ISSN: 2222-6990
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Encouraging more and more English as General Purpose (EGP) teachers to teach courses of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) for non-English majors to prepare students for future professional needs has become a vital issue in the reform of College English Teaching in China. Although most colleges and universities in more developed eastern China have taken the lead in ESP teaching, only a few colleges and universities in less-developed western China have offered ESP courses. As the teaching mainstay of ESP courses, college English teachers face a period of "transformation". Thus, their attitudes towards teaching an entirely new subject area in English play an essential role in the effectiveness of language teaching. This article attempts to investigate how college English teachers regard teaching ESP courses and what kind of assistance they need to provide ESP courses. The participants are all teachers from Western universities studying ESP and EAP at the University of Aberdeen, funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC). They are the backbone teachers of each university, so their views are representative. The research adopts a mixed research method combining qualitative and quantitative methods. A semi-structured questionnaire based on Richter's rating scale is used to understand the participants' attitudes, and an in-depth interview is used to explore the needs of these teachers. The findings of a questionnaire and interview among college English teachers from western Chinese universities can be applied to confirm the hypothesis that most teachers have positive attitudes toward teaching ESP courses. They would like to adjust themselves and change the teaching ideas and methods to achieve a better teaching effect in the future teaching process of ESP. Training programs for the pre-service ESP teachers to master specific related professional knowledge and new collaborative teaching models are requested by EGP teachers to equip themselves as proficient ESP practitioners. A strong sense of responsibility, moral sense, enterprise, and open attitude is the prerequisite and emotional basis for pre-service ESP teachers to carry out effective ESP teaching. Thus, the present EGP teachers can become students' assistants of ESP learning and collaborators with other professional disciplines.
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In-Text Citation: (Yanmei et al., 2022)
To Cite this Article: Yanmei, Z., Mustakim, S. S., & Muhamad, M. M. (2022). Exploring the Attitudes and Needs of Pre-service ESP Teachers in Western Chinese Universities. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 12(7), 2047–2062.
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