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 including content-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 Medical Sciences, three untouched groups were drawn. The first group was merely taught by a language instructor while the second group received the identical materials from a content instructor. Nevertheless, the learners in third group were taught based on a collegial approach triggering a balanced amalgamation between the language and content instructors. 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. The results of this study unraveled that the group taught by the hybrid model surpassed their counterparts both in the content-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.