Towards a realistic pedagogy for ESAP courses

In this paper I intend to discuss some of the theoretical and practical implications of the teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in the tertiary level of the Italian education system, with specific reference to the teaching of English for business and economics. In doing so, I intend to describe an approach, or more accurately a series of guidelines which I argue are essential to effective teaching in this specific learning context. I agree with Turner that specialist language teaching needs to have language as its centrality, “especially in written form” (Turner 2004: 95) and that texts need to be intellectually challenging. Consequently, the considerations in the paper refer exclusively to the use of texts in the ESP classroom.