How To Teach ESP Students With Ease - 3 Effective Ways

19th December 2022

Recently you might have travelled to your favourite destination to teach English as a second language and you might have found out that every student has a different motive to learn English.

Some are learning English to join an Aviation company, and some want to join IT Company internationally. As English is a language that is most-widely spoken all over the world, most organizations demand people to know English.

According to lemongrad.com, 1,121 million people from across the world speak English.
 

Source: lemongrad.com

Because of the demand for speaking English in many organizations, it’s quite obvious that there’s a huge demand for ESL language teachers too all over the globe.

However, as an ESL Teacher, you might come across a situation that many students are not learning English so just they can talk, or make their English grammar or pronunciation right, but they are learning for a specific industry, profession, or occupation in which they want to get in.

Normal traditional ESL classes, which you have been expecting while you have done your undergraduate ESL certification program or TESOL bachelor degree online program couldn’t fulfill the demands of students who are learning English for a special purpose which is also called ESP.

If you’re feeling like you don’t know industry-specific jargon, how can you teach those students then worry not, below we have explained everything about ESP and How you can adapt yourself to learn modern methodologies to teach young learners and adult learners related to ESP?

In addition, we will also recommend you explore our Bachelor of Education in TESOL, which will prepare you to fulfill ESP students' requirements.

Now without any further delay, let’s deep dive into know more about ESP and How you can adapt yourself to learn modern methodologies to teach young learners and adult learners?

What is ESP?

ESP is also known as English for Specific Purposes. As the term is self-explanatory, which means some of the student’s prime motive is to learn English for a particular occupation, discipline, or industry, and learn English to communicate in daily life, learning grammar and pronunciation is their secondary concern.

Now let’s get to know, how you can learn different ways of modern methodologies to teach young learners and adult learners related to ESP?

1. Find out the requirements of your Students:

First thing first, you need to identify the requirements of every student available in your class. Find out what specific English learning goals they have and for which industry or occupation.

You can find out the requirements of students who have specific goals by giving every student a task to fill out a survey list.

Make sure you create a survey list in such a way that it helps you to know everything about every student's goals. Your survey questions should cover to know about their
 

• career choice,
• Industry type,
• Company name
• Occupation
• Chosen industry demands in terms of the language English.
• Which topic of English they want to focus on more.

2. Curate curriculum according to their needs:

After knowing about their particular profession, it’s time to create a curriculum with multiple topics related to their occupation and industry and prepare yourself to learn modern methodologies to teach young learners and adult learners.

For example- A student is either working or pursuing the Aviation industry. As everyone is aware, the official language of the aviation industry is English.

Your prime focus of yours should be to make your student capable of -

• Listening to statements of other people in English with different accents and properly understanding them.
• Able to speak English fluently.

In the aviation industry, the stakes are much higher because whether they’re going to be a pilot, air hostess, or air traffic controller, they need to communicate much more frequently over radio, and sometimes due to network issues, they might face distortion while talking, so there listening and speaking ability should be very good.

You can give them a task like letting them listen to a recorded voice, and ask them what they understood.

3. Arranging resources industry-related:

With general English grammar and pronunciation books, you might need specific industry-related resources and materials.

You might feel daunted that where you can find all these resources and do you need to learn everything.

The answer is No. You do not need to gather technical information, you work as an ESL Teacher and your job is to teach English.

You just need to understand the industry and how they communicate, what those industries expect from their workers in terms of communication, just find out resources related to this.

There are plenty of ways to gather resources and materials such as-

• Onestopenglish.com
• Google scholar
• Harvard university press
• Oxford University press
• Researchgate
• Academia.edu
• scribd.com

These are some of the best sites to gather resources and research papers related to any industry. In addition, one of the best sources to find anything is Google, you can find other sites as well to find any information.

Final Thoughts:

While during the time when you are pursuing an undergraduate ESL certification program you might have thought that you just need to teach English to those students whose primary goal is just to learn English.

But as you started your teaching journey, you have found that some students want to learn English to get into a specific industry or have specific purposes which are also called English for Specific Purposes (ESP).

There is no need to worry, your job will be the same. You just need to learn modern methodologies to teach young learners and adult learners by doing research on certain industries, which are of student interest, but just the communication part, not the technicalities.

In case, if you’re still in your research phase of doing an undergraduate ESL certification program then we recommend our Bachelor of Education in TESOL or TESOL bachelor degree online program which makes you capable to deal with this kind of situation with confidence.