructors and students from a wider viewpoint.

The ESP teaching model is more suitable for cultivating professional talents than the traditional college English teaching, making college English a vocational education position and breaking through the limitations of the previous education system on the development of college English. In the era of new media, ESP (English for Specific Purposes) teaching can provide targeted English teaching based on students’ majors, prompting students to adapt to professional development, so as to meet the requirements of college students for English teaching in the future. This paper analyzes the basic concepts of ESP, combines the current status of ESP teaching in Chinese universities, and proposes ESP teaching strategies based on mobile learning. In order to improve the quality and efficiency of college ESP teaching work, so as to promote the development of college ESP education.

Despite the growth of research on English for specific purposes (ESP) teachers over the past two decades, the scope of research that focally examines ESP teachers’ emotions is limited. The present study explored 10 Iranian ESP teachers’ emotion labor. Collecting data from questionnaires, narrative frames, and semi-structured interviews, we show how contextual discourses, policies, and expectations of ESP instruction interact with the teacher participants across four areas of pedagogy, assessment, materials, and curriculum and culture. Our findings indicated that content featured as a significant factor in the teachers’ emotions, agency, and identity directly, indirectly, and specifically through content-related discourses and participants. More specifically, it is not necessarily the content itself that along with language shape ESP teachers’ professional sense-making; rather, the way content manifolds in institutional work and interacts with language through various contextualities, modalities, and participants functions more profoundly in ESP teachers’ work. We provide implications for ESP teachers to draw on their collegial potentials to form communities of practice that positively contribute to their professional growth and transform their negative emotions into mutual emotionality.

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teacher development has become a crucial issue in ESP teaching and research. How to equip ESP teachers with necessary knowledge and skills in the digital era becomes a hot topic. A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is a potential pedagogical approach to realize learning-centered in ESP teacher development. This paper is an exploratory research which attempts to integrate Learning Management System (LMS) with Personal Learning Environment for the training of ESP teachers at tertiary education in China. Based on the previous research on the seven-factor technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge (TPACK) framework and the five-factor skill Framework for ESP teachers in China, a PLE-ESP platform was built in the form of a website (www.esper.cn). The platform was evaluated with 20 ESP participants within a two-month pilot study. A survey about the value and flexibility of the platform was carried out, the result of which indicated an improvement on the skills required in ESP teaching, learners’ self-regulated learning competency and their ICT literacy. Recommendations were made for future research on the successful integration and maintenance of PLE and LMS.

In today’s globalized creative industries, English proficiency is not merely a supportive skill but a core component of professional literacy, especially in advertising. However, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instruction often fails to reflect the communicative realities of design students, leading to a disconnect between language learning and domain-specific needs. This study explores how advertising students at Politeknik Negeri Media Kreatif engage with English when crafting brand messages in visual campaigns. The aim is to identify the linguistic challenges they face and the pedagogical adjustments needed in ESP instruction. Employing a qualitative research design, this study involved 15 advertising students as participants. Data were collected through document analysis of student-produced advertising materials, semi-structured interviews, and classroom observations. Thematic analysis revealed five core findings: (1) English use was shaped more by intuitive creativity than formal instruction; (2) students showed resourcefulness in digital-assisted writing but struggled with genre-specific tone and idiomatic accuracy; (3) multimodal synergy between text and visuals was enhanced by linguistic confidence; (4) collaborative language support was seen as lacking; and (5) students called for more context-specific ESP learning experiences. The study contributes to ESP and design education by proposing a reimagined ESP curriculum that includes task-based, genre-driven, and collaborative approaches tailored to creative disciplines. Findings suggest that integrating language instruction with design practice enhances students' communicative competence and their ability to produce globally resonant advertising content. This research supports a shift from generalized English training toward a more embedded, practice-oriented ESP pedagogy in design education.

Integrating translation in English for specific purposes (ESP) teaching and learning is a crucial issue since the last decade of the 20th century. This paper aims to analyse the role of translation as a helpful tool for ESP classes on the use of translation in ESP teaching and learning. Therefore, a case study is employed to describe the necessity of using translation in ESP classes, especially, for third-year computer science students at the University of Tlemcen. A mixed method was used; a questionnaire was administered to ESP teachers in the Department of Science and Technology, and classroom observation on third-year students of computer science was conducted. The results revealed that computer sciences students at the University of Tlemcen faced various hindrances when dealing with professional resources which are mainly at the level of content due to the nature of ESP courses they were exposed to during their studies.
 Keywords: Computer science; ESP; ESP courses; students; translation.

The aim of this research is to investigate teaching and learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP) at SMK Negeri 2 Cirebon using the authentic materials. The method which used in this research is descriptive qualitative research. The techniques of collecting data are observation, interview and document study to know the process of teaching and learning ESP using authentic materials. The population in this research is students of hotel accommodation program. The sample of this research was a hotel accommodation class and an English teacher. The validity data in this research are credibility, dependability, transferability and conformability. Credibility refers to triangulation data of the observation, interview transcriptions and documents. Dependability refers to parallels prove, transferability refers to study previous document and conformability refers to the research objectivity. The result of this research shows that the process using authentic materials in teaching ESP works good, because the teacher selected the authentic learning materials appropriately relevance with students’ needs and interests. Therefore, the teacher has positive response and the students also have the positive responses to the teaching and learning ESP using authentic materials. In this research, the researcher found good portrait of authentic materials toward teaching and learning ESP at hotel accommodation program and the positive response between teacher and students about teaching and learning ESP using the authentic material. Keywords: ESP, Authentic Materials, Teaching Speaking

Assessing learners has constantly played a considerable role in teaching and learning process. This significance is obviously observed in teaching foreign languages in general and teaching English for specific purposes (ESP) in particular. Since in the global community, English language is considered as the major medium in techno- scientific communications and interactions, the demand for academic considerations for teaching and developing ESP as a central interdisciplinary course is increasingly growing. This growing tendency has created opportunities for designing and developing various technical and special course materials around the globe. In Iran, as well as the other countries, this movement has been with the main objective of promoting the quality of teaching reading comprehension skills along with translation techniques into the native language and developing relevant technical terminologies in every major. However, still a sort of inconsistency among teaching ESP, publishing ESP materials, and developing final exam ESP tests exists. This inconsistency emerged as the role of ELT specialists in each of the above mentioned activities disqualified the educational values of teaching and learning ESP. Although the administrators and authorities have allocated great amount of budget to designing, developing and holding courses, as well as ESP instructors' payments, still the quality and the efficiency is not as high as expected. Thus, considering the existing gap, the researchers in the present study have attempted to critically study and analyze the final exam tests of ESP for students of accounting in Islamic Azad University, Shahr-e- Rey branch, in Tehran in order to highlight the current problems and propose practical solutions in this regard.

It is believed that the time that the undergraduate students register in Teacher Education Program they have an extensive amount of experience, but English for specific purpose (ESP) teachersor pre-service ESP teachers are regarded as valuable resources for recognizing attitudes or perceptions of effectiveness of ESP teachers whose classless are taught by them. Pre-service teachers surely have several specific perceptions about their future career and the effectiveness of ESP teachers whose classes are being taught by them during practice teaching. If ESP teachers are asked the question why do you want to be anESP teacher? They may have different responses such as: I want to be an ESP teacher because I have a very good image of my teachers during my school period or I want to be a ESP teacher because I would like to follow the methods and procedures of effective teaching that my university teachers did during teaching specific courses. However, some might have an opposite perception. Anyway, this study tries to compare the perceptions of ESP teachers before (pre-service) and after (in-service) teaching period.