Instructional Design Of Esp Curriculum A Constructivist Perspective

With China's entry into the WTO and the successful bidding and hosting the 29th Beijing Olympic Games, China is getting more and more actively involved in all kinds of political, economic and cultural exchanges with the international communities. With the further expansion of economic globalization, more and more joint ventures and foreign-funded companies are also established in China and have made significant contributions to boosting China's economy. And in the job market there is an increasing demand for talents who not only possess all the necessary expertise, but also have a good command of English.ESP education in China's colleges and universities is supposed to prepare our students to meet the needs of economic growth and social developments. However, the current situation of ESP teaching is kind of worrying, instead of being optimistic as people have expected. ESP research method and scope is rather simple and narrow, basically restricted and confined to ESP ontology. Even in this information age, computer-based ESP research is still limited and interdisciplinary research is almost blank. Given the serious situation, this author jumps out of trap of ESP ontology and conducts an interdisciplinary research by integrating ESP teaching, instructional design and education technology, hoping to help ESP practitioners improve their teaching effect with the assistance of instructional design and information technology.Therefore, this author first briefly reviews the ESP teaching and research, both home and abroad in the past 50 years, and then gives a detailed discussion and analysis of current ESP teaching in China, especially about ESP essence, ESP curriculum positioning, and difference between ESP and EGP, only to find that ESP teaching never gets its due attention in many colleges and universities. This author proposes to reform ESP teaching and elaborates on the necessity, feasibility and possible directions of this reform. There are both macro and micro reasons why this reform is necessary. Three macro reasons: to comply with our nation's macro language strategy and promote China's international competition; to meet the needs of economic growth and social developments; and to keep pace with China's higher education reform. And six micro reasons: wrong ideology about ESP teaching; inappropriate ESP curriculum; backward teaching patterns; poor quality ESP textbooks; weak ESP teaching faculty; and loose ESP teaching organization. The ESP teaching reform is feasible for the following 3 reasons, namely 1) support from higher education; 2) general agreement from most ESP practitioners; 3) guarantee and support from information technology. Finally this author outlines 4 possible coping strategies for this reform: specifying ESP courses positioning, quickening the steps for ESP books development, enhancing ESP teachers training and setting up online ESP information bank.Having instructional design as ESP teaching's breakthrough, this author, on the basis of his teaching practice of Business Correspondence for Foreign Trade,Business English and English for Secretaries, discusses ESP needs analysis (learning needs analysis, content analysis and learner analysis) and ESP instructional design models (teacher-centered, learner-centered, teacher-led & learner-centered) in great detail, and outlines 3 principles (authenticity, openness and learner-centered) for ESP instructional design. Finally this author, under the guidance of constructivism theory and using English for Secretaries as an example of instructional design, further explores ESP instructional design from a constructivist perspective by addressing some key issues like constructivism teaching concept (knowledge, learning process, teacher and students), ESP constructivism instructional design (learning environment design, learning resources design and collaborative learning) and concludes that anchored instruction is especially effective in getting students actively involved in the learning process, improving their practical abilities in solving real world problems and preparing them better for their future jobs.There also exist some problems throughout this research. Firstly, ESP teachers need a lot of information literacy for the instructional design, especially during the process of designing learning resources when ESP teachers need to search and sort out useful information from huge amount of texts, sounds and videos. Besides that, they also need to tailor accordingly to the unique needs and requirements of the students by editing some authentic materials, which involves a lot of computer work and skills, and very demanding for most ESP teachers. It's not exaggerating to say that information literacy is the bottleneck for the application and popularization of instructional design. Obviously, timely and effective information technology training is of paramount importance for all the ESP teachers. Secondly, teaching ESP needs at least a multimedia classroom to simulate a target situation, but due to the lack of attention to ESP teaching or short of fund, a multimedia classroom is more often than not, hardly guaranteed, and particularly in some underdeveloped areas. What's more, technical support and maintenance, which is also a must to ensure ESP teaching to go smoothly and is often neglected or totally forgotten, is another big problem. Finally, the size of most ESP classes or the number of students in each class is just too large for effective or efficient instructional design. And"learner-centered"is just a beautiful slogan. Therefore, how to deal with the conflict between class size and insufficient ESP teaching faculty is another big issue that all ESP instructional designers have to confront and learn to tackle.To sum up, this interdisciplinary research, based on some teaching practice of Business Correspondence for Foreign Trade , Business English and English for Secretaries, has some referential significance for other ESP courses to some extent. But more importantly, this author hopes, through the discussion of this dissertation, to arouse more attention to and interest in ESP interdisciplinary research from the higher education administration and academia, and to promote a healthy, orderly development of ESP teaching, preparing our students better for the new challenge of economic globalization and international competition.