How specific is ESP teacher training?

The ESP Journal, Vol. 2, pp. 51-52, 1983 Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in the USA.

0272-2380/83/010051-02503.00/0 Copyright © 1983 The American University

How Specific Is ESP Teacher Training? Jack Ewer's important article raises, amongst other issues, the question whether and how we should distinguish "ESP" from "non-ESP" teachertraining courses. There are a number of potential dangers in accepting this distinction a priori. It could result in: (1) a narrowness of vision and lack of flexibility in a teacher who may be expected, given the rapid development of ELT, to operate in a variety of different teaching situations during his career; (2) an artificial distinction between ESP teaching skills and general ELT skills; (3) damage to the ELT profession as a whole, creating unnecessary divisions just at a time, long overdue, when teachers of EMT (English as the mother tongue), ESL and EFL are beginning to seek and find common ground. If there is to be specialisation in the profession, it is probably better for it to develop from content (e.g., testing, discourse analysis, syllabus design, etc.) rather than from "varieties" of English language teaching. Below is a rough hierarchy of levels of teaching, moving from general to specific: General Teaching

Language Teaching

EFL

"-..

ESL

ESP

J

I attempted to assign the features of the training programme described in Ewer's article to an appropriate level. I found that the major@ of features are relevant to the highest, most general level; i.e., they contain principles we would expect all training programmes to include (e.g., increasing the teachers' self-reliance, confidence and flexibility; learner variables; general aspects of methodology; evaluation). Other aspects are relevant to language teaching in general or ELT in particular (e. g., community needs, linguistic analysis, language varieties, errors). Few seem so specific to EFL or ESL situations that one could definitely say an EFL teacher should know X but an ESL teacher Y. And it is only those very few (but important) features concerned directly with the interface between language and content subjects that fall into the ESP category (e.g., matching of linguistic 51

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and nonlinguistic requirements, teacher attitudes to subject X, language and concepts of subject X). This would appear to indicate that many principles of ESP teacher training may in fact be derived from educational, language teaching and ELT domains, and that it is their exemplification alone that may give ESP teachertraining courses a particular identity. I am not denying the need for training programmes for teachers of ESP, but it is as well to be aware that the notion of "ESP" teacher training may be as much influenced by political, socio-psychological, administrative or even commercial considerations as by those of a more theoretical, academic nature, and that, therefore, the content and activities described by Ewer may, as he himself implies, be applied with profit to a variety of teacher-training contexts. Chris Kennedy Department of English Language Research University of Birmingham