Do ESP teachers need to be content experts?

The teaching of ESP is indeed an interesting area to be studied. My personal opinion is that ESP is more interesting than general English because ESP is learnt in context. It is the nature of ESP to be associated with the contexts that the learners are going to use the language. Lets say we're teaching ESP for medical students, surely we can not run away from medical jargons and tongue twisted phrases and lexicons which we don't normally use in every day life (unless ur mom's a nurse!). OR we're teaching pilots-to-be. Maybe we'll be using phrases like 'traffic issues', 'wind shear', 'wake turbulence' and 'bird strikes'. How interesting. We get to learn so many new things!.

Imagine this. You go to work one day and your HOD tells you that you are just the right person to design an ESP course for lets say Architecture students. and it just happens that u're no big fan of buildings and designs. (Don't u feel grateful that at least we know how to do Needs Analysis?!). Anyway the point I'm going at is that do you need to know all the adjectives to describe buildings or all the terms and concepts used by architects to describe sustainable architecture? In other words, is there a need for ESP teachers to be content experts?.

Well the answer is NO (don't we all feel relieved,pheww.) Debra-Lee in an ESP Newsletter published in March 2005 said that ESP professionals do not necessarily need to be content experts to teach English to learners with specific needs. There are, however, certain qualities or criteria that these people need to have to enable them to become better ESP teachers. These are the criteria as proposed by Lee (2005);

1. Curiosity and a willingness to learn about the content subject
2. Tolerance for content ambiguity (You are not the expert and your students may not be either.)
3. The willingness to let your students be experts
4. Confidence in your ability as a language, not content, teacher
5. The willingness to ask for content help (i.e., your colleagues in the Science Department or a conversation with an in-field expert)
6. The ability to adapt content materials to meet the levels and needs of your students
7. The willingness to forgo a vocabulary-driven class
8. The ability to tie language to content (discourse analysis/concordancing)
9. The ability to share your enjoyment of language learning with your students
10. Understanding that it is your language ability that makes you a great ESP teacher
11. Flexibility

Now we know that we don't have to have a degree in architecture in order to teach ESP to future architects. And we also know now, thanks to Debra that we need to have positive attitudes towards the content subject to encourage us to want to know more about the learners. After all, our aim IS to train them to become competent English users who can function effectively in their line of work/study.

So what can we do to increase our knowledge in the content subject? These are the steps suggested by Debra;

1. Talk to your students.
2. Attend a content class.
3. Read content journals/magazines; even widely read magazines
4. Read content textbooks.
5. Talk to colleagues in the content field.
6. Surf the Web.
7. Read the ESP Journal and EAP Journal, which are great resources for discourse and corpus studies in content/university fields.
8. Read online journals, such as ESP World or The Internet TESL Journal.

Having taken the efforts to increase our knowledge in the content subject and polished our language teaching skills help us to gain more confidence in delivering ESP lessons. Now that we're armed to the teeth, we can conduct the course that we've designed for Dr. Normah's class with not much problem... hopefully :)