Studies On The Status Quo Of ESP Teachers With The Corresponding Teacher Education Programs

ESP (English for specific purposes) is an approach to language teaching and learning based on the analysis of students'needs which is different from EGP (English for general purposes). In China's higher education, ESP includes ESP for English majors and that for non-English majors. The former refers to the English major's inter-disciplinary courses with English as the language in classroom in some other specialty's background such as Business English; while the latter is also known as the subject based English (SBE) which is a follow-up to basic English teaching.Although the two types of ESP have undergone great progress in recent years, the development of both two is still not satisfactory, with a lot of problems. One of the problems is that the make-up, quality and training for ESP teachers are not satisfactory. ESP courses are usually taught either by teachers who major in English or teachers from relevant disciplines with a better command of English. The former are good in English but lack professional knowledge more or less; while the latter are specialists in their relevant disciplines but their English is not so good especially oral English. In a word, neither of the two can fully satisfy students'needs and teaching requirements. Teacher training of ESP Teachers is indispensable and imminent.In order to seek the real picture concerning current ESP teachers, some investigations were carried out in many universities and colleges including Southeast University in the form of questionnaires and interviews. The most concern of the investigations is the current situation of ESP teachers and the questionnaires cover five basic aspects: ESP teacher background information, ESP teaching, training on subject knowledge and language, team teaching and other aspects on ESP teacher education. Some interviews were also conducted with several ESP teachers and students out of the total subjects to obtain further information and clarify the obscure answers in the questionnaires.Based on the results of the investigations, three concrete teacher training schemes aimed at the two main types of ESP teachers and team teaching are introduced for reference. For example, it is quite necessary to provide training courses for language-trained teachers on subject knowledge and on the other hand language training for subject specialist teachers is indispensable. A special attention should also be paid to team teaching since it has been a hot spot of discussion worldwide in this field.In short, from many points of view, ESP teacher education has been very crucial in ESP teaching, closely influencing the overall quality of ESP teaching in the tertiary level education in China. As long as we take effective measures to settle the problems in ESP teacher education, the current situation of ESP teachers with the effect of ESP teaching can be greatly improved.