سید حسین کاشف

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is derived from the umbrella term ESP, which means to meet learners’ and employers’ needs. It has gained a noticeable role as a language of knowledge dissemination, which has developed into an ongoing need for the improvement of language proficiency among non-English major university students. This has highlighted the significance of EAP courses, which are dominant in the context of Iranian universities. Although there is a reasonable body of contemporary research in the realm of ESP/EAP instruction nationwide, much of the literature in the Iranian EAP setting has been concentrated mainly on quantitative survey-based or experimental studies examining the syllabus and teaching contents with little or no attention to the teaching methodology. Moreover, there is scant research on the body of current EAP literature demonstrating a holistic picture of the running courses in terms of syllabus and methodology in EAP. The present paper aims at shedding light on the existing status of EAP courses for Iranian Islamic students in the tertiary educational system of Islamic universities of Iran through a comprehensive review of some major studies conducted in the related realm. Furthermore, it examines some of the major challenges and criticisms levelled at EAP instruction and EAP courses for Islamic students in Iranian higher education, with a focus on two major dimensions: syllabus and teaching methodology. The paper concludes by giving some practical and pedagogical implications for EAP practitioners, emphasizing the role of teaching methodology, aiming to raise the practitioners’ awareness in promoting the efficiency of EAP courses.

This study attempted to determine the viability of the pedagogic interventions in ESP writing courses that fall within the ambit of Written Corrective Feedback (WCF). Considering this objective, 93 intermediate-level ESP learners in 3 intact classrooms of a medical sciences university in Iran were assigned to three groups. They were provided with corrective feedback; using three feedback strategies comprising direct, indirect, and metalinguistic WCF over ten treatment sessions. The researchers endeavored to itemize the utility of the interventions mentioned above via analyzing the participants’ performance on an immediate and a delayed writing posttest. The results displayed the efficacy of WCF for the betterment of the ESP learners’ writing performance. Furthermore, they accentuated the short-term and long-term supremacy of explicit WCF strategies (i.e., metalinguistic & direct) over the implicit ones (i.e., indirect). The findings might enable syllabus designers and curriculum developers to redress the English courses for students of allied medical sciences.