This longitudinal study examined how an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teacher transformed her teacher identity over time. Hinging on the close relationship between teaching and identity construction, this study was grounded on the notion that teaching a language is becoming a person who teaches it (Benson, 2017). Data were collected through six face-to-face interviews and six electronic interviews with the teacher during a four-year period. Findings demonstrate that becoming an ESP teacher is a complex process of constructing and negotiating identities. The teacher started ESP teaching as a scared general English teacher, and then negotiated her identities as a struggling but hardworking collaborator and learner. Later, she positioned herself as a novice ESP teacher, and then finally constructed her identity as a competent, helpful ESP teacher. Significant factors affecting identity transformation include needs analysis, enhanced subject matter knowledge, capacity to develop teaching materials, and teacher agency. Based on these findings, this study suggests implications for ESP teacher education programs.

Digital media play an undeniably influential role in contemporary communication, facilitating new kinds of multimodal forms of representation. However, ELT pedagogy does not always take these multimodal aspects of communication into account in a systematic way. One pedagogical approach that has been developed for this purpose is ‘multimodal composing’ or ‘digital multimodal composing’. This approach caters to the needs of English language learners in the digital age by engaging with multimodal forms of communication in digital media which are ‘embedded’ alongside the reading and writing tasks that make up the core of traditional approaches to ELT. In this article, I provide an overview of scholarly work that has been done in developing this approach. Drawing on a case study of English language learners in Hong Kong, I demonstrate what the approach looks like in practice and suggest how it might be implemented in other contexts, balancing multimodal forms of communication with the traditional demands of the English language curriculum.

The present study investigates secondary school student athletes’ specific needs for English learning and analyzes correlation and a cause and effect relationship among the needs-related variables. Two hundred forty six student athletes enrolled in physical education. Junior and senior high schools participated in the study. Data were collected through a survey that inquired about the students’ perceived English ability and learning areas of interest, their needs for ESP education, and aspects to be considered for ESP course design. The results show that the students put more emphasis on verbal communication (i.e., on speaking and listening) than on written communication (i.e., on reading and writing) and that they wanted more practical ESP education reflecting their needs and interests. Additionally, there was significant correlation (p<.01) among the subjects’ learning areas of interest, needs for ESP education, and aspects to be considered for ESP course design; a cause and effect relationship among the above three variables was discovered by goodness of fit test for structure equation model. Based on these findings, it is concluded that secondary school student athletes’ perceived English ability and areas of interest for English learning influence both their needs for ESP education and aspects to be considered for ESP course design.

As English communication is vital for academic communities and workplaces in globalized society, learners seek for opportunities to learn English with specific needs for their studies and work. In order to make these learners equip with the necessary English communicative competence in the desired contexts, English teaching professionals and researchers now need to pay close attention to learners' specific needs considering the context of discourse and the features of discourse community. The main purpose of the current study is to present an overview of ESP research in English Teaching for 50 years and to provide directions for the future research. In particular, this paper (a) discusses the features of ESP; (b） overviews ESP research articles published in English for Specific Purposes from 1986 to 2014; (c) presents current status of ESP research in English Teaching; and (d) suggests topics for ESP research in Korea for the future.

ESP, English for specific purposes, is an approach to language teaching that has been found to be effective for students who are strongly motivated in their social lives or towards their future goals. With this in mind, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not the use of QR code in cellular phones can be effective in teaching a course for ESP such as Medical Tourism English. For the study, twenty six students participated in a questionnaire survey and an interview. Moreover, four independent tests in total, two tests before using QR codes in class and two tests after using QR codes were taken interchangeably based on a time serial analysis. As a result, positive effects were observed in both test results, questionnaire survey, and interview; and the mean scores of those tests after the QR code activities were higher than in those without the activities. In addition, the questionnaire survey and interview data supported the findings; especially, the QR code activity, which helped to decipher the meaning of the technical medical terms and of the process, which students have not experienced so they were not familiar with. In summary, these findings indicate that QR code activities have positive pedagogical implications for ESP education.