Empowering Gains of ESAP Course Design through Operationalization of a Synergic Model: Suggestions and Implications

It is becoming growingly tough to neglect fidelity to the pedagogical goals or desired outcomes delineated by learners’ target needs in academic milieux. To tailor such challenging requirements and to pledge backing for learners,English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) scholars are currently taping into synergy possibilities includingcontent-area instructors to empower learning by building a solid foundation in their apprenticeship. That being the case, the primary goal of the current study was to scrutinize the collegial role of synergic teaching model in fostering the reading literacy comprehension of anesthesia students in an Iranian ESAP context. Using convenience sampling method, from the initial sample of 100 sophomore students studying anesthesia at Isfahan University of MedicalSciences, three untouched groups were drawn. The first group was merely taught by a language instructor while thesecond group received the identical materials from a content instructor. Nevertheless, the learners in third group weretaught based on a collegial approach triggering a balanced amalgamation between the language and contentinstructors. After having finished the treatment, a Reading Comprehension Test (RCT) was implemented to gauge both the performance of learners against the objectives of ESAP program and differences in the performance of groups. Theresults of this study unraveled that the group taught by the hybrid model surpassed their counterparts both in thecontent-instructor-oriented group and the language instructor-oriented group on the post-test. Clearly, the findings of this study can provide certain implications to educational policy makers, syllabus designers, material developers, and specially ESAP practitioners

Keywords:

ESAP courses , synergic teaching model , hybrid model , collegial approach , anesthesia students