Perception of students and teachers over ESP curriculum design for a business management programme in the Sri Lankan context

Abstract

Teaching and learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP) for higher education still occupies a dominant place in scholarly forums. It is an obvious fact that learners should be equipped with a sound knowledge of ESP in order to meet the global requirements of the academic and industrial spheres. This paper reports the findings of a larger study which explore the perception of students and teachers regarding the practice of a new ESP course module within the context of higher education in Sri Lanka. The main objective of this paper is to report the findings based on qualitative data gathered after practice of a new ESP course module for the development of an effective ESP curriculum. A quasi experimental research design has been employed in the study. A larger amount of qualitative data was gathered to support quantitative data and for the triangulation of data to meet the objective of the study. The data was collected through semi structured interviews and open ended questionnaires. The samples used a purposive sample of twenty six (26) undergraduates of the Faculty of Business Studies and Finance from a university in Sri Lanka. Also the sample consists of four (4) language teachers belongs to English Language Teaching Unit (ELTU) of the same university. The findings of the ESP course module provide valuable insights in designing an effective ESP curriculum to meet the learners’ needs. The findings also indicate that the existing ESP curriculum does not meet the actual needs of the ESP learners and some changes are suggested for a successful application of the ESP curriculum in terms of quality, relevance and validity. In particular, the ESP courses are to be revised and redesigned to cater to the multiple needs of the learners and parallel to the language needs of the main stream content subjects.