CHALLENGES FACING ESP TEACHING

ESP as a relatively new field in language teaching has come with a new view concerning the purpose and objectives of learning English that serves particular learning needs. It has participated in the development of new learning strategies whose first concern is to satisfy the needs of its clients. Nevertheless, though the success and the positive effects on the learners, the new field of teaching is facing serious challenges that negatively affect its productivity. This part aims at exploring and discussing some of the common problems and difficulties that the teaching of ESP, in general and the teaching of Business English in particular faces. I will tackle the problems from three central dimensions; the teacher as a trainer and course designer, the textbook as the subject material used to carry out the class and finally the learners from a sociocultural and psychoanalytical perspectives. This part will also shed light on some suggested solutions to overcome these difficulties to accomplish better teaching objectives.

The ESP practitioner faces serious challenges. As I have already mentioned in the previous part the role of the teacher, Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998) identify five key roles for the ESP practitioner; teacher, course designer and materials provider, collaborator, researcher and evaluator. There are two main challenges that prevent him from effectively carrying out the assigned roles; the lack of content knowledge and the absence of a professional training as far as ESP is concerned. In addition to the linguistic competences, the ESP practitioner, according to Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998), Robinson (1991) and Hutchinson and Waters (1987) must have a working knowledge of the conceptual framework of the subject and actively engage the learner. The teaching of ESP then requires a specialized academic knowledge of the learners' major subject of study. Many authors strongly believe that the lack or the absence of content knowledge creates a lack of confidence for the language teacher which affects his performance and
teaching credibility. Secondly, the lack of qualified teachers is an urgent problem of ESP. ESP

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CHALLENGES FACING ESP TEACHING practitioners have received no formal training. They bank on their teaching experience of General English Teaching to carry out the specific needs of ESP learners.

The wide variety of textbooks within the same teaching branches (Business, Engineering, Marketing, ect) also creates many problems to the learners, practitioners and sponsoring organizations. Some of these textbooks are topic based oriented, other are theme-based oriented while the rests are task-based oriented some books are diverted towards the mastery of Business knowledge mainly instead of the improvement of language or communicative skills. This variety gives the impression that ESP teaching is not unified. Whats more, all the available references claim to meet the needs of ESP/ BE learners. Yet, may be there is no one that can live up to its name (Jones, 1990). In addition, these textbooks writers do not carry out any sort of needs analysis before book compilation. The same book that is published in England or in the States is widely used in Morocco, Japan, Spain and other parts of the world regardless of the economic, political and cultural considerations. Anthony (1997) believes that the problem is worse when we know that many Business English teachers become slaves to their textbooks unable or unwilling to evaluate their suitability or question their content. In most cases Business English class does not occupy a great importance especially for the pre-service learners. The teaching hours do not exceed two hours a week which does not provide the chance of more interaction or practice. They have no English environment to be exposed to, once out of the English classroom, nor are they required to or given the chance to use English in their daily life. English, for them, is nothing but a school subject that they have to pass in order to graduate. These facts make most learners uninterested in such a complementary course. In addition, experiences of failure in some learners educational background may generate a feeling of unwillingness to go through the same experiences with special and more focused types

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CHALLENGES FACING ESP TEACHING

of English. This has a negative effect on the learners psychology towards ESP. On the other hand, in-service trainees feel more motivated to learn since they feel that Business English becomes an integral part of their professional life. On of the most dangerous problems that ESP learners face is the restricted repertoire that they acquire throughout their training period. In the best of cases, learners pick up terminology related to their won field. The problem is that these learners cannot be fluent speakers of English outside their specialty which creates a serious handicap for ESP learners that are unable to interact with other fields. For these learners, ESP courses are likely to become limited to the learning of specific lexicon and the translation of content-specific texts.

In order to overcome these challenges and carry out ESP classes effectively, suitable ESP textbooks, qualified practitioners and home-designed material are badly needed in the realm of ESP teaching. The ESP practitioner will never be able to carry out the five paramount roles unless a continuous formal training is provided.

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