Material Design
The characteristic in ESP practice is materials writing. In marked contrast to general English teaching, a large amount of the ESP teacher’s time may well be taken up in writing materials.
There are some reasons for this:
a. A teacher or institution may wish to supply teaching materials that will fit the specific subject area of particular learners. In addition to the profusion of subject specialism. ESP course can vary from one week of intensive study to an hour a week for three years or more.
b. Even when suitable materials are available, it may not possible to buy them because of currency or import restrictions.
c. ESP is also for non-educational. For example to pull up the reputation of an institution.
And here, there is already an established tradition of ESP teacher’s, producing in-house materials. These may be distributed to other institutions or even published, but in general they are written by teacher to their students in the institutions. Few have had any training the skills and techniques of materials writing. It also shows a rather a cavalier attitude to the activity of materials writing, implying, as it does, that if you can teach you can write materials. And in other hand, it can be argued that the process of materials writing may help to make teacher more aware of what is involved in teaching learning.
