Introduction
Nowadays, most Turkish ESP practitioners design a wide variety of ESP courses such as English for civil servants, for policemen, for insurance staff, for medical students, for legal staff, for nurses, for human resources personnel etc. Such ESP courses have started to be more prevalent in our rapidly developing country, especially after Turkey’s application for full membership of the European Union in the second half of the twentieth century. Since then, Turkey has undergone a lot of changes in her national and foreign policy, international trade as well as economy and these transformations established the need for relevant and learner-centered
ESP courses in our globalizing world.
It is for this reason that if the ESP instructors lack the basic knowledge and experience about how to design an effective course that will cover the specific language needs of their students, they are often faced with various complexities and problems. Due to this reason, many instances of ESP course design in our country are often ad-hoc and not entirely based on comprehensive needs analyses.
All ESP course designers should know that the job of an effective ESP course design includes:
(a) planning and designing an appropriate course suitable for the target ESP groups,
(b) deciding on the practical type of syllabus that well meets the basic requirements of the ESP course participants.
1. Theoretical Background to ESP Course Design
The idea of focusing on learners’ needs originated in the 1970s resulting from the interest in the design of language courses that could satisfy individual and social needs (Palacios Martinez, 1992:135). Its development evolved in association with the teaching of languages for specific purposes. In 1978, Munby proposed his “Communication Needs Processor” (CNP), a model for needs analysis (Figure-1) which was quite influential, and stated that the design of syllabuses for language courses could only take place after a preliminary work on the learners’ needs.
In spite of such ESP diagrams designed by different practitioners, Munby’s Communicative Needs Processor (1978) as seen in Figure-1 still keeps its values as it is considered contributory to ESP in many developmental ways (Jordan, 1997; Phan, 2005).
Figure – 1: The Munby Model