The need to investigate the communication skills of specific participants usually arises upon demand from the stakeholders, including the employers, passengers, clients and others. The common reasons for stakeholders to consult course developers or language practitioners regarding developing a specific purpose course include poor language…

With the rapid growth and widespread use of English worldwide, there has been a paradigm shift from teaching English as foreign language to teaching English as an international language. However, there has been less discussion on English pedagogy about the global spread of English in this era of globalization, with rapid increase of English…

This paper addresses the conceptions of needs analysis and mixed-methods research, and the affordances and challenges of mixed methods needs analysis in implementing ESP courses. Language researchers and educators maintain that a lack of identifying students' needs hampers the development and improvement of English language education in ESP. ESP…

To enable students majoring in translation at the College of Languages and Translation to read, identify the lexical and syntactic features of legal documents and hence comprehend their content, this article proposes an instructional module for teaching English for Legal Purposes (ELP). The module should be based on the assessment of the students'…

This paper discusses the status of English in the education system in Tunisia with a particular focus on the use of English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP). It begins with a brief account of the history of teaching English in Tunisia as a country belonging to the Outer Circle of the Model of English…

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the professional development of teacher-trainers worldwide, with practical applications for instructors and curriculum developers who work to improve English proficiency in the professional/vocational training realm. The goal is to address situational language use during professional training so that…

Since its implementation in 2004, the Canadian English Language Benchmark Assessment for Nurses (CELBAN) has been accepted as evidence of language ability for licensure of internationally educated nurses (IENs) in Canada. This article focuses on the complexities of sustaining an occupation-specific assessment over time. The authors reference the…

Teaching and learning of technical terms constitute a major problem for ESP instructors and students. To help the students learn, retain, apply and relate technical terms, a multiple-associations instructional approach that focuses on connecting the printed form of the technical term with its pronunciation (the hidden sounds, double and silent…

Second-language learners increasingly need effective writing skills in English for academic and professional purposes, as well as for personal and social purposes. To date, peace education (PE) activities in the English language classroom have mostly focused on speaking. This article presents an activity that can help fill the gap in the lack of…

Vijay Kumar Bhatia retired from his role as a professor at the City University of Hong Kong and is now Visiting Professor at the Hellenic American University in Athens, and Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has extensive experience of teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels over a period exceeding 50 years in…

Audiovisual platforms like YouTube facilitate the introduction of informal learning practices for their pedagogical exploitation both in class and online. One such practice is the creation of a BookTuber community for recommending books, thus making it possible for students to engage in an out-of-class community where common interests can be…

Undergraduate students majoring in Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia need to take an English-for-Specific-Purposes (ESP) course each year of the B.A. program. The material for all four courses was developed in-house by a group of instructors at those colleges. A review of the course material, particularly reading texts, showed many inadequacies. It…

Use of dictionaries is an integral part of language learning and teaching. With the availability of smartphones, EFL, ESL and ESP students can access and download a variety of specialized mobile dictionaries Apps (MDAs). Specialized MDAs are of special importance for students learning English for engineering, business, and computer science…

Academic writing is one of the most complex tasks students encounter in university. Both domestic and international students struggle with academic writing; however, international students also face language barriers and are unfamiliar with western academic writing genres. Since many instructors don't know how to instruct academic writing as a…

Digital media play an undeniably influential role in contemporary communication, facilitating new kinds of multimodal forms of representation. However, ELT pedagogy does not always take these multimodal aspects of communication into account in a systematic way. One pedagogical approach that has been developed for this purpose is 'multimodal…