English for IT businesses: an ESP course design project

Abstract

The proposed project has been designed to meet the specific language requirements of an IT company, whose employees use English daily, both for informal communication and professional purposes. The company specializes in digital marketing, analytics, and e-commerce. This project aims at enhancing the English communication skills of the IT and Customer Success departments of the company. Based on the results of the needs analysis, the course incorporates topics related to IT, marketing, analytics, mathematics, and e-mail communication. The course includes five units, which contain reading, listening, vocabulary, speaking, and writing sections and all the four strands of language skills are to be practiced. The units have been designed based on communicative principles, and learners are provided with numerous opportunities to practice their productive skills with the help of pair and group discussions, debates, presentations, task analyses, etc. The designed units are for adult learners whose proficiency level is upper intermediate (or B2 according to the CEFR). This allowed the implementation of authentic materials from various sources to make the units compelling for the learners. The project has been designed specifically as a synchronous e-training course and has been implemented via a teleconference platform, namely, Zoom and through asynchronous e-mail correspondence. The course duration is one month, with two-hour-long classes held three times a week.