ESP Teaching: Reversal of Roles between ELT Teachers and Subject Specialists

This paper attempts to shed some lights on one of the issues that continue to be debated among ELT teachers and subject matter specialists as to who should take the responsibility of teaching ESP. ELT teachers say that teaching is just an approach to English language teaching, and therefore, it should not be seen as an independent field of study. On the contrary, subject specialists claim that teaching is about teaching a large corpus of specialized texts. Moreover, they think that students need to know the actual language that is used by the specialists. In order to deal with this controversial issue, this paper tries to investigate some questions, such as, is the content of highly specialized and thus the ELT teacher may not be able to deal with it? Is it true that the linguistic knowledge is of no or less importance in teaching and therefore, the subject specialist is more qualified to teach course? ESP should properly be seen not as any particular language product but as an approach to language teaching which is directed by specific and apparent reasons for learning. To what extent this claim made by ELT teachers is true? Should there be any sort of collaboration between the subject matter specialists and the ELT specialists to make the teaching of courses more effective? The author will try to tackle these questions in some detail in this paper. Index Terms—ELT teacher, ESP, subject specialist.