English for Specific Purposes: Teaching to Perceived Needs and Imagined Futures in Worlds of Work ,Study, and Every Day Life by Diane Belcher

     

     This study gives an overview of the current state of English for specific purposes begins by surveying ongoing debates on key some key topics. First, it states that it’s important and necessary to implement need assessment for those learners who learn in specific contexts. Needs assessment is now more often seen as a matter of ‘agreement and judgment not discovery”, negotiated by learners, other community members, and instructors inevitably influenced by ‘ideological preconceptions”. Second, the review articles rescript the instructional roles in ESP context. That is to say, it redefines the role of teachers for ESP learners. From the study, I conclude that How much subject knowledge is enough for ESP instructors, especially when taking a narrow-angled approach is still very much an open question. The last, the role of subject knowledge in instructor expertise is emphasized in the article, such as the specific genre theory and corpus-enhanced genre studies and some critical pedagogy.

   

       To be honest, I much appreciate the article states we should redefine the implement of need assessment for ESP learners. Indeed, it’s important for teachers to meet learners’ need and waste no time. When it comes to ESP, the English teaching in vocational schools comes into my mind. English teachers in vocational schools not only need to teach students general English knowledge but also need to focus on some specific and professional terms and knowledge for ESP learners. Therefore, the profession and authenticity of specific genres, such as journalism, medical, business, or science and technology domain, are especially important for those teachers. 

       However here comes a problem. For many English teachers, who are graduated from English-major program, are not so familiar with the specific domain. On the contrary, those who got specific knowledge are usually not trained with professional English teaching. Therefore, how to balance the training of teachers’ profession and authenticity of specific domains and general English knowledge becomes a big and important issue. In my opinion, it takes teachers’ time to train themselves and accumulate the knowledge in specific domain. Also, it takes ESP teachers’ wisdom to find out applicable and useful teaching material to meet those ESP learners’ need instead of just focusing on general English knowledge.