The aim of this study was to examine the situation of the practice of ESP in the public universities of our country in order to make some suggestions for its improvement. The conclusions of the investigation carried out revealed a gap between the practice of ESP in our context and the expectations due to the lack of formal didactic framework, the absence of a clearly defined status of ESP as a theoretically rooted and professionally oriented academic discipline, and the discrepancy between the envisioned objectives that transpire in the perceived needs of the students and what they actually are able to do with the language. Our suggestions to improve the situation were threefold: Design a cross-specialties needs-based framework for textbooks or workbooks selection or course design that could help teachers make decisions about appropriate course materials; deign a cross-specialties modular framework for syllabus design which may be an indispensable resource that teachers can draw from in order to design their own syllabuses; and use functional-Genre-Based Language Teaching (FGBLT) as an approach which would allow ESP instructors to do away with uninspiring, stale and contrived views of ESP that over-emphasize issues relating to register.

 

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