UNCOVERING THE CHALLENGES OF ESP TEACHING IN REFRIGERATION AND AIR-CONDITIONING PROGRAM

The number of international job opportunities in refrigeration and air-conditioning (RAC) is not directly proportional to the number of competent technicians in Indonesia. It cannot be separated from the limited number of polytechnics that provide RAC programs. Unfortunately, not all existing polytechnics offer English for Specific Purposes (ESP), only one polytechnic. So, the need for ESP in this field has not been met to produce graduates who are competent in English. It creates limited ESP resources, both ESP teachers and ESP materials. This limitation is assumed to provide various challenges to ESP teaching in the RAC program. For this reason, this research tried to investigate the challenges of ESP teaching in the RAC program and how the ESP teacher dealt with these challenges. This study used observation, interview, and document to comprehensively explore challenges in ESP teaching in the RAC program from three aspects (the teacher, the students, and the institution). The findings showed the challenges were categorized into three: challenges from the teacher (lack of content knowledge and lack of proper need analysis), challenges from the students (lack of basic English skills, lack of content knowledge, low learning motivation, lack of presentation skills, and classroom misbehavior), and challenges from the institution (ESP curriculum, long learning duration, and lack of teacher training). Thus, Institutions must take part in preparing ESP courses, both teachers and materials, by facilitating teachers with sufficient ESP teacher training.