TEACHING ESP SHOULD REPRESENT THE STUDENTS’ NEED

PKPBI under supervision of Language Development Center of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang held  a workshop discussing about English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teaching. The workshop was participated by about 50 lecturers from several universities in East Java. Having a theme of ” Revitalizing ESP Curriculum to Gain Best Practices in Teaching ESP”, the workshop was expected to be able provide fresh insight to the lecturers concerning how to teach ESP appropriately and fun. Therefore, three experts were invited to the workshop consisting of Dr. Mirjam Anugerahwati, M.A. from Universitas Negeri Malang, Yuta Otake, M.TESOL from Regional English Language Office (RELO), and Dr. Wahyunengsih, M.Pd. from English Language Center of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang. (20/2)

The workshop was carried out in three sessions. the first session was presented by Yuta Otake who provided examples of fun and appealing ESP teaching. He emphasized that English lecturers should be active, creative, and expressive to emerge lively atmosphere in the classroom. Furthermore, the next session was led by Dr. Wahyunengsih presenting a teaching strategy of contextual guessing to teach reading in ESP.  She encouraged the ESP lecturers not to let the students dependent on using dictionary, but trying to guess the unfamiliar words by analysing the context clues. In the last session, Dr. Mirjam as the ESP expert profoundly explained the concept of ESP teaching. In the discussion, she underlined the implementation of need analysis to achieve the appropriateness of ESP teaching to the students’ needs in accordance with their subject area.

Despite having 6 hours of learning in the workshop, the participants felt that they needed more knowledge to learn deeper about ESP, especially in designing good ESP syllabus. For this reason, the committees and participants expect to have further workshop or training in ESP. (jsa)