The Study Of The Current Situation Of ESP Teacher Professional Development

With the acceleration of internationalization,the exchanges between China and the rest of the world become more frequently. ESP(English for Specific Purposes)talents play an important role in those international exchanges, and the society needs more and more ESP talents. However, the traditional university English education based on EGP(English for General Purpose)has been far from meeting the demands of the society, ESP teaching will become the direction of the university English teaching reform(Runqing Liu, 1999). To meet the needs of the society, lots of universities in domestic has reformed the university English by offering various ESP courses, such as tourism English course, medical English course and so on. Therefore, ESP teaching and ESP teachers have become a heated topic for researcher as well as scholars in recent years.However, ESP teaching facing the current domestic situation of vague understanding of ESP, backward teaching mode, poor faculty and lacking of continuing educational system. These problems have seriously restricted the development of ESP teaching, ESP teachers are the key to improving ESP teaching. Therefore, it has a great significance to promoting ESP teacher professional development in such circumstances. Although researchers have done a large number of studies on ESP teachers, few of them pay attention to the ESP teacher professional development. Consequently, it is quite necessary to conduct a research on ESP teacher professional development. This thesis takes Chongqing University as an example and investigates the current situation of 42 ESP teachers’ professional development. Then find out that: ① ESP teachers are not only lack of English language knowledge, foreign acquisition of theoretical knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, but also not familiar with the ESP theories, their expertise can not meet the requirements of ESP Teaching.② ESP teachers’ English spoken ability and research ability etc. can’t meet the needs of ESP Teaching.③ ESP teacher professional development is lack of the university’s unified arrangement.④ ESP teachers love ESP teaching and recognize the importance of professional development, their professional attitude is good.According to the above findings, the author puts forward some advices from the aspects of the teachers and the universities:On one hand, ESP teachers should improve their self-development awareness and insist on teaching reflection to promote ESP teacher professional development; On the other hand, the universities should take various measures to arrange the ESP teacher professional development uniformly. Hopefully, the results obtained will shed some light on university ESP teacher professional development.