Development of collaboration in the English for specific purposes courses: opportunities and challenges

Abstract

The mission of higher education institutions is to prepare future professionals for a rapidly changing labor market, yet what skills we teach students, and how we teach them, is highly problematic. The ability to collaborate is crucial for success in professional and academic endeavor; the challenge for foreign language educators is to shift the focus of courses in ways that address the development of collaboration skills. Yet, this also becomes a challenge in scholarly literature on English for Specific Purposes (ESP), since research in this field has been somewhat limited, i.e., most commonly it investigates collaborative writing as a way of developing collaboration. Furthermore, the explicit teaching of collaboration, as well as the inclusion of diverse tasks to enhance collaboration, are often neglected by researchers. Also neglected in this field of research are the challenges and opportunities that students experience while learning to collaborate during ESP classes. The paper aims at acquiring more in-depth insights into the phenomenon of collaboration during ESP classes to facilitate the practice of language educators who can no longer neglect the urgent need to develop collaboration through their classes. The authors of the paper, who were also the designers of ESP tasks, sought to develop collaboration skills by both engaging learners in collaborative tasks and integrating additional measures to address this skill. Qualitative data acquired via observations and semi-structured interviews revealed that such tasks could contribute to students‟ overall performance to improve language proficiency because they enhance motivation and engagement. Apart from collaboration skills, they contribute to the development of many essential skills vital for engagement in the twenty-first century workplace. Notwithstanding, they pose challenges to students and this indicates the need for more frequent collaborative tasks and progress with additional measures that develop students‟ collaboration abilities in higher education.