First of all we’d like to point out that no case of team-teaching in  ESP might be possible without our attending a course for teachers of English “Teaching English for Specific Purposes at Tertiary Level” organized by the English Language Teachers’ Resource Centre and headed by the British Council teacher-trainer L.B. Kuznetsova. The course explored syllabus design, cultural issues in ELT and teaching and testing materials design. We were involved in classroom observation and completed project work. Our project work was monitored by N. Vorobyova. The more so we’d like to express our deepest gratitude and our profound appreciation to L.B.Kuznetsova for her careful proofreading of the article, precious suggestions, comments and advice.

In our rapidly changing society when teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has grown to become one of the most prominent areas of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), ESP practitioners face new opportunities and challenges. The extent to which we know and use a foreign language may be crucial to our existence, to our education’ our relationships and our careers. We are not only speakers, but also receivers, consumers, readers and interpreters of language. And ESP can help people to become better professionals, which may reflect on their whole lives.

Nowadays ESP focuses on using English effectively in specific academic fields such as business, law, banking, medicine, etc. One may ask: “What’s the difference between the ESP and general English approaches?” T.Hutchinson and A.Waters (1987) answer this quite simply - “in theory - nothing, in practice - a great deal”. The words and sentences learned, the subject matter discussed, all relate to a particular field or discipline, for example, a lawyer writing a brief, or a diplomat preparing a policy paper. The courses make use of vocabulary and tasks related to the field such as negotiation skills and effective techniques for oral presentations. The entire program is designed to meet the specific professional or academic needs of the learner. “In ESP a balance between educational theory and practical considerations is created. It increases students’ skills and confidence in using English.

A lot of scholars have been studying and researching the area of ESP - Tom Hutchinson, Alan Waters, Pauline Robinson, Tony Dudley Evans, Ann M. Johns, James R Davis and others. They have come to a conclusion that ESP is defined to meet specific needs of the learners, it makes use of methodology and activities of the discipline it serves, it is centered on the language appropriate to these activities and according to T. Hutchinson and A. Waters (1987:19) “ESP is an approach to language teaching in which all decisions as to content and method are based on the learner’s reason for learning’. Today teachers are much more aware of the importance of needs analysis and materials writers think rather carefully about the goals of learners while producing materials.

Modern teachers are expected to be linguistically and culturally competent, and to be equally competent on the discourse level. From the pedagogical point of view, they should be able to handle different learner strategies, be good classroom managers, organizers, initiators, monitors, advisers and resource-providers. They are expected to help students learn from their errors, motivate them, promote learner’s autonomy, and cater for different abilities and learning styles. Even experienced teachers would find it difficult to fulfill so many requirements.

But still there is a gap between students’ real life needs and what a common course book can suggest. Very often instead of conducting interviews with specialists in the field, analyzing the language that is required in the profession or even conducting students’ needs analysis many ESP teachers become dependent only on the published textbooks available.

What can an ESP teacher really do to meet students’ real life needs? Our answer is “team-teaching”. What is team-teaching? According to R.R. Jordan “Team- teaching - the joint teaching, or sharing of teaching’ by both the subject specialist and the English tutor - has added another dimension to the teaching of ESP since the late 1970s. The specialists act as informants on what goes on in the subject discipline” (R.R. Jordan. 1997:121).

T. Hutchinson and A. Waters (op.cit.) think that cooperation between subject and language specialists should be a two way process: the subject specialist can help the ESP teacher in learning more about the learners’ target situation, at the *same time the ESP teacher can make the subject specialist more aware of the language. So subject and language teachers benefit from this way of organizing their teaching process.

Team-teaching is not merely a technique it is becoming a strategy that has been growing in importance and demand. But creating a team to bring about changes in teaching practice requires careful thought and consideration.

In our opinion, interest in developing courses that provide interdisciplinary perspectives is increasing. Our idea of team-teaching came about as a conscious attempt to meet linguistic and academic needs of the students at the Economics Faculty of State Regional Institute of Economy and Finance. We had little doubts that team-teaching designed as a new way of presenting a subject could provide a stimulating and challenging opportunity for professional development, sharing teaching responsibilities and risk taking, collecting and designing materials, planning sessions together, coming to collective decisions through discussion and argument.

We were lucky enough to be able to try these risks. A team consisting of American professor Mr Charles Whittle and two Russian teachers of English L. Yeserskaya and T. Rostovtseva was formed. Students’ high motivation as well as the possibility of studying Management with an American professor made our work a most effective teaching tool.

Lack of opportunities for informal learning and real life use of the language made us seek a new, more complex and challenging solution. Team-teaching project work seemed to be the effective way to meet our aims. There were some points in favour of the project. Firstly, there was a gap between the language the students were taught and the language they in fact require. Our project could help to bridge this gap. It gave the students the opportunity of practicing in class the language they are likely to require outside their classroom. Secondly, the students became responsible for their own learning. They selected and organized materials with the teachers acting as coordinators and consultants. Our joint work also provided a good way of integrating the four basic skills (listening, reading, writing and speaking). And the skills were not treated in isolation but combined.

The idea was to try a comparatively new and rarely practiced approach to subject and language teaching by combining a course of lectures on “Principles of Management” delivered by an American professor with the further students’ participation in the form of project work “Principles of Management. “ . Students were supposed to make presentations on every principle of management. Their work was monitored by the English language teachers.

The content of team-teaching project covered all five basic principles of management such as planning, organizing, staffing, directing and controlling. Our students were invited to investigate, explore and analyze information about the studied principles and then make a presentation of each principle, create business vocabulary and invent tasks for cross-checking of the information given at the presentation stage.

We believe that project work approach is a relatively new and vanguard approach to language teaching as it goes in line with the modern trends in political, social and economic spheres where most of the activity is carried out through project work.

Our objectives were:
-to raise the students’ motivation for language and subject learning,
-to develop the students’ creativity and independent thinking,
-to involve the students into natural communication,
-to raise their cross-cultural and subject awareness,
-to encourage students to create their own stock of business terms,
-to develop students’ presentation skills.

The following teaching techniques were used to achieve our objectives:

1.Students were given much responsibility while forming their own teams and doing their project work tasks;
2. They were exposed to the authentic language of the lecturer;
3. Students were encouraged to use information taken from different sources;
4. They were to use a monolingual dictionary in order to make a primary stock of business vocabulary;
5. The skills of note-taking and report-making were being developed;
6. Different skills were trained while getting the presentation ready - discussion, negotiation, suggestion, argument;
7. Students took part in class discussions, group discussions;
8. They read special texts extensively;
9. They had the opportunity to work in group and individually.

The underlying assumption was that if you want independent students in your institute, you have to give your students as much responsibility for their own learning as possible.

Students who took part in our team-teaching project had the benefit of working under the guidance of three instructors. Our students had a unique chance of mastering the subject “Management” and the language simultaneously. After all, no communication is possible without content. It is only natural that the form and the content are taught together.

We provided our students with the data which they themselves had to organize and understand in the context of their own knowledge and experience. Today with our renewed emphasis on interactive, problem-solving teaching we tried to use in our class a truly student-centred, inductive approach producing task-oriented assignments which provided for students’ team-work, their independent processing of the data, communication with the instructors and better understanding of the business world.

Eventually we all benefited from being able to work together teachers as well as students.

Some of the major outcomes of our team-teaching experiment are as follows:

FOR TEACHERS: - greater cohesion in the design of lessons is attained;
-long-term goals become more important than day-to-day goals
-students are judged on what they can demonstrate about new
learning,
-students’ projects are used to judge how much students have learnt,
-teaching repertoire is made more diverse.

FOR STUDENTS:
-students become more active learners,
-more students experience success,
-analytical thinking is fostered,
-there is more enjoyment in students’ learning;
-we get more motivated learners who enjoy the process more.

We can’t but agree with James R. Davis, from the University of Denver who proves convincingly in his book “Interdisciplinary Courses and Team Teaching: New Arrangements for Learning” that “team-taught, interdisciplinary courses are an improvement over the traditional disciplinary structure”. He offers the suggestion drawn from current research to help facilitate the process: “Interdisciplinary team-taught courses will be a key element in reengineering teaching for the twenty-first century learning”.

The results of our questionnaire offered to students after their project work prove the same. The questionnaire was developed to get students’ feedback on the course. It was supposed to be the final stage of the programme. Our idea was to have students evaluate the course and their participation in it. The results of the short questionnaire satisfied us and proved that it was worth our joint effort.

Twenty seven students taking part in the project were given questionnaire sheets and twenty five students returned them. The results are the following:

1. How interested were you in the project?
Very - 22 Quite - 2 Not at all - 1

2. Did you enjoy working on the project in a team?
Yes - 24 No - 1

3. Do you accept this as a valid way of learning?
Yes - 21 No - 4

4. Are you satisfied with your role in the project?
Yes - 21 No - 3

5. Which activities do you find most useful?
-reading special texts - 22
-creating your own business vocabulary - 13
-delivering your business information - 16
-inventing tasks for your fellow-students - 14

The results obtained and discussed above lead us to believe that interdisciplinary team-teaching may prove effective in ESP teaching situations and is worth a try. The resulting link between subject and ESP tutors doubles the effectiveness of teaching which is still further enhanced by students’ increased motivation in the learning process, enjoyment and greater responsibility in their learning process.

1. Dudley-Evans Tony. Developments in English for Specific Purposes: A Multi-disciplinary Approach.- Cambridge University Press, 1997
2. R. R. Jordan. English for Academic Purposes. A Guide and Resource Book for Teachers.- Cambridge University Press, 1997.
3. Hutchinson T, Waters A. English for Specific Purposes: A Learner-centered Approach.- Cambridge University Press, 1987.
4. Davis J.R. Interdisciplinary Courses and Team teaching: New Arrangements for Learning.- Arisona: Oryx Press, 1997.- 288 p.- ISBN 089774-887-5
5. Robinson P. ESP Today: A Practitioner’s Guide.- Prentice Hall, 1991