DEVELOPMENTS IN ESP TEACHING

Abstract

Abstract The fast changing business environment and the ever-growing de- mand facing professional communicators in the 21st century pose new challenges to language learners and teachers alike. Competitive business organizations at- tempt to recruit employees who have excellent linguistic competence coupled with nonlinguistic competences and skills. It is not easy to acquire these addi- tional competences and skills. However, most of them are transferable and can be greatly improved if students are provided with adequate teaching materials and appropriate input from the teacher. The aim of the paper is to address the complexity of ESP teaching today. Firstly, it presents an overview of the changes that have occurred in the practice of teaching ESP in the last few decades. It also sheds some light on the increasing importance of needs analysis. Then it presents new developments in teaching English for professional communication at the ter- tiary level of education. These developments include (1) content-and-language integrated learning, (2) use of didactic case studies, (3) corpus studies con- ducted for teaching purposes and aimed at identifying high-frequency language elements: terms, specialized lexis items, collocations, formulae, acronyms, etc., that need to be prioritized in language courses, (4) more effective course-books with higher terminology indexes, (5) extended use of online materials, (6) teach- ing writing for specialized purposes, and (7) teaching cross-cultural and social skills. The new approach is more challenging for ESP teachers and requires much higher qualifications, such as content knowledge and transferable skills. In order to increase students’ employability and promotion opportunities, we need teaching materials and approaches that help streamline students’ efforts, economize on time, and increase the effectiveness of language courses.

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