Designing ESP courses in higher education: Challenges and solutions
Tiffany Pang*
With a focus on developing learners’ English communicative competence in a specific domain, the approach of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has attracted worldwide attention for nearly half a century. While multiple benefits of the ESP approach have been uncovered and discussed, perhaps unsurprisingly, there have been numerous skeptical voices regarding its effectiveness. In this blog post, I will draw on my experience in developing an ESP course for undergraduates in Hong Kong to address two major challenges faced by ESP course developers: 1) learners’ diversified discipline-specific needs and 2) teachers’ lack of specialized knowledge. My aim is to explicate how each of these two challenges can be overcome by the incorporation of self-discovery learning into the ESP curriculum.
Learners’ diversified discipline-specific needs
The first task of an ESP course developer is to ensure compatibility between the course’s intended learning outcomes and the students’ areas of study. However, given that each subject area (e.g. business, engineering) comprises multiple sub-disciplines, it is utterly challenging to construct course materials that are highly specific to the learners’ areas of expertise (see Ahyar & Sari, 2018). For instance, as one of the course developers for English for Social Sciences and Humanities, I must take into account the needs of the learners from a range of disciplines, including psychology, criminology, history, social work, political sciences, translation and linguistics. As the nature of these disciplines is completely different, it is highly questionable, if not totally impossible, for one to design an ESP course that could meet all or most of the specific needs of the learners. This may also be the reason why when the course English for Social Sciences and Humanities was first launched, students’ feedback comments were extremely diverse, even contradictory. While some thought the course was very useful, others did not find any relevance between the knowledge they acquired and their major.
Reading the students’ feedback comments, I thought: rather than giving fish to students, why not teach them how to fish? In other words, instead of tailoring course materials to learners’ discipline-specific needs, it is better to equip them with the skills they need to discover the knowledge applicable in their own areas of study. For instance, in this course, English for Social Sciences and Humanities, one way to facilitate students’ ability to self-discover is through implementing a corpus-based approach (see Chirobocea, 2017), whereby students acquire knowledge of corpus compilation, keyword and/or concordance analysis. Building on this knowledge, they learn how to compile a specialized corpus from authentic, discipline-specific materials and explore the language features/patterns that are commonly found in their own field of study. What is more, students may be given the option of compiling their own specialized corpora, drawing language comparisons between, for example, social work and political sciences, in such a way that would enable them to explore inter-disciplinary linguistic variations on their own.
Teachers’ lack of specialized knowledge
Back in 1987, Tom Hutchinson and Alan Waters highlighted the essential qualities of an ESP teacher. These included the possession of both general English language knowledge and professional knowledge of the students’ areas of study. However, as most ESP teachers are language and/or education graduates, it is unlikely that they are equipped with specialized knowledge of students’ areas of study (Ahyar & Sari, 2018). Arguably, the ESP teacher may find it difficult to carry out in-class activities, let alone answer enquiries vis-à-vis topics, terminologies and concepts that they may be unfamiliar (or insufficiently familiar) with. Under such circumstances, it becomes a challenge for ESP courses to achieve teaching and learning outcomes. One solution is to provide regular training to ESP teachers (see Finney, 2002). However, as somebody who has experience in dealing with hundreds of complaints from colleagues, I do not find Finney’s (2002) suggestion realistic, at least not in the context of Hong Kong higher education. Due to increasingly heavy teaching and marking workloads, teachers are strained; they do not have the physical and mental capacity to receive additional training on a regular basis.
This is where self-discovery learning comes into play. By incorporating teaching and learning activities that encourage self-discovery, ESP course developers enable instructors to take up the role of facilitator in the classroom, and students the role of active learners. The latter learn how to discover the knowledge that they truly need under the guidance of their teachers. However, to ensure the student-centredness of self-discovery, ESP course developers should draft detailed instructions for their colleagues, who in turn would use these instructions to provide step-by-step guidance to students. On the one hand, this pedagogical set-up can help instructors deliver lesson contents smoothly, thereby maximizing learning outcomes; on the other, it has the potential to reduce the time instructors spend on lesson preparation.
In this blog post, I have discussed and suggested approaches to mitigating two major challenges in ESP course development. While ESP researchers emphasize students’ needs, ESP course developers are under constant pressure to accommodate the needs of both teachers and students, striving in doing so to mediate between theory and practice. Rather than dream of the perfect ESP course, the only thing we can do, perhaps, is work to bridge the gap between reality and idealism.
References:
Ahyar, J., & Sari, D. K. (2018). Challenges in designing ESP course for first year students of Engineering Faculty at Malikussaleh University. In Proceedings of the Malikussaleh International Conference on Multidisciplinary Studies (MICoMS) 2017 (Emerald Reach Proceedings Series, Vol. 1) (pp. 563-568). Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited.
Chirobocea, O. (2017). The good and the bad of the corpus-based approach (or data-driven learning) to ESP teaching. Mircea cel Batran Naval Academy Scientific Bulletin, 20(1), 364-371.
Finney, D. (2002). The ELT curriculum: A flexible model for a changing world. In W.A. Renandya (Ed.), Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice (pp. 69-79). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hutchinson, T., & Waters, A. (1987). English for specific purposes: A learner-centred approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
*Tiffany joined the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at The University of Edinburgh as a PhD student in 2017. She is also a full-time instructor at the Language Centre of the City University of Hong Kong (CityU HK), contributing, in her capacity as course leader, to the design, development and management of courses like English for Humanities and Social Sciences. In recognition of her achievements, Tiffany was nominated in 2019-2020 for the Teaching Excellence Award (CityU HK). In 2020-2021, she received the Innovative CityU-Learning Award.
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