Developing an English for Specific Purposes Course

Abstract

The main objective of this report is to improve English language skills through the ESP course designed for the restaurant staff in Singapore. The main purpose of is to design the material required to cover in the ESP course, which is to be conducted for the waiters of Burmese restaurant, Singapore. This course outline will develop the English language skills, discourse and genres for the candidates (Noor, 2008). This activity will focus of two main skills, listening and speaking, and the discourse features. This activity will take around 4-6 hours to brief the waiters about the two lesion plan with justifications of the designed materials and the unit of work developed according to the nee analysis. The need of the learners will be identified through the need analysis and the ESP course is developed.

Introduction

This paper includes a needs analysis which was conducted in order to develop an ESP program which is designed for a group of Burmese waiter staff who are working in Singapore. This needs analysis was carried out to investigate the target situations, activities, language (lexis, grammar and register), language skills, and genres that are peculiar to their occupations. Based on the findings of the needs analysis, the objectives, syllabus and materials of this ESP course will be developed. In addition, an assessment task which can be used to assess one of the major objectives will be explained.

Discussion

Need analysis

Training need analysis is a vital prerequisite for the effective training program. The need is analyzed because the waiters were not able to interact with the customers in English language. This was causing the decrease in sales for the Singaporean restaurant. The need analysis was conducted to judge the level of English which the waiters can understand and respond accordingly. This training need analysis helps the management to identify the problems for losing their customers and to introduce the English language program to keep up the standards. It thus enables employee development and boosted their morale.

Findings of need analysis

The findings of the need analysis are gathered from the restaurant owners, it was found that the business needs to target the ethnic nationality and focus on the international English learning. Findings are analyzed through the situational analysis, target situation analysis and the discourse analysis.

Situational Analysis

Situation analysis identifies the gap between the learner's current level and the desired level, through questionnaires and interviews. Burmese customers seemed not to have many communication problems, other nationalities seemed to have some communicative breakdowns when they were dealing with some staffs that are not very fluent in English.

Target situation analysis

The purpose of target situation analysis is to identify the activities and skills learners will use English for. The results indicated that more than 70 % of the wait staff encountered problems (sometimes or often) when communicating with the customers. More than half the respondents either wait for other wait staff to attend a table or ignore that table if they are occupied by non-Burmese speaking ...