Esp Practitioner v2

THE ROLES OF THE ESP PRACTITIONER: A CHECK OF THE ESP TEACHERS' WORK (BY CARLOS ASTURIZAGA CRUZ) ESP theory has a lot of important components like materials, syllabus, methods, aproaches, etc. But none of them can be done without the person who manages all of them inside a classroom and decides the right trend to be followed: the teacher. This ESP professional must be able to understand the requirements of other professions and willingness to adapt to these requirements aside from other general teacher’s requirements as to consider linguistic development and teaching theories. As ESP teaching is a kind of complex activity, authors like Dudley-Evans and St John, (1998) use the term “practitioner” rather than “teacher” to emphasize that ESP work involves much more than teaching. Based on that conception, the same author divides the ESP practitioner’s roles into four ones: as a teacher, as a course designer and materials provider, as a collaborator, as a researcher, and as an evaluator. A) The ESP practitioner as a teacher. As it is explained by Cariaga (2008): “To work within a processoriented learning, the teacher has to receive some training, especially for the learning sequences” It means that the main focus of the ESP practitioner must be related on their students, in order to get a more dynamic and interactive classroom. Therefore, the work as ESP teacher must be focused to be a coordinator and facilitator in the process of learning in order to generate a learning space where student takes the initiative to self-direct their learning. That is why is very important the perception sense that the teacher has with their environment, in order to change the course features that are neccesary to get the best course development and to have a quality relationship with the students, being flexible and kind in order to help learners to learn. B) The ESP practitioner as course designer and material provider. The author Dudley-Evans and St John, (1998) menction that ‘ESP practitioners often have to plan the course they teach and provide the materials for it’. It means that is rarely possible to use a particular textbook without the need for supplementary material and sometimes no really suitable published material exists for certain of the identified needs. The role of ESP teachers as ‘providers of material’ thus involves choosing suitable published material, adapting material when published material is not suitable, or even writing material where nothing suitable exists. Moreover, ESP teachers need to assess the effectiveness of the teaching material used on the course, whether that material is published of self-produced. It states an interesting ability required for the practitioner, where the teacher must be prepared to create and apply an accurate material according to the context and the students’ needs. C) The ESP practitioner as researcher. ESP teachers need to be in touch with the research constantly in order to discover new useful trends and requirement that helps to improvce the development of the class. In fact, no matter if teachers are carrying out a needs analysis, designing a course, or writing teaching materials but they need to be capable of incorporating the findings of the research, and those working in specific ESP situations need to be confident that they know what is involved in skills such as written communication. This statement is explained by Dudley-Evans and St John, (1998): ‘An ESP practitioner has to go beyond the first stage of Needs Analysis – Target Situation Analysis (TSA) which identifies key target events, skills and texts – to observe as far as possible the situations in which students use the identified skills, and analyse samples of the identified texts.’ In fact, taking into account those factors make easier the students work understanding by the practitioner of ESP. D) The ESP practitioner as collaborator. Dudley-Evans and St John, (1998) believed that subjectspecific work is often best approached through collaboration with subject specialist. This may involve cooperation in which ESP teacher finds out about the subject syllabus in an academic context or the tasks

that students have to carry out in a work or business situation. But this situation can also be taken by the ESP practitioner in other ways, as it may require collaboration to integrate specialist studies, didactic activities and the language use. For example, it might involve the language teacher specifically preparing learners for the language of subject lectures or business presentations. Another possibility is that a specialist checks and comments on the content of teaching materials that the ESP teacher has prepared. E) The ESP practitioner as evaluator. The ESP practitioner is often involved in various types of evaluation - testing of students, evaluation of courses and teaching materials are done for two reasons: i) To assess whether students have the necessary language and skills to undertake a particular academic course or career that is important. ii) To asses the level of their achievement – how much learners have gained from a course. In fact, for an ESP practitioner there is much more than teaching in an isolated way. As it is mencioned by Cariaga (2008) ‘as a professional or specialist in ESP he is expected much more that teaching, the teacher is a course designer and materials provider, he is also a researcher and assessor because he has to evaluate the process from the beginning and orientate work towards the tasks the students will be doing in the classrooom...’. It gives the idea to ESP teachers that they must count with the necessary knowledge and tools to deal with their own students’ specializations, using skills as a framework of ESP. Eventhough, it should be remembered that ESP teachers are not ‘specialists in the field, but in teaching English’ as it is mencioned by Bojovic (1998). They help students, who know their subject better than the teachers do, develop the essential skills in understanding, using, and/or presenting authentic information in their profession. That is why a professional ESP teacher must be able to switch from one professional field to another without being obliged to spend months on getting started because he or she simply brings the necessary tools, frameworks, and principles of course design to apply them to new material that must be authentic, updated and relevant for students’ specializations.

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