Morteza Marooy - MA Student of TEFL, Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University, Tehran, Iran
Niloofar Karami - MA Student of TEFL, Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University, Tehran, Iran

Current study attempted to explore the research trend of International English language teaching journals with the focus on one of its major sub-disciplines, English for Specific Purposes. To this end, a corpus of ۱۹ articles from two prestigious International journals in the aforementioned theme and was meticulously inspected by two MA students of TEFL using NVivo۱۱. As the findings revealed, a special attention was paid to the role of the teachers as well as the students in ESP/EAP studies. Furthermore, the results indicated that vocabulary was the most frequently studied micro-skill in ESP studies. Implications of the current research for the researches could be that it helps them not get stuck in a research loop and consider various elements to discover the prevailing problems in ESP courses. Moreover, the findings carry practical implications for the ESP instructors to lead a more research-based ESP course in order to meet the students’ needs.

English for specific purpose, English for academic purposes, Journal trends, English as a foreign language