Practice And Reflections On ESP Teaching

English has become increasingly popular in China in the past thirty years since the reform and opening up. Along with the dramatic development at all levels generated by this trend, much higher requirements for English talents are put forward. Those with pure English knowledge cannot meet the demands of society any more. Nowadays talents with both English knowledge and knowledge of a specific subject are increasingly popular. Therefore, ESP (English for Specific Purposes) teaching comes into being. ESP, different from EGP (English for General Purposes), is an approach to English teaching based on a rigorous analysis of learners’needs and has received increasing attention from the scholars from the foreign language field.ESP in China, which started in the1980s, has a history of over thirty years. However, empirical studies are scanty in ESP field, still less case studies on a particular ESP course. What is more, enormous problems can be found in current ESP teaching in China. The thesis is based on Liang Xuesong’s model, which presented problems in ESP teaching such as teaching objectives, teaching materials, teaching quality, teaching methods and teaching evaluation. With the instruments of questionnaire and interview, this study aimed to present the status quo of the course, English for Economics (EFE), in Central China Normal University and to test whether the problems found by Liang et al (2006) existed in EFE or not, with a view to improving EFE teaching in CCNU and shedding light on the teaching of other ESP courses in China.The research aims to answer the following questions:1. What is the current situation of EFE teaching in CCNU in terms of teaching objectives, teaching materials, the teacher, teaching approach and teaching evaluation?2. What are the problems of EFE in CCNU?3. How can EFE in CCNU be improved?With Microsoft Excel, data collected from the questionnaire have been analyzed in order to find out the problems in EFE in CCNU. The problems are as follows:Firstly, reading and communicative objectives of the course have not been achieved.Secondly, the textbook should be improved for the following reasons:(1) more oral exercises should be added in the textbook;(2) the textbook is too easy in terms of the economics theory. It is suggested that original textbooks on economics should be used for the course.Thirdly, the teaching staff should be improved.Fourthly, the teaching method should be improved.At the end of the thesis, reflections were put forward in terms of the teaching objectives, teaching materials, teacher development, teaching approach and teaching evaluation based on Content-Based Instruction.