Teacher Perceptions of Industry Communicative Demands: Implications for Professional Development in ESP Education

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) education seeks to equip learners with the communicative competencies required in professional workplaces. The quality of such preparation depends substantially on teachers’ accurate perceptions of industry communicative demands. This article examines ESP teachers’ understandings of the language, discourse, and interactional practices characteristic of target occupational domains. Drawing on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with eighteen practitioners working in engineering, business, and healthcare contexts, together with systematic analysis of course syllabi, teaching materials, and assessment tasks, the study investigates how teachers conceptualize professional communication and how these conceptualizations align with documented workplace practices. Findings indicate systematic gaps between teachers’ classroom-oriented perceptions and authentic industry communication. These gaps are particularly evident in relation to genre hybridity and intertextuality, multimodal and digital literacies, interactive spoken genres such as meetings and handovers, and the strategic negotiation of professional identity and power relations. Teachers tended to prioritize formal written products and monologic presentations while underrepresenting the collaborative, rapid, and technologically mediated interactions that dominate contemporary workplaces. Such misalignments carry direct consequences for curriculum design, materials development, task authenticity, and assessment practices. The article argues that closing these gaps requires sustained, industry-engaged professional development rather than isolated workshops. Effective approaches integrate collaborative needs analysis involving practitioners and industry partners, structured workplace immersion or shadowing, the development of discourse-analytic skills, and the establishment of communities of practice. Implications for pre-service and in-service ESP teacher education, as well as for institutional policy supporting industry engagement, are outlined. The study contributes to ongoing discussions of teacher cognition in ESP and underscores the necessity of aligning pedagogical practice more closely with the evolving communicative realities of professional domains.

کلیدواژه ها:

English for Specific Purposes ، teacher perceptions ، industry communicative demands ، professional development ، needs analysis.