THE ROLE OF

THE ESP TEACHER

Who is an ESP Teacher?

• Almost always s/he is a teacher of General

English who has unexpectedly found him/herself
required to teach students with special needs.
• The experience is often a shock – the welcome or
unwelcome one.
• For non-native English teachers, there is likely to
be fear that they may not cope with their
students’ area of specialism.
• Those who welcome ESP may have
qualifications, or at least a strong interest, in
another discipline.
What is needed as an ESP teacher?
• Personal attributes (enthusiasm, the
ability to develop & administer a
course, work-rate, a knowledge of
students’ world ) as equally important
as the ability to write teaching
materials
• An interest in the students’
specialist area (at least an open mind
about it), an interest in the learners’
language, a readiness to respect
students
• The flexibility to change from being a
general language teacher to being a
specific purpose teacher, and the
flexibility to cope with different
groups of students,
What is more about ESP Teachers
• They do not only teach. Very
often, they are involved in
designing, setting up and
administering the ESP course.
• In nature, ESP is an integrated set
of tasks involving planning,
mounting, teaching,
coordinating, administering a
course, preparing the materials,
teaching and evaluating and
testing,
• (Finally) ESP teachers may well
have to write reports on the
students and on the course as a
whole.
The problems arises with ESP teachers
1. No ready-made guide of ESP
2. New realms of knowledhe ESP teachers has
to cope with
3. The change of status of Englsih Language
Teaching
4. ESP teacher will deal with ‘need analysis,
syllabus design, material writing or
adaptation and evaluation
5. They need to oriented themselves to a new
environment
6. English teacher usually are not trained in this
situation
7. ESP teachers usually reluctant to enter a new
field
ELT Teachers Design a syllabus
1. From the result of need analysis, the
material based on grammar, function
and language skills should be
organized into syllabus
2. The syllabus based on order of
importance and frequency from the
students’ field of work
ELT Teachers Write the material
• An ESP teacher should not
follow a book rigidly
• Especially if it is highly
specialized, there is no
connection between
sentence, grammar and
specialization knowledge
• The material must fit the
students need and goal set
by the teacher
ELT Teachers
Analyze the needs
• ESP teacher should gather
information of the work of
the weak and strong points
his/her students posses
• Once it is known, teacher
will have good support for
arranging syllabus and
writing material
Motivates the students
• Students/participants sometimes feel curious
about what kind of Englsih they will have
• They don’t want to get involved with
grammatical structure and lots of highly
technical terms to memorize
• Teacher should motivates them to change
this perception and makes them comfortable
• Skillful not only in writing material that suits
the students need but also be able to adopt
materials that is given by the institution they
are working in so the teacher and the
students will have fluent classes
ELT Teachers
Negotiates
• An ESP teacher must negotiate a two way
collaboration in which learners help
teacher learned more about the target
situation and in turn the teacher makes
them know of the problems learners face
• Negotiation in a more physical sense,
cramped classroom, inconvenient location
• Make the learners know that there is no
grammatical structure, function and
discourse specifically for specific subject, in
short there is no need for highly specializes
text
What teachers need to do

• Teacher needs to distill and synthesize

the best suit the particular
circumstance
• They need an open mind, curiosity and
degree of skepticism
• They need to arm themselves with a
sound knowledge with a sound
knowledge of both practical and
theoretical developments in ELT
Knowledge ESP teachers requires
They do not need to learn specialist subject knowledge but only :
1. a positive attitude towards ESP content
2. a knowledge of the fundamental principles of the subject area
3. an awareness of how much they probably know