GENRE FOR TEACHING ESP

Abstract

Teaching an ESP class in comparison to General English class requires different strategies where emphasis lies more on particular parts of the course rather than on skills. In an ESP course, we are mostly concerned with the application of skills that is getting students to show mastery of a skill by applying it to new and unknown material. Even though the learners are well-prepared in their subject area, most of them are third or fourth year students, they have to acquire new specialized knowledge of preparing and recording podcasts, persuasive writing in forms of leaflets, sales letters and brochures, compiling professional reports such as conducting researches by devising questionnaires, surveys and interviews.

In this paper, I would like to look at outcomes of teaching/learning sales letters and podcasts by an application of a correlation-al research, which aims to find writing and speaking relationships/characteristics and to answer the question: “Are students with good writing skills also those who have good speaking skills?” Research has been done on samples of writing skills (sales letters and reports) and speaking skills (podcasting) by evaluating students’ assignments with rubrics. After analyzing the evidences, I have tried to identify the problem area and to provide solutions to learner’s self-assessment by means of genre analysis.