BUILDING TEACHER CHARACTERISTIC TO CREATE AN IDEAL

ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSE TEACHERS

At the present days, it cannot be ignored that the demand, need, and the
influence of English has become fundamentally to people around the world.
English language has become as an universal language, and being used in the
many aspect. Moreover English language has countless of terminology within the
scientific purposes, art, medical, sociolinguistic and other specific knowledge. The
study of particular registers and terminology in particular branch of knowledge for
specific reason and purposed later being called English for Specific Purposes.
Even tough, ESP it’s not a new branch of knowledge to begin with rather it is just
an approach create an ideal model of learning specific knowledge.

This approach have several characteristics: first, ESP being created based
on the student needs. It means that the media, materials, and the method should
correspondence toward the need of the student. Second, ESP approach are focused
on the skill proficiency of particular knowledge and not focused on the four based
skill in the General English. ESP are solely designed for adult-hood environment,
this means that ESP are designed for the professional field. It’s should been taught
in the at least high school /vocational school and at the university student. Third
student who learn ESP at least should in the intermediate level who have
intermediate knowledge and skill of general ESP, this requirement is a must have
because if the student didn’t have or in the intermediate level how can he she
coped with the learning process. With the modal of being in the intermediate
level, are to be expected that the can cope with the materials and have the
convenience in learning ESP terminology and register.

In Indonesia, the application of ESP indeed has been implemented since

several decades ago, and being taught in the vocational school and the
universities. For the country which treated English as the foreign language or EFL
surely, it’s not easy to conduct the ideal ESP learning process. Engaging ESP
indeed has many problem and challenge such as material resources and facilities.
The differences of student background are also proved to be major problem. It
cannot be denied that there are lot of students who have a different background
especially the background of General English knowledge. Sometimes, there are
students who have the General English proficient and students with the lack of
General English proficient placed in one classroom. This matter seems like very
usual in this country but actually this matter cannot be taken too lightly, it will
increase the inequality and the learning process won’t be effective either. Students
who have lack of General English proficiency will not be able to cope with
learning process and hardly understand the material and the particular
terminology. And if the teacher made the materials a bit easier, the students who
have General English proficiency will taken the learning process lightly and get
bored too. This situation will only lead the learning activities become futile and
not effective.

In reality the application of ESP are really terrible, even thought ESP
become the subject matter in the Vocational School and in the University but in
the classroom teacher are only taught their student about English basic skill or
General English, the concern of the subject its not the specific skill and
knowledge but rather correcting students error in four basic English skills. The
lack of reading interest in students and the lack student self exploration in the ESP
materials also become a serious matter that cannot be taken lightly. This matter
will decrease students’ motivation to learn ESP because they are not really
familiar with the subject.

Aside from the problem which came from the student’s, there are also
problem coming from the teacher, Kusni ( 2004 & 2006) in his research stated that
this problem considered to be a critical one. The first is there is no specific and
consistent Universities which officially responsible to produce ESP teacher.
Second, there are inadequate ESP teacher development programs. Once they are
appointed to be ESP teachers, the opportunities to get training, workshop, or
further formal education are very rare. Third, ESP teachers are responsible for
over-loaded teaching hours in over-loaded numbers of students (big classes).
Whereas, teacher is the most component of the ESP without teacher proficiency,
how can students and learning process considered to being success?
 In terms of providing solution and the problem solving of ESP teaching in
Indonesia, Encouraging teacher characteristics it’s a must. Rather than changing
the students characteristic and force them to cope with the course. The student
shouldn’t be the one to blame on, even if they are not capable of mastering Basic
English. The ESP teacher is different from that of GE, but this does not mean that
they do not have things in common (Bojovic 2006). Stevens (1988), for example,
sees that ESP teachers are most of the time GE teachers being involved in
teaching specific subject in English for a specific group of learners (Stevens 1988
cited in: Esteban & Martos 2002). Dudley-Evans and ST John (1998) prefer to use
the term “practitioner” rather than “teacher”, because for them ESP work involves
teaching and more. In the 1960s, the ESP practitioners main job was to teach only
the technical-vocabulary (Smoak 2003). In recent time, the responsibility of the
ESP practitioner has involved five roles: A teacher, a course designer, material
provider, researcher, collaborator, and an evaluator (Dudley-Evans and ST John
1998) teacher role is a fundamental requirement to conduct a effective classroom.

The ESP teacher characteristic development program, furthermore, might

consist of two main blocks. The first tends to comprise work on topics such as
needs analysis, theoretical inputs to curriculum design, syllabus specification, and
so on. The second can concentrate on materials evaluation, adaptation and design,
and sometimes also on curriculum evaluation. Such an arrangement is logical and
straightforward, since it goes from the identification of needs to the creation of
appropriate learning resources, from the global to the particular, and indeed,
mirrors the very sequence of events which it is usually recommended that real-life
ESP curriculum design should follow.

The terms of building teacher characteristic to become an ideal

teacher should consist of several fundamental things:

First, ideal should be able to become an effective Course and syllabus

designer. The needs analysis done previously will help the ESP teacher to
organize the material based on terminology, situational or functional point of
view. And along with a criteria usually based on order of importance or
frequency. Second, become a good material writer. An ideal ESP teacher
shouldn’t follow a book rigidly. Especially if it is highly specialized since the
teacher seen there is no connection between grammars as specialization
knowledge. The material must fit the students need and the goal set by the ESP
teacher. Third, ideal ESP teacher should be able to analyze the needs of the
course. ESP teacher should gather information of the weak and strong points of
his or her student posses. Once the process mentioned above is done the ideal
ESP teacher will have good support for writing material.

Fourth, ideal teacher should be able to become a good motivator to their

students. Usually the students in ESP classroom are very tense, because they think
they will get involved with different grammatical structures and loaded with lot of
highly technical terms. They will have to memorize, so this is necessary to
the ESP teacher change these wrong perception and make their students
feel more comfortable in the classroom. Fifth, ideal ESP teacher should adapt to
the materials. ESP teacher must be skillful not only in the writing and arranging
materials that suit to their students needs but also be able to adapt to the different
materials that is given by the institution they are in. it will be necessary for the
teacher to adapt and able to choose the suitable materials, so both the teacher and
students will have a fluent classroom environment.

Last but not least, ideal ESP teacher should able to be a good negotiator.
The ESP teacher must negotiate:

1. A two-way collaboration in which the learners help teacher learn more

about the target situation and in turn the teacher makes the students
know of the problems which students faced out.
2. Negotiate in a more physical sense, cramped classroom, inconvenient
location, ETC
3. Make the learners know that there is no grammatical structure,
function or discourse specially for a specific subject. In short,
there is no need for highly specialized text

In fact, as most of ESP learners are primary workers secondary learners

undergraduate students, following a more integrated approach, which deals with
learners’ needs in more multidimensional way, is necessary. In other words, many
ESP teachers should follow an adulthood-oriented approach and act as
simultaneous teachers and counselors dealing with both linguistic and
psychological needs of learners in a parallel way. Therefore, in such a balanced
approach, learners are more motivated and involved in self-directed learning,
which is the most fundamental purpose of ESP programs. The counseling role of
ESP teachers should not be restricted to classroom settings.
ESP teachers should develop an accepting attitude toward content teachers
to get useful insights about the academic content, which they are going to teach.
In other words, ESP teachers should also closely collaborate with content teachers
to design the syllabus and get better teaching tips, which enable them to fulfill the
learners’ needs more effectively. Therefore, both ESP and content teachers should
negotiate without any unreasonable biases against each other. Finally, as ESP
programs are essentially learner-centered, the learning needs of learners are of
priority. Because these needs are variable, following a pre-determined syllabus
and methodology is unreasonable. In fact, an effective and ideal ESP teacher
should be continually involved in action-base theorizing about all the relevant
aspects and act as an active practitioner.
 REFERENCE

Kusni. 2004. „Model perancangan mata kuliah ESP di perguruan tinggi

(Unpublished
dissesrtation). Jakarta: Universitas Indonesia.
Bożena Górska-Poręcka. The role of Teacher knowledge in ESP Course Design.
Studies in
logic, Grammar and Rethoric 34 (47) 2013. The University of Warsaw
Kusi, 2013. Reformulating English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in Indonesia:
Current issue
and Future Prospect. SELT 2013. State University of Padang.
Bacha, N. N. (2003). English across academic and professional communities: A study of
EFL learners’ needs at the Lebanese American University. The Official Journal
of the Association of American International Colleges and Universities, 2, 33-62.