A Three-Category Analytical Framework for Modelling Student Expectations in ESP Course Design

AUTOR(I) / AUTHOR(S): Marija R. Ðukić , Vesna M. Petrović and Ivana M. Krsmanović

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.46793/TIE26.475DJ

SAŽETAK /ABSTRACT:

Business English has become an important component of tertiary education, as it helps students develop the language and communication skills required in their future professional careers. Since needs analysis is an initial step in ESP course design, it is important to examine what students expect when they begin a Business English course. This paper investigates which skills and strategies Information Technology students expect to develop and proposes a three-category analytical framework for organising their responses. The study follows an exploratory mixed-methods design based on qualitative content analysis and quantitative frequency, cumulative percentage and entropy analysis. The dataset includes 92 coded responses from 62 students, grouped into ten categories and then organised into instrumental or unspecified, language-development and professional-communication expectations. The results show that business vocabulary and workplace communication were the most frequent categories, together accounting for 50.0% of all coded responses. Professional-communication expectations formed the largest broader group, representing 58.7% of the corpus. A normalised Shannon entropy of 0.85 indicates that the expectations remained diverse despite this concentration. The findings suggest that the proposed framework can help relate students’ expressed expectations to course-design priorities in Business English for IT students.

KLJUČNE REČI / KEYWORDS: 

three-category framework; needs analysis; ESP course design; student expectations; Business English; frequency analysis

PROJEKAT / ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

This study was supported by the Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation of the Republic of Serbia and these results are parts of the Grant No. 451-03-136/2025-03/200132, with University of Kragujevac – Faculty of Technical Sciences Čačak.

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