ESP In Perspective---a Learner-centered Approach To ESP Curriculum Management

There can be few people involved in English Language Teaching (ELT) who are unaware of the concept of ESP English for Specific Purposes. From many points of view, the concept has been positive and beneficial. Ministries of Education in a number of countries regard it as one of the keys to their country's future of development. Corporations, firms, and other business organizations frequently build it into their training programs. And for individual teachers and learners alike, it has opened up many new professional possibilities. In the author's eyes, ESP, closely matching teaching content to learner requirement, seems to be the ideal answer in ELT to the charge of educational irrelevance and inappropriacy.Curriculum is, and should always be a major concern of any professional teacher. Whenever teachers seek clearer purposes or better strategies for -teaching, they are reflecting on the question of curriculum. However, curriculum has emerged as a subject for systematic study only in the 20th century, and it was mainly in the past decade that curriculum management received increasing attention in the literature on ELT. This paper deals with the category of ESP curriculum management in some detail, with the view that ESP is not a separate movement, concerning only with the "special "and" restricted"language of particular fields. In this paper, it is the author's point of view that curriculum management development, implementation, and evaluation should start with the language learners, centering closely around their needs.This paper outlines the curriculum decisions now facing the ESP teachers, starting with the consideration of needs analysis and ending with the implementation inside and outside ESP classroom. It is the purpose of this paper to develop a learner-centered approach a more effective and appropriate approach to ESP curriculum management with the analysis of the learner's needs and exploration of some theoretical concepts ranging from language descriptions to language learning theories. Furthermore, the paper covers such practical issues as syllabus design, materials production and evaluation, methodology, learner assessment, and course evaluation. Finally, it brings the research work into the field of the teacher roles, describing some extra responsibilities the ESP teacher must take in a learner-centered classroom.The most important messages in this paper lie in both needs analysis and syllabus design, and effective implementation of curriculum should be seen as an indispensable part of ESP curriculum management. The processes and factors of curriculum management are approached, but are studied only from one perspective or another, some of them, therefore, need further or wider investigation.