Using Macedonian Students’ Potentials in Designing ESP Materials

Abstract

Macedonian universities included foreign languages as compulsory subjects in their curricula in the late seventies and early eighties of the last century. In the later decades, English gained predominance, and specialized ESP courses were offered at many universities. This entailed designing and publishing of the first pilot ESP textbooks as English language teachers’ response to the restructured curricula requirements. However, the early beginnings were marked by content-based materials and still largely teacher-centered classes.

With the ever growing demands for various ESP university courses emerging from the variety of studies offered at Macedonian universities, ESP teachers found it difficult to cope with  the task they were faced up to which resulted in a gradual alienation from the traditional textbook and a continuous search for different ways of supplying ESP teaching materials. This phenomenon led teachers to tailoring their own teaching materials which best reflected the needs of a particular ESP course.

The author has long contemplated with the idea of motivating ESP students to participate in tailoring ESP materials most suitable to their field of majoring. This idea finally came to fruition with the first year Transportation telematics students at the Faculty of Technical sciences –Bitola.

Keywords: ESP, ESP textbooks, content-based materials, tailor-made ESP materials, materials design