Encouraging more and more English as General Purpose (EGP) teachers to teach courses of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) for non-English majors to prepare students for future professional needs has become a vital issue in the reform of College English Teaching in China. Although most colleges and universities in more developed eastern China have taken the lead in ESP teaching, only a few colleges and universities in less-developed western China have offered ESP courses. As the teaching mainstay of ESP courses, college English teachers face a period of "transformation". Thus, their attitudes towards teaching an entirely new subject area in English play an essential role in the effectiveness of language teaching. This article attempts to investigate how college English teachers regard teaching ESP courses and what kind of assistance they need to provide ESP courses. The participants are all teachers from Western universities studying ESP and EAP at the University of Aberdeen, funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC). They are the backbone teachers of each university, so their views are representative. The research adopts a mixed research method combining qualitative and quantitative methods. A semi-structured questionnaire based on Richter's rating scale is used to understand the participants' attitudes, and an in-depth interview is used to explore the needs of these teachers. The findings of a questionnaire and interview among college English teachers from western Chinese universities can be applied to confirm the hypothesis that most teachers have positive attitudes toward teaching ESP courses. They would like to adjust themselves and change the teaching ideas and methods to achieve a better teaching effect in the future teaching process of ESP. Training programs for the pre-service ESP teachers to master specific related professional knowledge and new collaborative teaching models are requested by EGP teachers to equip themselves as proficient ESP practitioners. A strong sense of responsibility, moral sense, enterprise, and open attitude is the prerequisite and emotional basis for pre-service ESP teachers to carry out effective ESP teaching. Thus, the present EGP teachers can become students' assistants of ESP learning and collaborators with other professional disciplines.
Ahmadi, A., & Bajelani, M. R. (2012). Barriers to English for specific purposes learning among Iranian University students. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 47, 792-796. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.06.736
Belcher, D. D. (2006). English for specific purposes: Teaching to perceived needs and imagined futures in worlds of work, study, and everyday life. TESOL quarterly, 40(1), 133-156.
Boswood, T., & Marriott, A. (1994). Ethnography for specific purposes: Teaching and training in parallel. English for Specific Purposes, 13(1), 3-21.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0889-4906(94)90021-3
Chen, T-Y. (2000). Self-training for ESP through action research. ESP, 4, 389-402.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0889-4906(00)00008-9
CAI, J. G. (2004). ESP and the development of college English teaching in China. Journal of Foreign Languages, 02, 22 -- 28.
CAI, J. G. (2007). A study on the characteristics and countermeasures of College English teaching in China during the transition period. Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 01, 27-32+80-81.
CAI, J. G. (2010). On the reorientation of College English teaching in China. Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 42(04), 306 - 308.
Esteban, A. A., & Martos, M. V. (2002). A case study of collaboration among the ESP practitioner, the content teacher, and the students. Revista alicantina de estudios ingleses, 15(7), 7-21.
Dehrab, B. A. (2002). A study of code-switching in four English for specific purposes (ESP) classrooms at the College of Business Studies in Kuwait. The Ohio State University.
Dudley-Evans, T., & St John, M. (1998). Developments in ESP: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach. Cambridge University Press.
Fortanet-Gomez, I., & Raisanen, C. A. (2008). ESP in European Higher Education: Integrating language and content. John Benjamins Publishing.
Guo, L. G. (2011), On Teaching Attitude, China Education Innovation Herald, 10, 223.
K?rkgoz, Y. (2019). ESP in teacher education: A case study. ESP teaching and teacher education: current theories and practices, 13.
Liu, F. G. (2001). On the attributes of ESP and corresponding teaching methods. Foreign Languages and Teaching,12, 25-27+30.
Ma, F. X. (2005). Comprehensive evaluation of the quality of classroom teaching quality. Journal of Shanxi University of Finance and Economics (Higher Education Edition), 04, 41 - 45.
Huttner, J., Smit, U., & Mehlmauer-Larcher, B. (2009). ESP Teacher Education at the Interface of Theory and Practice: Introducing a Model of Mediated Corpus-Based Genre Analysis. System: An International Journal of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics, 37(1), 99–109.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2008.06.003
Richards, J. C., Richards, J. C., & Farrell, T. S. (2005). Professional development for language teachers: Strategies for teacher learning. Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, V. (1996). The role of attitudes and beliefs in learning to teach. Handbook of research on teacher education, 2(102-119), 273-290.
Robinson, P. C. (1991). ESP today: A practitioner's guide. Prentice Hall.
Schleppegrell, M. J. (1996). English for specific Purposes: A Program Design Model/Selected Articles from the English teaching forum 1989-1993. English Language Programs Division. United States Information Agency, Washington, DC.
Strevens, P. (1988). ESP after twenty years: A re-appraisal. In M. Tickoo (Ed.), ESP: State of the art (1-13). SEAMEO Regional Language Centre
Swales, J. (1985). English language papers and authors' first language: Preliminary explorations. Scientometrics, 8(1-2), 91-101.
Tsui, A. (2003). Understanding expertise in teaching: Case studies of second language teachers. Cambridge University Press.
Widdowson, H. G. (1983). Learning purpose and language use. Oxford University Press.
Wang,, S. R., & Wang, H. X. (2011). The current situation of college English teaching in China and the direction of reform and development of College English Teaching. Foreign Languages in China, 8 (05), 4-11 https://doi.org/10.13564/j.cnki.issn.1672-9382.2011.05.011.
In-Text Citation: (Yanmei et al., 2022)
To Cite this Article: Yanmei, Z., Mustakim, S. S., & Muhamad, M. M. (2022). Exploring the Attitudes and Needs of Pre-service ESP Teachers in Western Chinese Universities. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 12(7), 2032–2046.
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s)
Published by Knowledge Words Publications (www.kwpublications.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
