Yasin Khoshhal Delijani - Department of English Language and Literature, University of Guilan, Rasht, Iran

The present study aims at investigating the role of general English proficiency of graduate students of psychology at their ESP course. It thus tries to give an account of the ESP course offered to psychology students and seeks to study its effectiveness to indicate how much it has assisted these students to accomplish their linguistic objectives. In order to identify the relationship between students’ general English proficiency and their achievements in the ESP course, a placement test, Quick Placement Test (QPT), was administrated at the beginning of the term in order to measure students’ level of English proficiency and then the students’ scores were correlated with those of the ESP test given at the end of the term. The findings indicated that a strong positive correlation does exist between these two variables. Given this, graduate students of psychology need more training at general English which can in turn guarantee their success to a great extent in their ESP course.

ESP, general English proficiency, syllabus design, TEFL