Abstract
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teaching is considered a separate activity in the domain of English Language Teaching (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998). ESP primarily aims to prepare and fulfill a set of the communicative needs of ESP learners in academic and professional contexts. These needs serve as a guide to design relevant course content and adopt appropriate teaching method with particular emphasis on the kind of English to be taught and the topics to be covered. The current study attempts to investigate through the perceptions of ESP teachers and ESP learners the effective role of Subject Matter Specialists (henceforth SMSs) in the teaching of ESP courses at postgraduate level in Pakistan. The sample size taken for this study comprises of 10 ESP teachers selected through snowball sampling technique and 50 ESP learners chosen through purpose sampling from three different disciplines of management sciences. Open ended questionnaire and interviews were used for data collection. The data were thematically analyzed. The analysis of ESP teachers’ data suggested English language competence, pedagogic competence and awareness of the learners’ prospective communicative needs in academic and workplace contexts. The analysis of ESP learners’ data indicated that Subject Matter Specialists (henceforth SMSs) along with content area knowledge need to have good command of English language as well. From the comparative analyses of ESP teachers and ESP learners’ data, this study concludes that for effective ESP teaching to any group of ESP learners, an ESP teacher irrespective of the academic background (ELTs or Subject Matter Specialists) needs to have English language competence, pedagogic skills and how much they know about the learners’ target communicative needs.
Keyword(s)
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