Graduate ESP Teacher Training: Examining Practices, Overcoming Challenges, and Exploring Future Directions

In their future careers, English for specific purposes (ESP) and languages for specific purposes (LSP) teachers-in-training are likely to initiate, participate in, and supervise the development of new language courses, including those targeting specialized workplace or discipline-specific content and language. This paper highlights the need for future ESP/LSP teachers to acquire additional professional competencies in order to meet the demands of present-day language professionals, and discusses how these competencies are targeted in a graduate-level teacher training course in ESP that is taught at a large public university in the western United States. The authors first contextualize the need for additional research focusing on teacher education in ESP/LSP and then offer an in-depth discussion of the three competencies targeted in the course, including the ability to conduct needs analyses, to explore authentic discourse, and to utilize corpus-based tools to examine specialized language. Formal evaluations from course participants, which served to provide feedback and to instigate revisions in content and procedures in subsequent offerings, are then discussed. The conclusion offers a set of recommendations to consider in future ESP/LSP work in teacher education.