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ESP learners
Another important aspect in which ESP differs from GE is the target audience andtheir goals, as well as their motivation to learn the language. When teaching ESP at the university or higher education level, ESP teachers will most often teach both preexperiencelearners and job-experienced learners. Pre-experience learners mostoften have just finished secondary school and rely mostly on their theoreticalknowledge, while job-experienced learners, in addition to having theoreticalknowledge, also have some practical experience of using a foreign language inbusiness life. Consequently, as Ellis and Johnson (1994: 5) point out, pre-experiencelearner expectations of language learning are to a great extent based on their formereducational experience, while job-experienced learners will above all focus on “theirown shortcomings in terms of fluency, getting the message across, and being able tounderstand the people from other countries that they have to deal with”.Regardless of these differences between pre-experience and job-experiencedlearners, the emphasis of ESP teaching/learning for both categories of learnersshould be on performance or, as emphasized by Ellis and Johnson (1994: 35), theyshould become “operationally effective”.
Motivation - that is, “the student’s desire and need to learn” (Haycraft, 1993: 6) – isof key importance for both pre-experience and job-experienced learners. In the firstsituation, considering that most students have no or almost no work experience, ESPteachers have to rely primarily on materials and activities they have prepared fortheir learners. For this reason, materials used in the language course shouldpreferably relate to knowledge gained in other courses and learners’ future jobs.
When teaching job-experienced learners, on the other hand, ESP teachers can alsofocus on what learners do in their jobs and at least to some extent relate theteaching/learning materials and course activities to that. The direct use of thelearner’s experience in the ESP teaching/learning process is thus important for themotivation of both pre-experience and job-experienced learners, the most importantdistinction being whether ESP teachers predominantly refer to knowledge gained inother professional courses or the learner’s practical experience gained on-the-job. ESP materialsMaterials selection, adaptation, or writing is an important area in ESP teaching,representing a practical result of effective course development and providingstudents with materials that will equip them with the knowledge they will need intheir future business life.
One of the most important issues regarding ESP materials selection and/or writing iswhether the materials selected should be solely or primarily subject specific and whatthe most appropriate ratio of general materials to subject-specific materials is.
General materials focus on one’s general ability to communicate more effectively,while subject-specific materials focus on a particular job or industry (Ellis andJohnson, 1994). When carefully selected, both general and subject-specific materialswill equip the students with the necessary skills and knowledge, but subject-specific materials nevertheless better cater for ESP learners’ specific needs. Consequently,ESP learners will very often feel more affinity for materials that they find relevant totheir area of specialism. The use of subject-specific textbooks is also more in linewith the realization that students are individuals with different needs, styles, andinterests and with some central traits of cognitive theory, which, as Skela points out,are the following:
- It focuses on purposeful learning;
- The learner is seen as an active processor of information;
- Learning is the process by which the learner tries to make sense of theinformation by imposing a meaningful interpretation or pattern on it;
- One of the basic teaching techniques is problem-solving;
- Recently it has been associated with a focus on deliberate acquisition of alanguage as a logical system;
- The importance of carefully selected rules, which can provide an importantshortcut in learning process(adapted from Skela, 2008: 159).
According to Prabhu (1994: 94), another important issue regarding materials is that
they should be used as sources: “The fact that materials need to be used as sourcesrather than as pre-constructed courses should not be regarded as a weakness oftask-based teaching; it can in fact be a strength for any form of teaching”.