Bank Clerks’ Occupational English Language Needs

Nowadays, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is a major area of interest around the world. The researchers believe that ESP is an enterprise involving education, training and practice; it draws upon three major realms of knowledge: language, pedagogy and the student’s areas of interest. ESP courses are offered in all academic disciplines with the aim of providing the essential knowledge and skills of the target language to the learners. This study investigated the present and target occupational English needs of Iranian bank clerks (IBCs). For this purpose, two groups (a total of 60 participants) were studied. The first group included 40 IBCs out of 10 banks in Rasht, Iran, and the other group included 20 English for Occupational Purposes (EOP) teachers from two universities in Rasht. They were MA and PhD holders in English Teaching and Applied Linguistics. The data were collected through two semi-structured interviews and two questionnaires for both groups and then analyzed using the SPSS software. The results obtained through descriptive and inferential statistics including the Mann-Whitney U Test revealed a statistically significant difference between IBCs’ and EOP teachers’ perceptions of present and target occupational English needs. Many EOP teachers (p = 76%) and IBCs (p = 84%) supported the existence of such problems in EOP learning. Besides, both groups emphasized EOP teachers’ limited competence and lack of compatible equipment as the main problems and challenges of teaching and learning EOP in Iran. Moreover, most of them reflected that the number of credits devoted to EOP courses for banking affairs was not adequate. Furthermore, both groups mostly believed that an integration of three methods, namely, Task-Based Language Teaching, Interaction Learning Teaching and Participatory Approach is highly effective for IBCs to be mastered. Therefore, it is proposed that stakeholders take these perceptual mismatches into consideration, as they influence the effectiveness of EOP classes and courses to a great extent.