Designing a syllabus for ESP learners

Abstract

The present study has been conducted to investigate the needs and objectives of commerce students at the University Mentouri, Constantine, while learning English as part of their curriculum. The sample population comprises 120 second-year undergraduate students and 5 English language instructors at the same department. A questionnaire was constructed for each group to explore the teaching/learning environment and any problematic areas in this process. The language they are learning is specific because it targets a content related to their field of interest, and our aim is to study the relevance of that content and whether it matches students’ expectations or not. The findings of this study revealed that students are at different levels of performance, and this is due to antecedents related to school classes and instructors, uninteresting learning environment, lack of references (example: textbooks), etc. The results also show that all English skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) are needed and that the learners’ needs (or what they think they need English for) are varied, and this points to a possible necessity for an eclectic approach and appropriate strategy to meet all the learners’ expectations. After analysing those findings, we attempted at presenting sample units that could be included in the syllabus and presented lists of possible topics, activities and language structures. Study limitations, course implementations and suggestions for future studies have also been addressed.