This paper outlines the process of the design of an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course in an EFL context based on learners' real-world needs and perceptions of various stakeholders on these needs. The specific course chosen for this study is called “Vocational English Course” (called VEC hereafter) for the department of Electric and Energy. The target group enrolled in the course consists of undergraduate students from a vocational school at a state university in Turkey. In order to identify the needs specific to the target context, an environment (situation) and a needs analysis were carried out with questionnaires and interviews to gather information related to the context, language needs, and methods of language teaching and learning. The results of the surveys and the interviews indicated the variety of students' needs which had not been realized previously. By focusing on both students' needs, learning styles and perceptions as well as other stakeholders' expectations and views, and by strengthening the connection between the learner and the target workplace, the content was improved for an ESP course based on the curriculum design model of Nation and Macalister in their book Language Curriculum Design. In the light of the findings of this study, conclusions are drawn, and suggestions are made regarding the development of a needs-based curriculum for vocational English courses.
There are various factors to take into consideration while designing a curriculum. These factors could be of vital importance in order to design the most suitable curriculum which helps to foster teaching. A thorough environment analysis also called as “situation analysis” (Richards, 2001) is needed in order to better understand the context in which education takes place. The primary objective of an environment analysis is to lessen the negative effects of the situational factors which will affect teaching and learning. There are various views on what to include as a factor. According to Munby (1978) these factors can be about: participants, purpose domain, setting, interaction (potential participants in the interactive process), instrumentality (skills needed), and communicative events (prediction of communicative situations).
In addition to the environment analysis, needs analysis, also called Needs Assessment (hereafter NA), has become a vital element of curriculum design both for general and specific language purposes since its appearance in 1970s. A pioneering work on needs analysis is John Munby's Communicative Syllabus Design (1978) in which a thorough and detailed needs analysis was presented. The significance of NA for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has been underscored by numerous scholars. Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998) state that NA is 'the cornerstone of ESP and leads to a very focused course' (p.122). Since an ESP course is expected to be based on specific needs of the learners in a particular context, needs analysis is considered as a vital part of course design to determine the current and prospective language needs (Basturkmen, 2003; Chang, 1998; Ezeifeka, 2010). Hutchinson and Waters (1987) state that if we are aware of the reasons why learners need English, the content of the language can be adjusted accordingly, and the teaching process will focus on these needs and become more effective and meaningful.
ESP as subset of English teaching has become a popular term in the globalized world where English is taught and learnt for particular purposes. It refers to teaching English to those who need it for certain purposes such as a job or academic. ESP is taught in many different countries and contexts and it includes English for Academic Purposes, English for Professional Purposes, and English for Vocational Purposes. Johns and Price-Machado (2002, p. 43) defines it as “a movement based on the proposition that all language teaching should be tailored to the specific learning and language use needs of identified groups of students—and also sensitive to the sociocultural contexts in which these students will be using English” (italics in the original). What distinguishes it from general English is the needs of learners for learning English. Earlier studies on the effectiveness of ESP courses have shown that these courses can be dissatisfying unless they serve the purpose and meet the needs of the learners (Derwing, Schutiz, & Yang, 1978; Leki & Carson, 1994; Littlewood & Liu, 1996). The discrepancy between the content of ESP courses and students' needs in real life has been reported by several recent studies in different contexts (Liu, Chang, Yang, & Sun, 2011; Chostelidou 2010). To overcome this, needs analysis is required. “Needs analysis is the cornerstone of ESP” and it is the means to reach a “focused course” (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, p.121)
The vital role of needs analysis for ESP programs and curriculums have been underscored in many earlier works (Basturkmen, 2013; Hyland, 2009; Hutchinson & Waters, 1987). As these studies indicate, planning courses in accordance with the needs of particular group of learners can yield to an effective, goal oriented and time saving learning. Despite the vital of NA to ESP course design, little attention has been paid to the practice of NA itself. Getting the environment and needs analysis as the baseline, this paper presents the design of a vocational English curriculum for electrical and energy department through the waterfall model which is based on a sequence of carefully planned progression produced from a needs and environment analysis leading to a consideration of principles and the setting of goals (Macalister & Sou, 2006). The curriculum design process is presented following the general curricular model including analysis, methodology and evaluation (Brown, 1995; Richards, 2001).
1.1.1 The School and the Department
Vocational schools also called higher vocational schools (Meslek Yüksekokulu) in Turkey offer two-years of undergraduate study after high school education. These schools have various programs like Tourism and Hotel Management, Computer Programming, Marketing, Accounting and Tax Practices, Motors (automotive) Electrical and Energy etc. Following the sectoral need for qualified workforce in different areas, these schools offer both theoretical and practical education and training. The curriculum in these schools includes both field-based (practical) and general (theoretical) courses, such as Turkish language, Principles of Atatürk and History, and English.
The department chosen for this study is Electrical and Energy Department at a state university in Turkey. The department offers evening classes along with daytime classes. The idea of offering vocational English courses is a new development at the department. Students at this department have general English courses in their first year of study. In these general English courses, they are basically taught English grammar as the basic skill. Taking the content of the program into consideration, students and teachers are highly motivated and pleased to have a vocational course in the overall curriculum.
1.1.2 The Learners
The target audience for this study consists of students who are in their last year of two-year undergraduate degree at the department of Electrical and Energy Department. They are mostly adult students whose educational, social, and economic background is similar to each other, which can be considered as a constraint that might have a positive effect on the curriculum. Based on the teaching experience in this specific setting, it was found that students are not highly motivated to learn English in general; however, they are very eager and motivated to learn technical English related to their field. This constraint can have a positive effect in the design of the curriculum as well. Since the students are already motivated, it can be easier to administer the course. English level of students in VEC is assumed to be low-intermediate; they have already taken general English courses for two semesters in their first year.
The target group can consist of students who are at an older age (30-40 years), thus while choosing activities, special attention should be given to activity types. The type of activities should be suitable to students' cultural background, age level and their wants. As learnt from interviews with these students, they are more interested in doing activities which require minimum group work and physical movement. As a final note, the topics chosen for the units should be interesting and up-to-date because the devices and technology they will have to use at workplace will be newly developed and launched.
1.1.3 The Teachers
Language teachers who offer VEC are not motivated to teach this course and they do not feel confident. The most apparent reason is that there are no quality textbooks available for teaching vocational English at the department of Electrical and Energy as it is the case for most of other vocational school departments. It is mostly the teacher's responsibility to develop materials. Language teachers might not have the required field and technical knowledge to teach the course which means that a cooperation is required between language teachers and the expert teachers from the department. Therefore, while designing the curriculum, cooperation is required to prepare the materials with the expert teacher and get acquainted with the course content. In this way, the language teacher can feel more motivated, confident and ready to teach the course.
Needs analysis helps curriculum developers find ''what learners will be required to do with the foreign language in the target situation, and how learners might best master the target language during the period of training'' (West, 1994, p. 1). Bachman and Palmer (1996) argue that 'needs analysis, or needs assessment, involves the systematic gathering of specific information about the language needs of learners and the analysis of this information for purposes of language syllabus design' (p.102). For the purpose of designing a curriculum and including relevant and useful things to be acquired in the curriculum, a detailed needs analysis around necessities, lacks and wants of the target group was conducted in this study. In order to do the analysis not only the school environment but also the industrial stakeholders were included to investigate the current situation in relation to students' English language skills and VEC. The data were collected from four different groups:
The reason why various groups were included in the needs analysis process is due to the fact that the purpose of the analysis is to find not only the learning needs but also the target needs. According to Hutchinson and Waters (1987) learning needs refer to what the learner needs to do in order to learn. They show how the learner learns the language items. Target needs, on the other hand, refer to what the learner needs to do in the target situation (work domain).
According to Hutchinson and Waters (1987), the best methodology for studying the needs of any particular group is to use methods as questionnaires, interviews, and collection of authentic texts. In this study, questionnaires and interviews as well as personal observations were used to gather data. The first participant group, students who are enrolled courses at the department (will be called “students” hereafter), were given questionnaires. In order to gather information on their current needs and wants for VEC, sixty-two students from day-time and evening classes were asked to fill in a five-graded Likert scale questionnaire. It included 29 Likert-scale type questions and open-ended questions. The other three groups, graduate students, teachers, and employers were interviewed. The interviews include open ended questions which aim to seek answers about the needs, lacks, and wants of the target groups in relation with VEC. 8 graduate students and 3 employers were interviewed individually, and a focus group interview was carried out with 4 teachers who offer courses for this department for at least five years. All the data collection tools and procedures were in Turkish to make the participants feel more comfortable while expressing their opinions and accordingly to obtain a rich amount of data for the needs analysis.
The results revealed that the students in this department considered vocational English course as a necessary element for their future career or studies and they were quite eager and motivated to take this course during their school years. They believed that what they learned in this course would positively affect their future studies and career. Depending on the mean scores derived from the questionnaire, it was concluded that students wanted to learn field-related vocabulary items and to make translation studies related to their own discipline. While they wanted to improve their reading skills in this course, speaking and listening skills were of secondary importance for the students of Electrical and Energy Department. Students also reported that the lessons should include current and up-to-date topics related to their fields. They expressed the necessity of integrating sample materials (realia from their field) in the lessons.
In addition to the questionnaire, eight students were also interviewed to gather in-depth data on their needs, lack and wants related to VEC. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The answers given by the students to the open-ended questions in the interviews showed similarity with the results obtained in the questionnaire and also with the interviews conducted with graduate students and employers. Overall, they stated that the terminology related to their field, the names of the machines and devices and their parts, current topics related to Electrical and Energy, terminology of the computer programs related to their discipline, sample manuals and projects written in English in the field should be included in VEC. They also thought the English lessons should involve vocabulary activities, translation studies, explanation of the computer programs, explanation of the machines, devices and their parts and demonstrations on how to use them.
Semi-structured interviews were carried out with graduates (n=8), teachers (n=4), and employers (n=3) to investigate their in-depth ideas and beliefs on VEC. After being transcribed, the interviews were subjected to content analysis in order to find meaningful phenomena. As a result of this qualitative analysis, it was found that there are common themes and topics existing in the data. These common themes are further explained for each group in detail as follows.
2.1.1 Graduate Students
Eight graduate students who started to work after their graduation were interviewed to gather data on their experience of VEC and what they would suggest for the updated VEC curriculum. To begin with, all the participants revealed that learning English is highly significant in their field especially in the work environment. When they were asked about their lacks in English at work, the most common answer was not being able to understand the technical properties of the equipment they use. It was also stated by most of the graduate students that there was no problem with general English but there was definitely problem with vocational English (technical English).
As the next question, when they were asked what they would like to change about their English skills if they were given a second chance, almost all of the participants mentioned that they would like to learn more vocabulary about their field. Hence, they could read the manuals better and understand the projects written in English about their work.
As an advice for students who are still at school and have the chance to attend vocational English courses, graduate students said that they should be aware of the fact that vocational English is one of the most significant factor if they want a satisfactory job. They also suggested that these students should pay attention to vocabulary related to Electrical and Energy. Reading labels in English, reading manuals of devices, reading warnings at workplace, reading e-mails in English, writing and reading projects, using machines and devices, using field-related computer programs in English are the cases in which graduate students who have a job have to use English.
As the last question of the interview, graduate students were asked to rank skills according to their use. These skills are grammar, reading, writing, listening, speaking, translation, and technical terminology. In parallel with what they have said earlier about the significance of vocabulary learning, the results showed that technical terminology gets the higher proportion among others (58%).
2.1.2 Teachers
Data gathered from the focus group interview show that teachers had similar thoughts on vocational English courses in general. All of these four teachers indicated that they found the vocational English course very fruitful and necessary. They believed that it could be the only time when students could combine their general English skills with their field and future jobs. Therefore, this course should be taken into consideration seriously. They added that students should be notified about the fact that vocational English plays a vital role in finding a job.
After hearing about their general thoughts on VEC, the teachers were asked about the goals and objectives of the course. All of the teachers' responses included reference to teaching/learning technical terms related to the field. It was found that they regarded teaching vocabulary as the first goal of the course. One of the teachers highlighted that by knowing vocabulary about the field one could follow recent technological developments in the field and this would help to find better, even international jobs.
Teachers were also asked to rank target language skills according to their priority in English courses. Similar to the students' results, the results revealed that field-terminology received the highest proportion among other skills like grammar, reading, writing, listening, speaking, translation and technical terminology.
As a final note two of the teachers made a call for curriculum designers that there was an urgent need of a suitable curriculum for VEC since they believed this issue had been neglected in their department. They added that the curriculum should be in parallel with what the students might happen to see in real work atmosphere. Thus, they believed that in designing such a curriculum there should be collaboration with teachers, employers, students, and material developers.
2.1.3 Employers
The last stakeholder to be investigated in this study consists of 3 employers who had recently hired graduate students from the department of Electrical and Energy. As the first question, these employers were asked to reveal their thoughts on to what extent vocational English was required at workplace. The answers were quite similar since all of the participants underscored that vocational English was a must. One of the employers said “All the manuals are in English, thus of course English is inevitable at our workplace”. Employers added that in addition to being able to read and understand the manuals, their employees should also be able to translate texts from English to Turkish. One of the employers further explained the situation with an anecdote that one day since none of the workers knew English, they could not translate a sentence written on a machine. They had to call someone outside to translate the sentence so that they could mend the machine and work it. He added that they had to stop all the machines not to cause a problem. He said “At that moment once again I realized that knowing technical English is much more important than years of experience etc”.
When the employers were asked how they would benefit from employees who were good at vocational English, the answers included “programming, reading technical catalogues and manuals, and getting international support”. They also stated that the need for employees who knew English was increasing in the industry; therefore, vocational English courses should be supported at all universities.
As a final note, employers explained that they believed cooperation was required in order to prepare the curriculum for VEC; however, unlike graduate students and teachers they did not think that they could provide sufficient information in such a case.
When the data obtained from graduate students, teachers, and employers were analyzed, the results in general indicated that the most required need for the target course was learning field-related vocabulary. Listening and speaking skills were not seen as necessary skills to be learned; whereas, only a limited number of interviewees emphasized the need for reading and writing skills in the target language. The results from these interviews revealed that in this study the curriculum would be designed around the goals focusing on language use in work environment. The students were expected to be able to comprehend mainly written documents about the devices and machines they were expected to use in addition to using computer program which were in English. Expressing themselves orally in English or being able to understand spoken input was not what they would encounter at work environment. A student who has taken VEC is expected to be able to translate documents about his own field, Electrical and Energy in particular, use machines properly based on English manuals, and have a wide knowledge of vocabulary in his field.
Depending on the results of the needs analysis, it was concluded in a general point of view that students of Electrical and Energy department wanted to learn a detailed repertoire of vocabulary items and phrases related to their field, understand the written manuals, projects, signs, and documents related to their field, comprehend the commands of the computer programs in English and translate the English documents related to their field to Turkish. They were quite motivated to take this course and study all these elements thoroughly. Therefore, the lessons should include valuable and meaningful activities that will appeal to these needs of learners. For that reasons, when the literature is examined, the principles related to content and sequencing, format and presentation, monitoring and assessment are found to be practical, applicable, and meaningful for the VEC. Being quite appropriate for the curriculum of VEC, these principles shape and guide the goals, content, and the format of the course and help the design of the curriculum achieve its purposes.
Considering the needs of the students and based on the principles listed above, following goals have been formed to be achieved by the students at the end of this course.
By the end of this course, students will be able to;
A language course not only contributes to the learners' control of language, but also puts the learners in contact with the ideas that are useful to learners and the content of a course may take many forms (Nation & Macalister, 2010). For this reason, the content of VEC will be based on the topics related to field of Electrical and Energy. Each unit will cover an important topic that the students need to learn in the field of Electrical and Energy and all other aspects such as frequent vocabulary items related to that topic, commands and instructions, and translation studies related to that specific topic. This content of the course will meet several criteria in the list presented by Nation and Macalister (2010, p.70) to evaluate the choice of the content ideas. This content will make the students interested and motivated in their studies, help in their job and future career, and support the learners in terms of their academic studies. The topics of the content will be chosen in collaboration with the teachers in the department, employers, and graduate students considering the results obtained in the needs analysis. The vocabulary items related to the topics will be chosen depending on their frequency in the field of Electrical and Energy.
A modular approach which breaks a course into independent non-linear units (Nation & Macalister, 2010) is utilized for the sequencing of units. Each unit serves as a module, which is based on a topic related to the field of Electrical and Energy, is complete in itself with its activities, vocabulary items, and exercises, and does not assume knowledge of previous models. The topics in the units are independent, do not require any kind of prerequisite and can be taught separately. For this reason, it is thought that a modular arrangement will be suitable in the design of VEC.
Based on the data gathered from needs and environment analysis and the principles chosen, in this stage of the curriculum design process, format and presentation of the curriculum is explained. Length of time for each lesson, students' economic status, students' needs, lacks, wants stated in the needs analysis, the size of a class, number of students in each class, students' attitudes toward the target language, students' motivation and interest, available materials etc. are the factors taken into consideration while deciding on the format and presentation of the target course.
Since the needs analysis reveals that students are in need of authentic materials which are firmly related with their work-environment, the units include as many authentic materials as possible. The analysis of needs shows that students in this context are not highly motivated to learn English in general. Therefore, they have negative prejudice and attitude against learning English. In order to overcome this negative attitude towards English and to support their eagerness to learn vocational English, the units are prepared in a reader friendly format. It is for sure that long texts in a thick book without images would not appeal to this target group of students.
Another significant point for format and presentation is that students should be aware of the goal of each activity in class. In order to make this possible, headings, and instruction for each activity are clearly stated. If the learners have an idea of what they are doing and why they are doing it, the outcome will be more meaningful. In the curriculum for VEC, each activity for modules/units is prepared in a way that it appeals to students and attracts their attention. For example, in each unit photos of devices are included, or images from real work environment such as warnings in English are included in the unit.
Each unit prepared can be regarded as a separate block, a term suggested by Woodward and Lindstromberg (1995) as cited in Nation and Macalister (2010: p.97). A unit in a block format in the curriculum for VEC is a complete module which consists of a topic from the students' field of study. The topic chosen is studied in detail with activities based on four strands principle. However, it should be noted that since the most prominent need is vocabulary, activities focusing on teaching vocabulary are given priority and they comprise a larger percentage of each unit. Although each unit is a complete block, units are similar in the way that they are repetitive in presenting the activities. The order of the activities in each unit is the same so that students become familiar with the flow. In this way, teacher does not always have to make explanations on how to do the activity. Activities are varied so that the students do not get bored doing the same type of activity. Based on the needs, lacks and wants of students, four strands principle by Nation (2007) which says that a balanced range of opportunities for learning is required and is followed in designing the units. These four strands are meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development. Activities for each strand include reading for meaning focused-input, writing assignments for meaning focused output, learning vocabulary for language-focused learning, repeated vocabulary, and grammar activities for fluency development.
Monitoring and assessment is another crucial part of the curriculum design model utilized in this study. Since monitoring and assessment must take account of the environment in which the course will be used, the needs of the learners and principles of teaching and learning (Nation & Macalister, 2010), the designers of VEC carefully consider all these elements while designing the tools and techniques for monitoring and assessment.
After the elements mentioned above were carefully analyzed, observation of learning and achievement assessment have been decided as the main types of monitoring and assessment among the ones provided by (Nation & Macalister, 2010). Observation of learning is based on the monitoring of activities while the course is being taught. Depending on the results of the needs analysis, it was found that the students need to learn a wide range of vocabulary items related to their field, and for this reason, the content of the course include such kind of vocabulary items and various activities in which students learn, revise, and practice their vocabulary knowledge. It is thought that these activities will be monitored by the instructors through the method of observation of learning and the students will be given helpful feedback on their learning. By doing so, the feedback principle related to monitoring and assessment will be achieved because students will receive feedback which will allow them to improve their knowledge of vocabulary.
The other type of assessment that will be used in this course is the achievement assessment. In achievement assessment, the students are assessed on what they have learned from the course (Read, 2000) at one or two points during the course. Achievement assessment usually has the purpose of both examining the effectiveness of the course and testing the learners on what or how much they have covered. It must be based on the material covered in the course and students are usually familiar with the subjects and question types that they will face in the exams. Depending on these characteristics of achievement assessment and the practicality of test in terms of environment, in this course, students will take quizzes, a midterm and a final exam which assesses the material covered during the course. They will cover the vocabulary items, translation studies, instructions, and commands taught in the course and readings similar to the ones studied in the course. It is thought by the designers that these achievement tests will provide helpful feedback for students and teachers. They will also encourage and motivate the students to study the materials covered in the course.
VEC has been designed depending on the curriculum design model developed by Nation and Macalister (2010). The elements in this model each of which forms a crucial part of it have been studied thoroughly and the necessary analyses have been carried out. According to Nation and Macalister (2010), there are two main factors to consider when applying a model of curriculum. The first one is the starting point, and the second one is how the process will move through. Considering the first factor, “since the design of a new course may start from nothing except the knowledge of the curriculum designers” (p. 140), the designers of VEC did not have anything concrete to start from except the observation of the language teacher who has taught the same target group before. First, the needs and environment analysis which are the crucial parts of the preferred curriculum model have been carried out to gather significant data on learners' needs, lacks and wants, and the suitability of the environment. The target group for the course was reached and the necessary data for the course design was obtained. Then the necessary content focus, which skills would be prioritized, what kind of methodology would be utilized and how to assess or monitor the learning process were determined. In other words, systematic steps were followed in a planned and principled way. For all these reasons, the approach behind the implementation of the curriculum model seems like “a waterfall model” because it involves a sequence of carefully planned and produced progression from a needs and environment analysis leading to a consideration of principles and the setting of goals (Macalister & Sou, 2006). However, there are some reasons which prevent this approach to be a totally waterfall model. Because of the time limitation and lack of resources for an extended and more systematic design, the approach is not a totally waterfall model. As it is known, a waterfall model is usually to be applied in funded curriculum designs or commercial books, but since a careful, planned and systematic process has been gone through in spite of the time and resources limitation, it can be said that a partly waterfall model has been utilized in the design of VEC.
Designing an ESP curriculum for a vocational English course requires a comprehensive process since it is difficult to identify a particular kind of language, teaching material or methodology in ESP contexts. While designing the curriculum for this project, it was found that some stages of curriculum designing model suggested by Nation and Macalister (2010) can be more significant depending on the teaching setting. For example, needs analysis was the most important and necessary stage for this project. This is because of the fact that defining the needs is a must especially, for ESP settings because all other stages are dependent on the needs of the students. In order to identify the needs of the target group for this project, several tools were used in a systematic way and as many stakeholders as possible are included in the needs analysis stage. Questionnaires, interviews, personal observations were used to collect data from students, graduate students, teachers, and employers. It should be stated that obtaining information from these groups was very helpful and fruitful for the curriculum developers. Other stages of the curriculum design process are all dependent on this data gathered such as identifying goals, content, sequencing, format and presentation, monitoring, and assessment. Especially deciding on the content of the course and preparing activities for the course heavily depends on the needs of the students. It is a difficult stage for this project because there are no quality English teaching materials such as textbooks for the target department, Electrical and Energy are available. For this project, an expert teacher from the department had to help with the decision of the topics and finding texts and other sources for the course. Based on the suggestions with the teacher, nine field-related topics were chosen. These topics are found to be more recent, interesting and necessary topics to learn about. This is based on the expert teacher's observation and experience in their field. However, it is firmly believed by the curriculum developers that there is a better way of preparing materials in such an ESP context, which is developing corpus-based materials. In this way, relevant texts which can be stored digitally are collected from various sources such as manuals, study field textbooks, reliable internet sources, and even academic papers. Then these sources are analyzed in order to reach reliable, authentic materials. As mentioned before, for this course teaching technical vocabulary is a must. As underscored by Nation (2001), language teachers should prepare their learners to deal with the large numbers of technical words that occur in specialized texts. Therefore, corpus-based curriculum design would be helpful for identifying the most frequent lexical items used in the field. However, due to time constraints, collecting data, and creating corpora could not be realized for this study.
To sum up, designing a vocational English course for the department of Electrical and Energy has been the main focus of this study. All the elements presented in Nation and Macalister (2010) which are crucial in designing a curriculum have been conducted, analyzed, and followed carefully in detail. At the end of a three-month process, the curriculum the aim of which is to meet the needs and wants of learners in terms of their vocational English has been constructed. In spite of its limitations in terms of its research elements and due to some time limit and procedural issues, it is expected that this course can be beneficial for the students in their academic studies and future careers.
In addition to its contextual contribution as a new and needs-based course design, this study also makes a unique contribution to ESP research in Turkish EFL context which currently lacks sufficient amount of studies to guide practitioners. As a novice study conducted by emerging scholars in the field, it puts forward that curriculum design in the field of ESP is a challenging and multi-faceted process with its own unique characteristics. Since the outcome of this process is worth its difficulties, this study suggests that more curriculum/syllabus design studies should be conducted in similar contexts especially in the fields such as business, tourism or marketing, which are closely related with English as an international language, in order to present a better instruction process and materials to EFL learners.