Abstract

Very few studies, if ever, have so far been conducted to investigate the challenges of teaching ESP at Majmajah University. This study sets out to probe the challenges faced by ESP instructors at Majmaah University. For that end, ESP instructors’ perspectives about the challenges and the solutions they put forward to overcome them, were navigated. Carefully moderated Online Focus Group Discussions were first used to collect the relevant data and then thematization and categorization methods were employed to analyse them. Findings revealed six major challenges: 1. Challenges dealing with instructors 2. Challenges dealing with students 3. Challenges dealing with teaching materials and teaching strategies 4. Challenges dealing with evaluation 5. More special challenges 6. Challenges dealing with the relationship between the language instructor and subject-matter instructor. Specific solutions were suggested to overcome each set of these challenges. Numerous implications were likewise discerned and discussed in the light of the findings: pedagogical, policy-making and future research implications. These include: considering students’ needs analysis in course design, updating or selecting more appropriate coursebooks, using supplementary materials, instructor self-training, more effective collaboration between language and subject-specialty instructors/ scholars alongside researching more specific challenges when combining the Focus Groups with other qualitative methods.

Key words: ESP, Challenges, Majmaah University, Focus Groups, Discussions.