Tailor-made ESP teaching materials for HEIs – two case studies

Abstract

Commercially available teaching materials for Languages for Specific Purposes usually aim to cater for the needs of a very wide range of students, even within a specific professional area. So, when we have a more specialized purpose at hand, which is the case with two Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) under review in this paper, more time, resources, and work are needed to produce more tailor-made materials. This paper presents two case studies of ESP teaching materials design in two Serbian HEIs specializing in agriculture and food technology, and management, respectively. Materials design, resulting in two tailor-made coursebooks aimed at undergraduate and master’s degree students of English for Agriculture and Food Technology as well as undergraduate students of English for Management, are compared and analyzed in terms of course rationale and syllabi (learning outcomes, aims and objectives, students' entry levels, syllabi framework types, etc.), the number of teachers involved in the materials design process, approaches to needs used, the content choice and sequencing, copyright and other issues, theoretical and methodological frameworks, the timeline and the steps in the process, and the final product. The paper concludes by outlining the lessons learned, identifying areas for improvement and limitations of each of the processes.