Stakeholder Perceptions of Connecting ESP Courses With Graduation Seminar Topics

English as a global language and recent attention to the merits of the integration of language learning with knowledge/content construction has led to the necessity for the inclusion courses reflecting these ideals in tertiary educational programs including liberal arts. With this in mind, in the 2020 academic year, the presenters’ university in Japan asked them to review the third-year content-based English classes and develop an ESP program that would enable students to study content related to their graduation seminar subjects in English. Fourteen content English courses divided into two categories were created: Comparative Cultural Studies and Intercultural Communication. Course topics include American Studies, British Studies, Japanese Studies, Children’s Studies, Political Science, SDGs for International Cooperation, Gender, Race, Tourism, Economics, Organization Behavior, Cross-Cultural Management, Information Science, and SDGs for Business. Instructors with expertise in these areas were also hired and the new courses commenced in the 2021 academic year. This presentation reported on the progress of implementing the new courses, and discuss data obtained from students and professors in regard to the new courses. The preliminary results demonstrated that while 77 percent of the students surveyed felt a strong connection between the content studied in their English classes and their Graduation Seminar, the results from the Seminar professors and CBE Instructors surveyed indicated less of a perceived connection between the classes and the seminars. The issues surrounding these findings and plans for the next stage of the ESP curriculum project was elaborated upon.