English for More Specialized Purposes: Suggestions and Challenges

Abstract

This paper presents the changes in the representation and type of ESP courses at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade that are to be introduced with the new accreditation period commencing in the academic year 2022/2023, and potential challenges that these changes bring to ESP instructors. Even though there is a general trend of gradual reduction in the presence and status of ESP courses in Serbian tertiary education, our experience proves that discipline specialists and faculty management are eager to embrace ESP courses in which “specific purposes” have become “more specific” or “more specialized”. Accordingly, new ESP courses at our multidisciplinary faculty are to become discipline-specific (i.e. tailor-made to particular study modules, e.g. English for IT, English for Management, English for Finance, English for Human Resources) rather than faculty-specific (i.e. one-course-fits-all-modules). The authors therefore suggest that narrowing down the disciplinary focus of ESP courses and presenting “more specialized” purposes to decision makers at particular faculties may improve the status of ESP courses and potentially reverse the process of their elimination from Serbian universities.