Teaching English for Specific Purposes: Online, or not Online, that is the question

Abstract

Many Teaching/learning references discuss and highlight the importance of relevancy when it comes to choosing the materials and tasks that should meet the students’ needs. The same applies to teaching/learning any second language. However, students’ needs may differ when they learn the same language as a general language or as a language for specific purposes. In Turkey, the Higher Education Ministry issued a decree that Universities can shift 40% of the classes to the virtual domain. The purpose of that is to reduce the number of students coming to the campus at a time. Many universities teaching practical sciences like medicine, Engineering... et c. decided to include English for specific purposes ESP in the list of subjects to be offered online. However, as David V. Kimball rightly stated, \"with every innovation comes a new abuse.\" The question to address in this study is: would online English for Specific Purposes be more appealing to the students than face-to-face?The researcher is planning to distribute a questionnaire to the students who did their preparatory course (General English Course) online before joining their program at the university. The questions will help the students draw a comparison between both experiences. This in turn will show if they prefer to learn their ESP course online or face-to-face by weighing the advantages and disadvantages of online learning.The purpose of doing this study is to find out what kind of difficulties/advantages students face when having their ESP classes online. Keywords: Online learning, ESP, English, face-to-face, advantages