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2 LITERATURE REVIEW
Ghanbari & Rasekh (2012:112) explain that English,
the lingua-franca of almost all professional and
academic settings, has come out in EFL/ESL circles
as the English for specific purposes (ESP). This
popular catchphrase of presently English language
teaching programs, has been used to provide students
with the foreign language skill and relevant
professional knowledge necessary to succeed in their
work fields. With the rapid development of fierce
competition of business and industry, business
communities around the world have deemed English
language skills as an important tool needed to
compete in the global economy. English is one of
international language facilitating Indonesian
students to encounter external challenges in
industrilized communities and modern trades namely
in World Trade Organization (WTO), Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Community, Asia-
Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), and ASEAN
Free Trade Area (AFTA). This trend has caused ESP
instruction to more greatly highlighted for the last few
years at vocational schools in Indonesia. English for
Specific Purposes (ESP) materials are considered
vital aspects to help the students using contextual and
authentic the language learning sources.
English is one of obligatory lessons learned by
Senior Vocational High School students in Indonesia.
They have limited time to learn and practice the
language in the classroom. The students cannot use
their English in everyday activities and
communication, since it is a foreign language in this
country. They learn English for ninety minutes which
can be divided into two meetings within a week
(Permendiknas No. 22 Year 2006 about Content
Standard for Primary and Secondary Education). This
condition makes English lesson difficult for
Indonesian students especially in ESP context. It is
necessary for the language students use the target
language through a real practice in their daily
activities to help them easily mastering it.
Furthermore, Margana and Widyanto (2017:26)
confirm that Vocational High Schools (VHSs) in
Indonesia which run the 2013 curriculum are
necessary in facilitating their students to learn English
for Specific Purposes in accordance with their study
programs. For example, when they take a business
and management study program, the English
materials should be related to their fields, namely
business and management development instead of
general English. Because they are oriented to be
skilful workers in reference to their fields, this
suggests that the English textbooks used by students
of SVHSs should be different in nature.
Richards and Schmidt (2010:198) define ESP as
a language course or program of pedagogical
practices which consist of the content areas and
objectives of the course with regard to the fixed
specific needs of a particular group of learners.
Referring to this statement, Vocational High School
students should have specific needs according to their
backgrounds. Since they need mastering English
speaking skills to communicate in their workplaces,
they have to acquire not only the other three skills
(listening, reading, and writing) but also the three
language components (pronunciation, vocabulary and
grammar). By having so, they are accustomed to
handle any job and being well literate due to the use
of ESP in discourse of workplaces. In relation to this
statement, Hyland (2007:155) strongly urges that
when genre-based writing courses are organized
around the texts students will need to use in a
particular target context, and these needs are easier to
identify in ESP situations. A vocationally oriented
writing course, for instance, may be organized around
the range of oral and written genres needed in a
particular workplace. He, furthermore, exemplifies a
group of laboratory technicians have to keep
inventories of materials, receive written and verbal
instructions from scientists, take notes during
experiments, write reports, etc.
Cahyono and Widiati (2011:75) explain that many
secondary teachers are tempted to see writing as one
the first things to be cut back, or relegated to the end
of the English teaching or to homework. The writing
activities tend to be excluded in the classroom,
because the time allocated for writing skill was
considerably inadequate. Therefore, the Vocational
High Schools (VHSs) received not only insufficient
writing practices but also the skills. They are not
familiar with some writing processes (outlining,
drafting, etc) which can be used as their guidelines
expressing their ideas into written text genres.
The students’ reading activities such as
identifying reading topics, figuring out detailed/
important information, guessing meaning from
contexts and recognizing references in the English
texts are main concern of the reading class of this
research. Cahyono and Widiati (2011:49) assert that
the teaching of reading as a foreign language (EFL
reading) in Indonesia can be generally included in the
teaching of reading comprehension. This is because it
aims to improve the skills of learners, who have been
able to read in their first language and in EFL,
understanding the meaning of a written text.
Literacy Skills among ESP Students
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