Content-based instruction for psychology majors: Issues and solutions for ESP curriculum development

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has been widely integrated into higher education, but psychology has not yet received systematic attention within this framework. Existing courses tend to emphasise general academic skills and simplified texts, leaving a gap in provision of instruction consistent with the communicative practices of the discipline. The purpose of this article is to determine the potential of content-based instruction (CBI) to establish a structured approach to integrating language study with psychology-specific discourse, while identifying obstacles that arise in curriculum design. The study used a qualitative comparative methodology that combined text and genre analysis with curriculum audit. A corpus of fifty psychology texts comprising research articles, case reports, ethical documents, and poster guidelines was analysed for rhetorical organisation, lexical clusters, modality, and multimodal features. These findings were systematically compared with the contents of an existing ESP syllabus and textbook for psychology majors. The analysis showed that psychology requires competence in genres ranging from empirical reporting and diagnostic narration to ethically binding documentation and multimodal dissemination. In contrast, the curriculum reviewed concentrated on essays, oral presentations, and general vocabulary lists, with little exposure to authentic disciplinary texts. The results demonstrate a substantial gap between disciplinary requirements and current practice. The study argues that CBI provides a viable framework for addressing this misalignment by extending genre coverage, incorporating unadapted texts, integrating multimodal tasks, and focusing on discipline-specific lexis. The implications are pedagogical and institutional, calling for closer collaboration between language instructors and psychology faculty to bring ESP provision into correspondence with professional training.