Solving the Problems of Designing and Teaching a Packed English for Specific Purposes Course

Abstract

Background: In an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course offered to a department in a university in Hong Kong preparing the students for their internship, students were expected to learn to write and engage in spoken activities related to a number of documents over a period of 13 weeks. Having to achieve so many learning outcomes within so short a period of time, course designers and teachers encountered problems. Aims and methods: This paper describes an attempt to solve the problems arising from such a packed course in several ways through action research. These ways include (1) gradually moving from a consciousness-raising genre-based teaching method to an approach with less reliance on samples in teaching, (2) contextualizing all the tasks, and (3) working out group drafts from several individual drafts. The students ’ reactions to these three implemented solutions were investigated through questionnaires. How they felt about the course design and the teaching methods, the reasons for their preference, the problems that they faced when each method was applied and possible solutions to their problems were reported. Conclusion: Results show that the students were positive towards all the solutions implemented indicating that these were workable solutions to the problems arising from the packed course. Suggestions on how the solutions could be further improved were made.

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