Segregated vs Integrated Skills Approaches in ESP Teaching, ESP Teachers’ Perspectives, Guelma University

Abstract

The current study investigates teachers’ attitudes towards the use of segregated and integrated skills approaches in teaching English for specific proposes. The journey to master any language is a nonlinear path that requires the development of various skills and competencies. Similarly, teaching English for specific purposes is no different, as it involves promoting skills such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, there is a controversy among English for specific proposes teachers regarding whether these skills should be taught separately, or interwoven together. In other words, whether to adopt a segregated skills approach or an integrated skills one. To this end, a descriptive quantitative method was employed, using a structured questionnaire that was administered to ten teachers from different Departments, at the University of 8 Mai 1945 Guelma. The results obtained from the questionnaire reveal that the majority of teachers prefer the integrated skills approach to the segregated skills one. Moreover, concerning the use of these two approaches, the majority of teachers adopt both, yet they favor instructional type that incorporates some degree of overlap or connection between language skills rather than isolating each skill completely.