Criticisms of ESP courses in Iran

Perspective courses centrality of the learner, learner purposes, learner interests, and the social nature of the language which is a focal point in modern teaching theories like communicative language teaching is ignored. Secondly, study skills and discourse genre appropriate for authentic language use find no way in such classes. Thirdly, since ESP learners in Iran cannot see the immediate results of what they are learning, they consider these courses as obligatory and boring. A further criticism of ESP courses according to Hassaskhah is that the courses do not consider learners’ interests and needs, and also lack the motivational principle which can help in encouraging learners in further learning. Being exam-oriented, these courses ignore the life- long needs of the learners and no “real-life communication” takes place but only the skills the students need in taking exams. Likewise, Fathi 2008 believes that the existing materials are not satisfactory since their focus is mainly on vocabulary and syntax while the learners’ needs are ignored. However based on the findings of her study she concludes that the students see texts in their ESP course books as useless and they requested the texts to be more subject-specific. Besides, the students complained about the traditional teaching of grammar. In line with the students, ESP teachers in the study stated that the students must be exposed to genuine and interesting English texts. Moreover, having conducted a case study, Amirian and Tavakoli 2009 refer to the mismatch that exists between the course contents and the required skills and materials of the learners at workplace. Learners in their study mentioned some sub-skills in reading which they perceived as critical while not included in textbooks as reading catalogs, books, formal letters, foreign visitors’ reports, technical documents, journals and newspapers and also using the internet. Having reviewed the comments made by learners the y report that learners’ dissatisfactions from the content of the text books rooted in the fact that the content had a general basis and did not exactly relate to their field. For Tayebipour 2005 the drawbacks referring to ESP courses in Iran are twofold. One set of problems are associated with instructors’ qualifications and another set relate to what he calls materials design. He refers to two main reasons why this is happening. The first reason is the read-only approach being implemented in which the only focus is on reading skill. The second reason as he writes is that the approach towards reading skill, as a “valued Perspective skill for ESP courses”, is passive rather than active and reading is only considered as an end product rather than a process. Because of this, as he states, ESP students “have hardly ever gained the proficiency required for reading fluently their own materials such as relevant articles, journals, and academic books”. p.224 In a similar way, Mahdavi-Zafarghandi 2005 believes that both General English and English for Science and Technology EST courses which are offered at Iranian universities have been unable to facilitate learners’ achievement of the course objectives. He came to this conclusion based on the results he got from his study in which dentistry students were not able to understand the dentistry films and they didn’t have sufficient reading skills to skilfully read texts about dentistry although they had completed the course successfully. He further proposes that there is a need for changing the curriculum by the inclusion of listening skills and the application of modern approaches in ESP courses. In brief, it has been highlighted in literature that the current ESP course books and the methodology which is followed do not support a learner-centered approach. Moreover, the current approach does not consider the real needs of the learners. This is perhaps so because learners are not involved in the process of choosing their preferred skills and normally no Needs Analysis as a core feature of any ESP course is conducted.

4. Research Procedure

The data was collected during the second academic semester of 2010. The participants were selected randomly to fill in the questionnaire items. The purpose of the study and also the objectives of the questionnaire were clearly explained to the students by the researchers before administration. The Data was collected through the adaption of the Needs Analysis questionnaire presented by Peterson 2009 in the 43 rd Cardiff conference. The questionnaire consisted of four sections relating to the four language skills as well as their sub-skills. The students had to choose between two items of important and unimportant to show their preferences in learning the language skills and the sub-skills related to each of the items. So, they had to specify if they thought the skills or the sub-skills are either important or unimportant to them. Perspective

4.1 Participants

The participants in the present survey included 66 students majoring in Information Technology and Computer Engineering in Islamic Azad University of Mashhad in Iran. They were all male sophomores who were taking their ESP courses during the second academic semester of 2010. The students had passed their Basic English course in which they were introduced to basic grammar points, general vocabulary, and reading comprehension strategies. The students were instructed through the textbook “English for the students of engineering” which followed the same pattern explained above.

4.2 Instrument

The questi onnaire through which the data was collected was adapted from Peterson’s 2009 Needs Analysis questionnaire which consisted of four sections related to the four language skills with their corresponding sub-skills. For instance the listening section included listening to lectures, instructions, presentations, reports, as well as explanations given by the teacher. Other language skills were followed by their related sub-skills as well the details of which are available in the following tables.

5. Results

The data was analysed by using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences SPSS version 15.0. To find out about the students’ preferences for each sub-skill, the frequency analysis was run. As is shown in table 1, from among the reading sub-skills, reading the manuals [n= 55 78.6], followed by legal documents [n=50, 71.4] were preferred by the majority of the students. However, other sub-skills such as reading the contracts [n=27 38.6], and price lists and specialist literature [n=24 40.0] were chosen by students as unimportant. Language skill Language Sub-skills Frequencies Reading Important Unimportant Manuals 55 78.6 11 21.4 Instructions 48 68.6 18 31.4