ESP Teaching Research Articles

Humanizująca siła narracji w akademickim nauczaniu EFL jako odpowiedź na wyzwania edukacyjne po pandemii COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic enforced rapid changes in teaching methodology, practically revising the widely applied academic practices and traditional approaches. Upon entering the spaces of classrooms after demanding remote learning, academic teachers and students encounter several challenges that pertain to building humanizing learning environments, as times differ from those before the pandemic. Therefore, promoting humanizing pedagogy in higher education is critically needed right now. The purpose of the article is to detail theoretical and practical solutions for academic teachers to inspire them to implement a narrative approach in their academic classrooms. Empirical studies support that when humanizing pedagogy is put into practice, it can strengthen reflective and dialogic approaches to teaching English, including teaching a specialist language. The practical suggestions on how to implement these approaches into teaching EFL and ESP in the context of Polish higher education distinctively show the potential of narratives and storytelling as didactic tools translating into an opportunity to design modern, high-quality English language courses.

Analyzing non-English major students’ needs, attitudes, and English language learning strategies

Students learn English with different educational backgrounds at university level. Through this course, students can get the opportunity to develop their English competence for their learning success and future professional needs. To maximise the attainments of the goals, ESP teachers need to design ESP courses relevant to the students’ needs and conditions. This study surveyed 180 non-English major students to investigate their needs in learning English, learning attitude, and language learning strategies. The results reveal students still lacking in all English skills and language use. Therefore, ESP teachers should provide learning materials and inputs that can develop students’ English competence. ESP teachers need to struggle to make non-English major students hold a positive attitude toward English language learning. This finding showed that even though the students had confidence and motivation in learning English, they felt anxious and insecure during the teaching and learning process. Since this study involved non-English major students from different educational backgrounds, it was found that students’ language learning strategies were various. The results did not show certain strategies used by the students in learning English in higher education. ESP teachers should provide a variety of teaching techniques that can help students maximise their English language learning.

Teachers’ Perspectives, Practices, and Challenges in English for Specific Purposes in Non-English Major Students

This study aims to obtain teachers’ perspectives, practices, and challenges in English for specific purposes in non-English major students. The researchers distributed some questionnaires as the instrument to the English Teacher Forum. There were seven respondents from some universities; University of Muhammadiyah Makassar, STIMIK Widya Pratama, University of Muhammadiyah Lamongan, University of Mataram, University of Muhammadiyah Magelang, University of Muhammadiyah Banjarmasin, Banyuwangi State Polytechnic, and Indonesian Aviation School (STTKD) Yogyakarta. The questions items focused on obtaining the respondents’ characteristics including the length of teaching ESP, the gender, their major in teaching ESP, etc. Also, it tried to explore the ESP teachers’ perspectives, practices, and the challenges during teaching ESP. The findings stated all respondents have been teaching in other major than English; Economics, Engineering, Health, and Tourism. All respondents agreed to that ESP is an essential part in their learners’ academic and/or professional life, taught by collaboration among English teachers, major teachers, and practitioners with the qualifications such as knowledge in a specific topic and certain sciences, qualify in English to teach the learners in their field of study, English teachers who have experience in the field related with the material taught, and the length of time to encounter the subject or competence certification on the related subject.

“I GET BLANK WHEN START TALKING”: AN EXPLORATION TOWARDS SOURCES AND STRATEGIES OF NON-ENGLISH FRESHMEN’S ANXIETY IN ESP SPEAKING PROGRAM

Foreign language anxiety has been recognized as one of the foremost challenges for language learners. This study intends to explore the sources of non-English freshmen’s anxiety in ESP speaking program and their ways of dealing with it. Similarly, ESP instructors’ solutions to mitigate their freshmen’s anxiety were also discovered. A qualitative approach with an exploratory case study design was conducted to enrich insight and better understand the phenomenon. Data collection involves classroom observations and semi-structured interviews with eight non-English freshmen and two ESP instructors enrolled in ESP speaking program at a private university in Malang, East Java. The data was then analyzed thematically using the interactive model of Miles et al., (2014). It was found that speaking anxiety commonly felt by non-English freshmen was caused by some sources from freshmen’s personal mentality, linguistic capability, and classroom activity. The finding also provides several strategies adopted by freshmen to overcome their anxiety. Furthermore, various approaches implemented by ESP instructors to decrease freshmen’s speaking anxiety were offered. It should be emphasized that anxiety among students will always linger upon learning a foreign language. Still, such learning roadblocks could be diminished. Instructors possess a crucial duty to lessen the worries of learners.

Digital multimodal PechaKucha presentations in ESP: insights from students’ learning experiences

Abstract Advances in digital and audiovisual communication have contributed to the remediation and emergence of genres (Luzón and Pérez-Llantada 2022, giving rise to new discourse practices. Against this backdrop, it becomes important to review ESP pedagogy to better prepare students to communicate effectively in professional settings. For this purpose, ESP teachers should move beyond traditional literacy to embrace multimodality and develop students’ multimodal literacy. This study presents a multimodal genre-based approach to teaching PechaKucha (PK) presentations (Querol-Julián and Beltrán-Palanques 2021) and reports on students’ learning experiences. This pedagogical approach allowed students to explore the genre of PK presentations and reflect on how to construct their own version. The recipients of this approach were 127 ESP students, of which 44 voluntarily completed a survey purposely designed to explore their learning experiences regarding the preparation and performance of a digital PK presentation. Findings suggest that students made a great effort to effectively construct a digitalised PK mainly because of the format requirements. The students were faced with the challenge of making decisions about what and how to represent ideational, textual, and interpersonal meanings through a PK. Finally, this study suggests that students seemed to have become aware of the complexity of expressing meanings through the multimodal genre of PK presentations.

PEDAGOGY OF SOCRATIC METHOD OF TEACHING ESP

Methodology of teaching English for Specific Purposes today is often referred to as eclectic, drawing from various available, established resources and imparting personal lecturer’s standpoints on how and why to teach. Hereby, we advocate and illustrate the use of Socratic method in teaching ESP, with the main arguments addressing the fact that its application at once enhances students’ disciplinary genre communicative skills, the very domain knowledge, and higher order thinking, transversal skills, all directly relevant for their designated professional environment. Socratic method of intellectual exchange also allows for an overall mental and psychological development, strengthening students’ self-awareness and self-confidence. All these advantageous features contribute to students’ success and overall well-being in their professional and scientific environment.

ADAPTING CONTENT-BASED MATERIAL IN ESP COURSES: THE EXAMPLE OF DEBORAH POTTER’S HANDBOOK OF INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

The search for suitable teaching materials in ESP classes requires a lot of effort as available materials rarely satisfy all the specific needs of language learners in a particular subject area or syllabus. This is why some ESP teachers resort to adapting existing learning materials. This paper describes the motivation to adapt authentic content-based material for the use in English for Journalism courses within the academic study program of Journalism at the University of Zagreb. It outlines concrete techniques employed in adapting the Handbook of Independent Journalism written by Deborah Potter. These adapting techniques, primarily deletion and omitting, supplementation and rewriting of the original text, help learners to better identify specific morpho-syntactic features of English for Journalism, which is required by the syllabus. The main effect of material adaptation is better identification and acquisition of morpho-syntactic structures pertaining to English for Journalism. Overall, the adapted material re-engages learners with the content of the Handbook and thus enhances learning.

Application of ESP Teaching Mode Based on English Learning Styles of College Students Majoring in Arts and Sports

Application of ESP Teaching Mode Based on English Learning Styles of College Students Majoring in Arts and Sports

Retracted: Construction of University English Informatization Learning Environment Based on ESP Teaching Mode

Retracted: Construction of University English Informatization Learning Environment Based on ESP Teaching Mode

An Integrated Approach to ESP Teaching: A Case Study

This article is about the relevance of the integrated approach in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teaching. The purpose was to show the extent to which that teaching approach is essential in meeting ESP learners’ needs, as compared to a training based on grammar points and discrete items of the language. The study was grounded in the genre theory and it was made around main questions as follows: what is the appropriate approach to ESP teaching-learning? Should teaching ESP be about discrete items, grammar, or an integrated approach? What does the adoption of the integrated approach entail? To address these concerns, we conducted a research with the target population (6 learners from two different companies), through a semi-structured interview guide. The findings revealed that the integrated approach gives to ESP courses more meaning. The implementation of authentic activities is a means of giving the possibility to the students to build and acquire global knowledge in the language, which is far better than focusing on grammar points and isolated and floating terminologies.

ESP Need Analysis of Computer and Network Engineering in Vocational High School

A vocational school is an educational institution that focuses on providing students with practical skills and training for specific careers or professions. Unfortunately, the English lessons given to vocational schools still follow the same English as English in general high school which does not support their needs in their specific major resulted in gaps in English skill for vocational students. The gaps between secondary schools teaching English and vocational schools in terms of resources, curriculum, and even infrastructure. Examining the ESP of computer and network engineering in vocational high school was the aim of this study. As research tools for this study, a questionnaire about needs analysis, analysis of textbooks, and analysis of interviews were used. The findings indicated that in vocational schools, ESP teaching and learning based on the school program is needed by both students and teachers. The poor value of English language proficiency, particularly ESP in vocational schools, is due to a number of factors, including a lack of ESP for computer and network engineering starting from the content, such as textbooks, suitable school facilities, and even the competence of teachers to teach ESP.

Transitivity Analysis in English for Logistics: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Study

This study discusses the transitivity process. transitivity helps us in understanding the relationship between subject, object, and action in a sentence. This research aims to determine the process type of English clause in English for Logistics Books by Grussendorf (2009). The data is obtained from six reading comprehension articles contained in the book. The main theory used a transitivity system based on Halliday & Matthiessen (2014b). The method used qualitative description. The result of this research states that four types of processes are used in this research. They are the material, mental, relational, and verbal processes. The dominant frequency of occurrence process in this research is the mental process as much as at 35%. This research may involve ESP teaching process, especially for Logistics Business Students.

Building Tour-Guiding Skills During the ESP Course. Tourism Students’ Vision of Their Potential Professional Development

"Faced with an abundant array of professional paths to follow upon graduation, some of them not even in their own domain, many tourism students steer their future career towards tour-guiding. After all, being paid to travel the world and meet new people is not at all a bad start to the hospitality industry. However, a tour guide’s role is a very complex one: from facilitating the transmission of cultural/ historical/geographical information to mediating communication in a pluricultural space; from physically leading the tourists’ group through the meandering city streets to solving tourist-host linguistic misunderstandings, to name just a few. A plethora of communication and soft skills are involved in exercising this job and in preparing students to practice it to the highest standards possible. The current presentation endeavors to delineate the skills and activities an ESP teacher should focus on for best preparing the students for this job. In this respect, the teacher’s perspective has been generously influenced by the students’ own perceptions on their potential new career and the knowledge they extracted from their specialism courses. Keywords: tour guiding, mediating communication, facilitating pluricultural space, cultural ambassadors, communication and soft skills."

UTILIZING DIGITAL LEARNING RESOURCES IN ENGLISH-SPECIFIC PURPOSES LEARNING CLASSROOM: ESP TEACHERS’ PERSPECTIVES

Nowadays, the development of technology has significantly affected how ESP teachers deliver their learning materials in the language classroom. This study aims to reveal the perceptions of ESP teachers towards digital learning technology devices used, both inside and outside the classroom. There are 25 ESP teachers of Serang Raya University engaged in this research. By using a questionnaire through Google Forms, this research revealed that although some students understand the importance of using digital devices in teaching practice in the classroom, they admit that their use has not been maximized due to their lack of knowledge about digital learning media.

Challenges and Difficulties Faced by ESP Teachers in Teaching during COVID-19 Pandemic in Iraq

E-teaching quickly became an essential way for educational institutions and universities during the global COVID-19 pandemic, as teaching during the breakdown has brought education to a new level. The present study aimed to investigate the challenges and difficulties faced ESP teachers in online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iraq and also clarify the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on changing the methods of teaching. The study is important to show the role of online teaching and the teachers’ barriers to online teaching. The study aims to answer the following question: Are there any challenges and difficulties faced the ESP teachers in e-teaching during the covid-19 pandemic? And what are the factors that cause these challenges and difficulties? The study is limited to ESP teachers at Al-Nahrain /College of political sciences during the academic year 2022-2023. The participants of this research are ESP teachers, who have been teaching English for specific purposes for years. Twenty ESP teachers were chosen randomly for this study. An online questionnaire and interview were designed by using Google Forms for this purpose. The data analyzed qualitatively. The results showed that there are many problems facing the ESP teachers in online teaching. These problems may be solved by acquiring training, technical skills, and the development of information and technology. The conclusion showed there are numerous challenges and difficulties face Iraqi teachers in teaching on-line.

Professionally Significant Personality Traits and Soft Power Skills Development in Esp Teaching

Miscommunication in pilots’ and air traffic controllers’ radio exchange has always been a deep concern in aviation. Standard phraseology provides pilots and air traffic controllers with special phrases to minimize the risk of miscommunication in a multilingual environment. It is designed to facilitate unambiguous and concise radio exchange. In non-standard situations, which are not covered by standard phraseology, the ability to use plain language is a must. The language training aims to ensure that language activity does not distract pilots’ and air traffic controllers’ attention and saves time to make the right decisions. The authors believe that improvement of professionally significant personality traits such as motivation, emotional stability, the accuracy of reaction, thinking elasticity, logical reasoning as well as the ability to process information quickly, select reasonable hypotheses, picture flight environment, predict the development of the situation, and anticipate the result of the activity can be a highly efficient way to reach this goal. The authors also consider soft power skills as an indispensable part of pilots’ skill sets and distinguish the most significant of them. The problem is that the points mentioned above are not included in the pilots’ and air traffic controllers’ language training. Therefore, the research aims to identify a set of professionally significant personality traits and develop ways of their improvement. The most efficient digital resources are distinguished. The research outcomes will significantly contribute to flight safety.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Medical English Course Syllabuses

This article presents an analysis of the teacher-student power relationship embedded in three English for Medical Purposes (EMP) course syllabuses at a case study university. The study employs Fairclough's critical discourse analytical approach to examine the linguistic elements of the syllabuses, including verbs, modality, and quantifying adjectives. The findings reveal that the syllabuses textually represent an unequal power relationship, with the teachers holding significant authority over the students. This finding is significant as it contradicts some recommendations that ESP teaching should avoid a teacher-centred approach. By analysing the linguistic elements of the syllabuses, this study provides valuable insights into the power dynamics in EMP courses and highlights the importance of critically examining course materials for equitable and student-centred learning environments.

Lecturers’ Perception in Using YouTube for Teaching ESP

Information and communication technology (ICT) developments have completely changed how education is delivered. The lecturers especially English for Specific Purposes lecturers have been encouraged to use websites such as YouTube to promote better and best learning among the ‘Net Generation’ students. YouTube is an option media for teaching listening of ESP. The purposes of this study are to explain the benefits of YouTube in ESP classes especially in teaching listening based on the lecturers’ perception. This study used descriptive qualitative research design. YouTube is also one of websites that can support ESP teaching and Learning Process especially in listening. YouTube video is shared to the students by the lecturers when they teach listening of ESP in the class. Using YouTube in teaching listening of ESP classes was very benficial for the lecturers and the students. Besides, the lecturers’ perceptions on using YouTube were very interesting and useful teaching and learning in ESP classes.
 
 Keywords: YouTube, Teaching ESP, ESP classes.

The Potential of ICT Tools for Achieving Better Achievement in Learning English for Specific Purposes in the Context of Hybrid Learning

Educational technology as an interdisciplinary field whose subject of study is the effective use of modern technology in education is very significant when we talk about changes within the educational system. Bearing in mind that educational technology includes both means and procedures used in the teaching and learning process, the goal of its application is to increase the efficiency of the teaching process itself, as well as student achievement in learning. The paper is based on the assumption that the application of ICT tools in the teaching ESP has the potential to contribute to the success of students in mastering the desired material. The research subject of this paper is the examination of the impact of the application of information and communication technologies in teaching on the learning ESP vocabulary at the academic level in the context of hybrid learning. With the aim of examining the mentioned impact, a survey was conducted on a convenient sample of 50 first-year students of the Faculty of Business Studies and Law and the Faculty of Information Technology and Engineering, UNION University "Nikola Tesla" in Belgrade. The obtained results are contrary to our expectations that teaching organized with the help of ICT will lead to a significant progress of the experimental group compared to the control group on the knowledge retest and indicate that although teaching generally leads to progress in the achievement of students of both groups, the use of ICT in teaching, in the way it was performed in this research makes no difference in terms of that progress.

Use of Different Tools in Teaching a Foreign Language in ESP Lessons

This article provides information on the specific aspects of teaching a foreign language to students of higher education institutions in ESP classrooms. ESP teachers play an important role in high education.