Abstract
Needs analysis is the key step to designing relevant and useful courses in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), but finding ways to deliver needs in a motivating and interesting way is also paramount. Therefore, investigating students’ motivation to learn ESP is central in needs analysis. Few studies have investigated needs from the perspective of ESP learners’ motivation. Focussing on engineering fields at three Iranian state universities, this study aimed to identify factors that affect engineering students’ motivation for learning technical English in ESP courses. Using a mixed method design, this study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, semi-structured interviews with 40 undergraduate students helped to identify motivational variables, select a theoretical framework and develop instruments for the second phase. In the second phase, a survey using a 28-item questionnaire with 152 students, semi-structured interviews with 60 students, in-depth interviews with eight ESP practitioners and non-participant observation in seven ESP classes were done in parallel. Principal Component Analysis on survey data resulted in five motivational components of main sources of engineering students’ motivation to learn technical English: 1) ideal-self, 2) ought-to self, 3) instrumentality promotion motivation, 4) learning conditions, and 5) learning experience. These components were in agreement with Dӧrnyei’s L2 Motivational Self-system. Further quantitative and qualitative data analyses revealed that long-term goals and the practicalities of using technical English in every day life promote motivation more than a sense of obligation to learn technical English. Moreover, the results showed that Engineering students had negative attitudes towards elements of ESP learning experience, which best explained the reasons for students’ low motivation. The findings also supported the significant effect of academic levels on motivation. The factors that motivated students call for modifications in ESP courses which are discussed as pedagogical implications.
Introduction
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) provides instruction based on the needs of a specific context. Since ESP courses are designed based on learners’ needs, they are likely to generate higher motivation (Basturkmen, 2010). Accordingly, a thorough needs ana-lysis to make the course as relevant as possible is a key to designing a motivating ESP course. Needs analysis is defined as careful examination of the target situation and identification of the linguistic features commonly used in a specific context to formulate a language course to help learners develop the knowledge to deal with them (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987). However, Hutchinson and Waters (1987) believed that the relevance of the course per se is not enough to motivate learners. They argued that ‘the medicine of relevance still needs to be sweetened with the sugar of enjoyment, fun, creativity and a sense of achievement’. They affirmed that ‘learners should get satisfaction from the actual experience of learning, not just from the prospect of eventually using what they have learned’ (1987: 48).
Basturkmen (2010: 19) suggested ‘learner factor analysis’ as an important procedure in needs analysis and described it as the ‘identification of learners’ motivation’. In addition, Hyland (2006: 73) defined “needs” as a term which has several aspects including: ‘learners’ goals and background, their language proficiencies, their reasons for taking the course, their teaching and learning preferences, and the situation they need to communicate in’. Therefore, “needs” is a broad term and a thorough needs analysis is required to consider different aspects from the perspectives of all insiders by employing different methods such as observations, interviews and surveys (Long, 2005).
A number of studies investigated motivation in ESP courses. Katsara (2008) claimed that undergraduate students were instrumentally motivated to learn ESP and that extrinsic motivation outweighed intrinsic motivation. According to Katsara, teachers’ behaviour and good marks motivated students in ESP courses. Therefore, students preferred less demanding courses because they could get better marks. Learners’ low motivation in ESP courses was attributed to students’ low General English (GE) proficiency which thwarted learners’ active participation in class activities. Whereas, a higher proficiency level made learners more critical of teachers and teaching methods (Martinovic and Poljakovic, 2010). Malcolm (2013) attested that the main source of motivation in ESP courses was instrumental because students learn English for academic and future occupational attainment. According to Malcolm, family expectations, the compulsion of the course as a degree requirement and the dream of an ideal-self for future long-term goals were the other incentives.
ESP in Iran
According to degree plans ratified by the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, in order to provide students with specific language knowledge in their fields of study, a two-credit ESP course is offered at undergraduate level in Iranian universities in addition to another three-credit required course in General English. The plans determine whether the ESP course is to be elective or required based on the demands a specific major makes on English knowledge. Course descriptions clarify that improving reading and translation skills and developing specialized vocabulary knowledge are the main course objectives. Previous studies which evaluated ESP courses in the Iranian tertiary context affirmed that comprehensive needs analyses were rarely conducted to design them (Atai, 2002). Lack of needs analysis caused disparate views about students’ needs among stakeholders and led to inconsistencies in choosing appropriate course contents. Soodmand Afshar and Movassagh (2016) reported a consensus among stakeholders that reading comprehension and specialized vocabularies were the most required skill and sub-skill that should be taught. In contrast, students considered speaking and writing equally important and necessary.
Incompatibility has been reported between students’ motivation to learn ESP and course objectives (Atai and Shoja, 2011). Furthermore, students’ low GE proficiency was reported to be an obstacle to the effectiveness of ESP courses, the impact of teaching methods and the objectives of courses (Atai and Shoja, 2011; Soodmand Afshar and Movassagh, 2016). The other challenge in ESP courses, according to previous studies, has been teachers’ qualifications. Hayati (2008) confirmed that a successful ESP teacher should have sufficient content knowledge and should be familiar with language teaching methods. This calls for cooperation between subject specialists and language specialists. Nevertheless, the lack of collaboration between subject specialists and applied linguists resulted in discrepancies in needs perception and disparate course contents and teaching methods (Atai and Shoja, 2011).
Investigating learners’ motivation provides clues to their needs, interests and attitudes which altogether can provide a foundation to develop a responsive ESP course. None of the studies which evaluated different aspects of ESP programmes probed students’ sources of motivation as a way to identify needs. With a focus on the engineering fields and technical English, the current study aimed to explore what motivates engineering undergraduate students to learn technical English in their ESP courses. This research considered how elements of learning context affects students’ motivation. Based on the purposes discussed in early sections of this article, two research questions were devised:
What are the sources of Iranian engineering students’ motivation for learning technical English in ESP courses?
How do instructors, course materials, course contents and teaching methods affect Iranian engineering students’ motivation for learning technical English in ESP courses?
Method
This study was designed in two phases. In the first phase, exploratory in-depth interviews were conducted with 40 students. The findings were used to identify the motivational variables, choose a theoretical framework and develop instruments for the second phase. Subsequently, the data gathered in this phase were merged with the second phase data for final analysis. The second phase included four parallel strands: a survey using a 28-item questionnaire administered to 152 students, semi-structured interviews with 60 students, in-depth interviews with eight ESP practitioners, and non-participant observations in seven ESP classrooms.
A total of 252 undergraduate engineering students were randomly chosen to take part in the first and second phases (Table 1). Participants were from various engineering departments in three Iranian state universities, namely University of Tehran, Amirkabir University of Technology, and Sharif University of Technology. Students who participated were from different educational levels (freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior) who were either concurrently studying an ESP course or had already passed the course. Moreover, eight ESP practitioners (Table 2) were chosen to be interviewed based on purposive sampling; participants that could best help the researchers examine the variables under investigation were chosen.
Demographic Information of Student Participants.
ESP Practitioners’ Demographic Information.
The interview questions for the first phase were composed based on the purpose of the study and by consulting the related literature and two ESP experts. For the second phase, based on the findings of the first phase and review of the literature, two sets of open- ended questions for interviews with students and ESP practitioners (Appendices A and B) and an observation checklist were developed (Appendix C).
In order to develop the questionnaire (Appendix D), two methods were employed. First, as suggested by Dӧrnyei and Ushioda (2011), semi-structured preceding interviews were conducted as the first phase of this study to identify motivational variables to be included in the items. Second, items were incorporated from the questionnaire previously developed and used by Taguchi, Magid, and Papi (2009). However, the items were modified to serve the purpose and context of this study. The questionnaire was translated to Persian (Appendix E) – the native language of the participants –and all the administered questionnaires were in Persian. The questionnaire was pilot tested with 50 students. The validity of the questionnaire was examined through the feedback acquired in the pilot study and based on consulting with two ESP experts. Problematic items were either modified or deleted. Reliability analysis was exploited and Cronbach’s alpha of .85 indicated that the internal consistency of the questionnaire was good. The questionnaire was administered to 152 undergraduate engineering students. In order to validate the motivation components included in the questionnaire, the items were subjected to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and five motivational components emerged.
The interviews with undergraduate engineering students in the first and second phases were conducted in an interactive manner and in pairs to elicit in-depth comments and make the interview atmosphere friendlier. Each interview took 8–10 minutes. Interviews with ESP practitioners were conducted in a one–to–one manner and took between 30–40 minutes. Interviews were done in a flexible manner and interviewees were welcome to express their comments beyond responses to questions. All the interviews were conducted in Persian to enable the interviewees to fully express their opinions. Interviews were conducted by the first author of this study with constant and close supervision from the second author who has a PhD in Applied Linguistics and experience in ESP instruction and ESP materials development in various engineering fields. For observation purposes, seven ESP classes in three Iranian state universities were randomly chosen. Before observation, the researchers obtained the instructor’s permission. Field notes were recorded of significant classroom events and factors under investigation. The observation data were analysed and common features of ESP classes that affected students’ motivation were identified and used for further interpretation of students’ motivation in relation to the factors of the learning context.
Based on the motivational variables and features of the context identified in the first phase of the study, Dӧrnyei’s L2 Motivational Self-system (Dӧrnyei, 2005) was selected as the theoretical framework. This model includes three main sources of L2 motivation:
An Ideal-self: which refers to the ideal state that one desires to achieve. This source of motivation concerns students’ desire to improve their knowledge of English based on long-term goals. The type of motivation which concerns internalized or instrumentality-promotion (Higgins, 1998) falls into this category.
The Ought-to-self: which concerns a person’s belief about what one ought to achieve to meet expectations based on a sense of duty and in order to avoid punishment or a negative outcome. This source of motivation is related to responsibilities and obligations.
L2 Learning Experience: which refers to the motivational factors involved in learning context and experience.
Results and Discussion
The Results of the Survey
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was done to identify the components of motivation with direct oblimin rotation. Prior to performing PCA, the suitability of data for factor analysis was investigated. First, since the skewness and kurtosis measures of all items were between -1 and +1, the data met the assumption of normality. Secondly, The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) measure was used to estimate the sampling adequacy for the analysis which was 0.85, exceeding the recommended value of 0.6 (Field, 2009; Kaiser, 1970), and all KMO values for individual items were above the accepted level of 0.5 (Field, 2009). Thirdly, Bartlett’s test of sphericity X2(378)=2582.664,P<0.05, indicated that correlations between items were sufficiently large for PCA.
An initial Parallel Analysis using Monte Carlo PCA revealed that with 28 items and 152 participants, a five-factor solution best fitted the data. Consequently, factor extraction was run with this fixed number of factors. This method is more precise in extracting factors because Kaiser criterion, in which all the factors with eigenvalues of 1 were retained, overestimated the number of factors in solution (Field, 2013; Plonsky and Gonulal, 2015). The five-factor solution explained a total of 65% of the variance, with five components contributing 28.10%, 16.04%, 10.25%, 6.81%, and 3.88% respectively. The items that cluster on the same components in pattern matrix (see Table 3) suggested that component 1 represented ideal-self (or long-term goals), component 2 represented attitude towards learning experience, component 3 represented ought-to-self (or obligations to learn a second language), component 4 represented learning conditions, and component 5 represented instrumentality promotion motivation.
Pattern Matrix.
Note: Rotation converged in 16 iterations.
The motivational components that emerged were in agreement with the L2 Motivational Self-system (Dӧrnyei, 2005). In that, component 1 matched L2 Ideal-self, component 2 represented Ought-to-self and component 3 fitted Instrumentality Promotion Motivation which had positive correlation with component 1. In this study, components 4 and 5 also matched Second Language Learning Experience in Dӧrnyei’s motivational model. The average of items’ mean scores in each component was calculated and analysed to understand the effect of each component on motivation (Table 4). The mean score for ideal-self (4.3) and instrumentality promotion (4.7) components showed that students had strong future desires which positively affected their motivation. Whereas, a lower mean score of 3.5 for ought-to-self indicated that students were not concerned about the negative effect of insufficient ESP knowledge on their obligations. Moreover, a high mean score of 4.6 for component 4 showed students’ strong views about the importance of class participation, use of technology and positive attitudes towards learning English. Nevertheless, a low mean score of 3.4 for learning experience revealed students’ overall dissatisfaction with the elements of learning context, which best described the reasons for students’ lack of motivation in ESP courses. The average of items’ mean scores in each of the components was also used to investigate gender differences in the sources of motivation. For this purpose, the average of male and female students’ answers to the items of each component was compared through running five independent sample t-tests. The results showed there was no meaningful relationship between gender and students’ motivation.
Descriptive Statistics of Items in Five Motivational Components.
N= 152.
Kormos, Kiddle, and Csizér (2011) corroborated the significant impact of goals and L2 ideal-self on motivation and the more limited role of ought-to-self. Malcolm (2013) also identified instrumental motivation as the main source of motivation to learn ESP. Malcolm found obligation as another significant source of motivation. However, in the current study, students did not feel strong obligations to learn ESP. This discrepancy can be explained by the difference in the context of the studies. Malcolm’s study was carried out in a university where the language of instruction was English. Whereas, in this study, Persian was the language of instruction and students were not obliged to learn ESP as their degree requirement.
Interview Findings
Based on students’ interviews the most common reasons for taking ESP courses were learning technical English based on needs (44%), getting a good mark (33%), and having a positive attitude towards English (18%). In addition, students did not welcome a strict teacher and a demanding course. One student stated: The course is elective in our department and I’ve heard that the teacher is strict and assigns a lot of homework. That’s why I did not take the course. I don’t like to spend too much time studying for the course because we are too busy studying our specialized courses…
The results confirmed Katsara’s (2008) claim that getting a good mark was important for students in ESP courses and that students favoured less demanding courses.
ESP practitioners corroborated the same sources of motivation for taking the course. However, practitioners considered getting a good mark as the main motivation. They maintained that when the course is elective, students with a high language proficiency take the course because they can easily get a good mark. A positive correlation between students’ GE competence and their motivation was also confirmed by Martinovic and Poljakovic (2010). Atai and Shoja (2011) also claimed that having good GE proficiency is paramount for students to make best of their ESP course. In addition, practitioners underlined needs as an incentive for taking the course and emphasized that the knowledge of technical English is necessary for engineers to continue their education at graduate level and work in industry. P–5 explained that: The speed of progress in science and technology is so fast that there is no time to get the sources translated because they become obsolete within few years. Students need to read their sources in English to keep pace with the fast progress in their discipline…
P–3 stated that: Today, we are not educating engineers for domestic academic and professional positions only. An engineer must be able to communicate with their discipline global community and function at international level…
P–8 and P–6 believed the policy for announcing the course as elective caused a decline in its importance from the perspective of departments and the students and affected students’ motivation in a negative way. Moreover, both students and practitioners emphasized the importance of the factors involved in the learning context. In this regard, teaching method was found to be the most significant factor followed by course content. They expressed their views about the elements of learning context as follows:
Course Contents
Students criticized the course for having outdated and boring content. They complained that the course did not offer them any new and interesting language or specialized knowledge. One student stated: The course contents were the rehash of the topics we have already learned in our subject classes. The contents were only an introduction to what we have learnt. This makes the course very boring.
Students at higher levels were more up-to-date with the latest knowledge of their field. As a result, introductory texts which were used as reading passages sounded dated and too simple for them and made them more critical of the course content.
Students’ needs are paramount to determine course contents. Needs is a broad concept that Hutchinson and Waters (1987) divided into three aspects of necessities, lacks and wants. Interviews with students revealed a discrepancy among three aspects of needs. In terms of necessities, students stated that knowledge of technical English was necessary for a variety of reasons – to read their sources in English, to continue their education and apply to study abroad, to write English articles, and to work in industry. In terms of the skills that students considered as challenging, students considered speaking (42.5%) and writing (25%) more challenging compared to reading (15%) and listening (10%); only 7.5% believed that technical vocabulary was a challenging sub-skill. On the other hand, 27% wanted writing, 26% reading, 23% speaking, and 17% expected technical terms to be taught and only 6% wanted to learn listening in the course.
Students’ views about their needs were not in agreement with practitioners’ views. There was a consensus among ESP practitioners that from the four language skills, reading and writing were the most needed skills. They argued that due to the limited time in a two-unit course, it was more important to do reading because it was more necessary than writing at undergraduate level and students need writing mostly for graduate level. Besides, the majority of practitioners maintained that using interesting classroom activities, novel content and updated materials was paramount for promoting motivation. P–2 explained: the contents used in ESP courses are not as updated and as attractive as those used in subject classes and students consider them as simple and obsolete. One solution is using updated articles from the latest issues of scientific journals. They don’t need to be highly specialized but they should be novel and interesting…
While ESP practitioners considered students’ short-term goals and obligations when assessing students’ needs, students have long-sighted perspectives and perceive their needs by taking their long-term goals and desires into account.
Course Materials
Eighty-two per cent of the students stated that they were not satisfied with the materials. Students were critical of the content of their course books and complained the texts were rudimentary and boring (55.3%). One student stated: I wish teachers used variety of materials including scientific videos such as documentaries or talks. We can also have more interesting class activities. Teacher can introduce some real life situation and teach us the related language used in such situation through role plays. Classroom discussions and debates are also useful…
From the practitioners’ perspective, finding appropriate teaching materials was a challenge. P–4 and P–5 explained that one problem with using published books was that the content was usually outdated. P–5 criticized locally published books for not having appropriate exercises and asserted that internationally published books contained a variety of useful and interesting exercises. P–4 affirmed that students preferred updated authentic materials, yet such materials loaded teachers with extra trouble and responsibilities for preparing comprehension exercises.
Teacher.
Thirty-five per cent of the students expected their ESP teacher to be active and motivated and provide students with constructive feedback. Having good specialized knowledge (29%) and good language knowledge (22.5%) were the other most mentioned teacher qualifications followed by using good teaching methods. One student stated: We expect teacher to make class more interesting so that students enjoy the class even if they don’t learn much. I think there should be more interactions and more opportunities for students’ participation…
ESP practitioners who were content specialists – P–1, P–2 and P–5 – claimed that offering the course in engineering departments with a subject teacher was more motivating. On the other hand, P–3, P–4, P–6, and P–8 emphasized the importance of cooperation between language specialists and subject specialists for improving course quality and usefulness. P–8 stated: An ESP teacher who is educated in one field and lacks either specialized knowledge or language teaching expertise would not be successful. However, my experience showed that students prefer subject specialist to teach the course because they have good content knowledge. Students are not aware that in this course teaching language is primary and content knowledge should be developed in subject courses…
Teaching Method
Students believed that taking a student-centred, cooperative and interactive approach was necessary and suggested providing opportunities for all students to participate to enhance motivation. Use of technology such as videos (documentaries and scientific talks) and adopting more interesting and communicative methods were other frequent suggestions. The students stated: We do not participate in class. When we are not active, we do not learn anything… the most important skill is the ability to communicate which was not taught… …The course should help us develop the ability to communicate our discipline specific topics effectively. Learning technical terms by itself is of no use…
Using a communicative teaching method with a cooperative and an interactive approach, and creative use of technology were equally emphasized by ESP practitioners. For example, P–2, P–4 and P–5 suggested the use of videos to make ESP classes more interesting. P–2, P–4 and P–6 insisted on the importance of cooperative learning and an interactive approach to teaching through using class activities such as students’ presentations. Since reading is the most focussed skill in current ESP syllabi, using an appropriate approach to teach reading is essential. P–4, P–6 and P–8 emphasized the importance of adopting a strategy-based approach. P–8 stated: Reading is the most important skill because it helps students get familiar with text structure and discourse organization in their discipline. It is a prerequisite for developing writing skill. However, it should be taught using an appropriate method. A strategy-based approach should be adopted to promote students’ reading fluency and rate. As students develop their reading skill, they would be more inclined to read their sources in English which eventually help them acquire technical language of their field through extensive exposure to reading input.
These findings corroborated Hirvela’s (2013) emphasis on using an appropriate approach to teach reading which focusses on developing reading strategies and draws on purposeful reading. In addition, current literature recommends a shift from using text to teach linguistic knowledge to viewing text as a source of information. Hirvela (2013) supported the importance of equipping students with the knowledge of discourse structure and rhetorical features of their discipline-specific genres and the reading strategies which enable them to read quickly and efficiently, extract the information they need based on their reading purposes and discard unimportant parts.
P–6 and P–8, however, claimed that most teachers did not have the knowledge of reading strategies because ESP instructors in engineering fields were mostly subject specialists and they were not trained in language teaching methodology. Besides, students’ dissatisfaction with different aspects of their learning experience, especially teaching methods urged a more serious attention to develop teachers’ knowledge of appropriate methods for teaching ESP. Such initiatives require both language specialists and subject specialists to work together in different forms such as team teaching. Flowerdew and Peacock (2001) suggested that language specialists and subject specialists can carry out cooperative projects in which they take responsibility based on their expertise. As they maintained, subject specialists are better at choosing content and designing and running appropriate authentic classroom activities, whereas language specialists have better knowledge of text structure, discourse and rhetorical features, genre instruction and strategy-based language skill teaching.
Timing
The majority of students and ESP practitioners agreed that the best time for taking the course was the fourth or fifth terms when students have developed enough background specialized knowledge. Students claimed that they were more motivated to take the course earlier. They stated that postponing the course decreased students’ motivation because they had already become familiar with technical English either in their subject classes or by reading English sources; therefore, course content sounded trivial to them. The findings confirmed the temporal nature of motivation which has been presented in the Process Model of L2 motivation developed by Dӧrnyei and Ottό (1998). Based on this model, during the Preactive phase, engineering students displayed stronger motivation for learning technical English in their early academic studies. This can be attributed to the students’ ESP needs based on their future goals, desire to get a good mark and positive attitude to English. However, low quality learning experiences and the discrepancy between students’ wants and course objectives hampered students’ motivation during the Actional phase. In the Post-actional phase, when students had already passed the course, they gave negative evaluations of the course because it failed to meet their expectations. As mentioned above, delaying the course until the last terms reduced students’ motivation for the Preactional phase because they have already found alternative ways to acquire the ESP knowledge they needed
Findings – Non-participant Observations
ESP courses, in the context of this study, were mostly elective, yet in a few departments it was a required course. There was no unified fashion as to when the course had to be taken. The majority of students postponed taking the course until their last term. Some departments, however, specified a certain number of credits as prerequisites to taking an ESP course. In observed classes, activities such as information sharing, negotiation of meaning, high level and variety of interactions which according to Richard and Rodgers (2014) characterize a communicative approach to language teaching, did not exist or were limited. Soodmand Afshar and Movassagh (2016) attributed using dated teaching methods in ESP courses to students’ low GE proficiency. Nevertheless, this study confirmed that teachers’ lack of awareness about language teaching methods was another reason for not using communicative methods.
Based on course content, it can be concluded that the principal course objectives were developing reading skills and building specialized vocabulary or academic word knowledge. On the other hand, the procedure for teaching reading did not promote reading strategies. The most common procedure used for teaching reading was that the teacher asked individual students to read paragraphs from the reading passage out loud and then explained the meaning of the sentence by either translating the text to L1 or focussing on some academic words or technical concepts. Pamphlets were the most common materials used in observed classes followed by locally-published books. International books and authentic materials were rarely used.
The majority of ESP courses in engineering fields were taught by subject specialists. Content knowledge and high language proficiency were important criteria for recruiting teachers. Subject specialists who instructed ESP courses were not trained in language-teaching methods. Most classes followed a traditional teacher-centred approach. No cooperative learning took place and there were very few attempts to engage students. However, based on previous research, using interactive activities and adopting cooperative language teaching through extended use of group work and pair work as features of Communicative Language Teaching (Dӧrnyei, 1997) involve learners in learning and improve their motivation (Jacob et al., 1996; Ning and Hornby, 2014) and course effectiveness (Pan and Wu, 2013). Use of technology in observed courses was limited to use of PowerPoint slides or a video projector. The use of authentic materials obtained from the internet was limited. This calls for more attention to two major roles which were proposed in literature for technology in ESP courses including the use of technology to obtain authentic material and to design authentic tasks (Bloch, 2013).
Conclusion
Engineering students were motivated to develop technical English knowledge and skills to achieve their future goals rather than to satisfy their immediate obligations. Students’ future goals demand technical English competence in all four skills. Therefore, ESP courses with a focus on reading skills should be offered in the second year when students have already developed enough background knowledge of their discipline and reading is their most needed skill. In order to address students’ needs concerning their future goals, another course could be offered later on with a focus on other skills such as writing and speaking. Moreover, the approach to reading instruction should move from teaching reading as a separate skill to teaching reading in combination with other skills especially writing to prevent boredom and make the course more interesting and useful. In addition, adopting a strategy-based approach towards reading which develops students’ ability to read according to their purpose would make the reading instruction more appealing for students. These strategies must be selected and taught based on a thorough needs analysis which identifies the authentic reading activities of engineering students.
Problems that hinder students’ motivation in ESP classes were found at different planning levels. At a macro level, problems were related to policy-making. The issues that need to be addressed at this level are making ESP courses compulsory and allocating more time and units to ESP. At a micro level, the most significant issue is needs analysis. Identifying students’ needs requires a comprehensive study in which different aspects of needs are taken into account. Tailoring a course according to learners’ needs per se cannot guarantee course success and effectiveness because a key requirement is that the course should be motivating. This research points to the need to modify various aspects of ESP course design so the courses are more motivating.
Regarding course content, more interesting and updated texts must be used which correspond to the texts students will encounter in real life situations in terms of genre type, rhetorical structure and complexity. Course materials should include authentic materials and varieties of genre. In addition, the most frequent language function required by engineering students should be identified with appropriate procedures for teaching and proper and interesting classroom activities for practising them. Since a two-credit course does not provide enough time to teach all the technical terms, the focus should be shifted to teach vocabulary-learning strategies such as word analysis. Interesting and effective procedures and methods for teaching the course must be adopted using more communicative classroom activities which involve all students. Students’ participation should be encouraged by adopting a more learner-centred approach, group work and pair work and more interactive teaching activities. Effective and creative use of technology should be promoted both as a source to obtain authentic material and as a means to devise authentic communicative activities. More cooperation and collaboration between subject specialists who mostly teach ESP courses and applied linguists is required to enhance teachers’ awareness of appropriate teaching methods.
Supplemental Material
Supplemantary_material – Supplemental material for Engineering Students’ Motivation to Learn Technical English in ESP Courses: Investigating Iranian Teachers’ and Students’ Perceptions
Supplemental material, Supplemantary_material for Engineering Students’ Motivation to Learn Technical English in ESP Courses: Investigating Iranian Teachers’ and Students’ Perceptions by Saeedeh Jafari Pazoki and Minoo Alemi in RELC Journal
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
References
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