Student participants were asked to comment on course usefulness. From total 100 students, 54% considered the course as not useful while 37% believed it was useful and the others were neutral about this issue. In order to put a valid interpretation on students’ views, they were asked to elaborate on their reasons for considering the course as not useful. About 30% of the respondents complained that the course had not offered them any new knowledge. They believed that they could learn technical English automatically by reading their sources in English and many of the technical terms had already been acquired because professors explained them in their lectures or they learned them while reading their sources in English. Therefore, when ESP course was offered as an elective course many students refused to take it. One student explained:
“I am not going to take the course. I asked students at higher levels who had passed the course. I’ve learned that it is not useful. I think it is important to learn technical English but I don’t believe that I will learn technical English in one semester and in a 2-credit course. My friends advised me to study my source books in English. So I will learn the reading skills and the technical vocabularies. I think I can manage learning technical English without taking the ESP course.”
Students were asked to elaborate on how effective they consider ESP course in acquiring different ESP skills namely, writing and speaking scientifically and understanding oral and written technical text in their field of study. Almost 80% of the students believed that they could learn ESP reading skill without taking the course and that taking the course was not necessary for learning technical terms. Students criticized the course for too much focus on reading skill and they did not consider the course effective for learning speaking or listening. One student explained:
“Learning just a bunch of new technical vocabularies is of no use. If I encounter a new technical term, I can simply refer to a dictionary to check its meaning. We need to develop our English academic communicative skills especially writing and speaking which are the most difficult skills for us”
On the other hand, students did not consider developing writing skill as easy as reading skill so that they can acquire it without taking the course. One student stated:
“I wish we had worked on writing articles. For example, how to write an abstract or the introduction part for a research paper. Writing and speaking are the main problems which were ignored in the syllabus. Moreover, we need to learn to speak academically to present in conferences and take part in scientific debates.”
These comments unveiled discrepancies between students’ wants and actual course contents and objectives. Non-participant observation helped to achieve a deeper insight into this issue. Based on the observations, many aspects of the teaching method in ESP courses was close to Grammar Translation Method which advocates using first language as the medium of instruction, reading the passages line by line and translating the sentences into student’s native language and focusing on key vocabularies and concepts mainly by giving the L1 equivalent (Richard & Rodgers, 2014). Alimorad (2019) endorsed that the method for teaching ESP reading in Iranian universities is not based on current theories and attributed the application of such an approach to the limitations imposed by the learning context such as students’ low motivation. Furthermore, reading was used as a mean for teaching technical vocabulary. In few cases summarizing was used as a post reading activity and as a speaking or writing task rather than an exercise for developing reading comprehension strategies.
Moreover, ESP classes in engineering fields were characterized with high amount of teacher’s talk and one-sided explanations. On the other hand, students’ participations were limited to answering questions. In most observed classes no cooperative practices happened and classroom activities were not engaging. Being taught with such an old-fashioned method, students believed that they can develop reading skills on their own because this approach to teaching reading did not facilitate students’ academic reading skill. This fact revealed the importance of equipping students with reading strategies which has also been supported by Jafari Pazoki and Alemi (2019). They attributed employing inappropriate and outdated teaching method to the fact that most ESP instructors in engineering fields were subject specialists who were not trained about language teaching methods. Accordingly, they urged more cooperation between applied linguists and content specialists to eliminate the problem.
In contrast to students’ views about course objectives, ESP practitioners emphasized that reading is the most needed skill for students at undergraduate level to read their sources in English while speaking and writing are mostly needed at graduate level or future occupational setting. One practitioner noted:
“The main objective in the course is to improve students’ reading comprehension skill. Developing writing skill is the main concern of graduate students. It is impossible to teach all four skills in a two-unit course. Therefore, we must focus on a single skill. Nevertheless, we ‘d better work on other skills sometimes to add variety and avoid boredom.”
These findings supported Hirvela’s (2013) report that some needs analysis studies indicated that students regarded reading skill as the least challenging among other skills. However, he confirmed the significance of this skill as the most used skill in academic and occupational settings and placed emphasis on using an appropriate approach to teach reading skill which focus on developing reading strategies and draws on purposeful reading.
ESP practitioners complained that lack of needs analysis in designing courses has caused many challenges such as unintegrated teaching approaches and using inappropriate methodology and contents by ESP teachers. One practitioner explained:
“In the absence of a thorough needs analysis, ESP teachers choose to focus on different skills based on their own intuition. … Needs analysis should be done to identify the language functions that students need and use in real word situation and these language functions must be taught through interactive and authentic classroom activities.”
A practitioner pointed out the changes in students’ ESP needs in recent years and how it is increased due to the considerable rise in communication among the members of global scientific communities. Moreover, she pointed to the availability of wealth of information and scientific sources on the World Wide Web which an engineer needs to have access to and emphasized the need for modification in the course syllabi. These remarks confirmed Long (2005) statements about the dynamic nature of needs and that needs analysis must be renewed continuously and that the ideas of all insiders about needs should be taken into account.
In addition, most students (60%) complained that the skills and contents taught in the course are not in compliance with their needs. One participant stated:
“I wish the course contents were more novel and challenging but the topics were very boring and banal.”
Moreover, 60% of the students were not satisfied with the contents of the course materials. Here are a few comments made by students:
“The course book contains texts which are boring and dated but we need updated and profound topics and more challenging and interesting contents”
“The texts in the book were replete with difficult academic words and structures which are not very common in the authentic texts and sources that we have studied in our subject classes. Authentic texts are fluent and they don’t use complicated structures.”
“The course was not useful. This course would be useful for someone who is not familiar with engineering concepts and terminology. The contents were rudimentary rubrics in our major.”
The comments revealed that students criticized the contents of the course materials because they were not authentic. On the other hand, Tsou and Chen (2014) emphasized that material and task authenticity was an important element to evaluate a course as effective.
It is assumed that ESP courses are offered when students do not have enough background knowledge in their disciplines, Therefore, introductory texts of different disciplines can make a good reading material for ESP courses. Such texts help students build up required schema and they also introduce the discourse pattern, lexico-grammatical features and text structure in that specific discipline (Love, as cited in Hirvela, 2013). Besides, it would be very problematic when students encounter a discipline specific English text that they have no background knowledge about its content (Hirvela, 2013) because student’s content knowledge has been proved to be a determining factor for successful performance in understanding ESP reading (Estaji & Meihami, 2016). As a result, ESP courses should not be offered early in undergraduate level. While using less specialized and introductory texts seems to be a solution to this problem, Hyland (as cited in Hirvela, 2013) argued that relying solely on introductory textbook would be problematic because they do not familiarize students with all types of text structure used in other genres within a specific discipline such as journal articles. Moreover, taking the course in the last year and encountering such rudimentary topics could be very demotivating and tiring for higher level students which have a good and updated subject matter knowledge.
More close analysis on students’ responses revealed that educational level affected students’ ideas about course effectiveness. From those who commented on course effectiveness, 39 students were in their first and second year. In this group, 64% said that the course is useful and effective and 36% believed that the course is ineffective. On the other hand, 42 respondents were in their fourth and fifth year. From this group, 16% believed that the course was useful and 83% believed that the course was not effective. The dissatisfaction among students at higher levels was mostly due to the discrepancies between students’ needs at this level and the course contents. Students’ ideas were different about what they wanted to learn in ESP courses based on their educational level. Students at higher educational level ordered the skill they expected to be covered in ESP courses as: writing (41.5%), reading (20.7%), speaking (20.7%), and listening (5.6%) and 11% wanted technical vocabulary to be taught in the course. On the other hand, students at lower educational level mentioned the skills in the following order: reading (30%), speaking (26%), writing (18%) and listening (4%) and 22% agreed that technical vocabulary is required to be taught.
One practitioner believed that usually the course is taken in the last semester because both departments and students do not take it seriously. Observations in this study revealed that the majority of engineering departments had no regulation to determine the time for taking the course and students had a tendency to delay taking the course up to the last year of their undergraduate study. The findings in this study supported the importance of the time students take the course. Former studies also affirmed that while students showed high level of ideal self and instrumentality promotion motivations in all educational level, they have stronger motivation for improving their ESP knowledge to meet their obligation and degree requirements in lower academic levels (Jafari Pazoki & Alemi, 2019).
Responses revealed that 84.5% of the participants confirm the effect of GE proficiency on their learning. Students with lower GE proficiency considered the course as less useful. One students explained how low proficiency had affected her ESP learning:
“I know a lot of technical terms, yet I don’t understand technical texts. It shows that the problem is my GE proficiency. If I had good general reading skill, I could read all type of texts. Sometimes my problem is that I don’t understand the grammatical structure or I don’t know a vocabulary. I wish we worked on GE skills and essential vocabularies or some key grammatical lessons which improve our comprehension of the texts”
In some responses students questioned course usefulness for those who have low GE proficiency. One student stated:
“I think if I had a good proficiency level in English, I would learn technical English very easily because technical English is only learning technical terms and I can learn it by myself.”
ESP professors also supported good GE knowledge for effective learning in the course. One professor stated that:
“…in the engineering departments that the course is offered as optional, students with low English level never risk taking the course because they don’t want to get a low mark in an elective course. On the other hand, when the course is required, students with low GE find the course difficult and not useful.”
Nevertheless, students with good GE believed that the course did not offer them any new knowledge. Students with low English proficiency refuse to take the course when it is elective and those with good GE knowledge take the course in their last semester because they considered it an easy and least demanding course which can earn them a good mark. Heterogeneous classes and students’ different general English level, were the other frequent complains which made the course ineffective from students’ perspective.
The problems that ESP practitioners face can be a key to understand some reasons behind the course ineffectiveness. Consequently, ESP practitioners were asked to comment on the challenges in ESP programs. Students’ low language proficiency, heterogeneous classes and limited time in a two unit course as well as low motivation of students were the most frequent responses to this question. One interviewee attributed this lack of motivation to the fact that students don’t take non-specialized courses very seriously. Lack of motivation in ESP courses in engineering field has been attributed to students’ negative view toward the elements of their learning experience such as course contents, materials, teaching methods and also ignoring students’ needs based on their long term goals (Jafari Pazoki & Alemi, 2019)
ESP teachers also had low motivation. One participant explained the reason behind teachers’ low motivation:
“Teaching this course requires expertise in two fields: language knowledge and language teaching expertise and content knowledge, yet ESP teachers are paid less. Teaching ESP course is not valued and appreciated and teachers consider it as having a lower status. Therefore, experienced and highly skilled subject teachers or language specialists are reluctant to teach the course.”
Two practitioners stated that despite the importance of ESP knowledge for engineering students, the Ministry of Science and Technology announced the course as elective and this measure added to the problem. They believed that if the course were compulsory, both students and departments would take the course more seriously.