esp teachers' challenges: a review study

In the past few decades, the demand for teaching english for specific purposes, or esp, in higher education has been increasing. widely considered a better approach for non-english department students, esp is generally designed to fulfill what learners currently need and what their future careers demand. the current research is a review and internet search of articles indexed in persian and english databases science direct, sid, pubmed, scopus, google scholar from 2015 to 2022 with keywords challenges, esp course, instructors, teachers, medical education, and students took place. in the initial search, 62 articles with related keywords were found. the inclusion criteria of the research conducted in this study were to investigate the esp teachers challenges, providing clear and sufficient information, the research being in the desired period and the language of the desired research (persian-english). the exclusion criteria also include the lack of access to the full text of the article, being unrelated to the purpose of the research, and being repetitive, so that 34 articles were excluded from the analysis process. finally, 28 articles were evaluated according to the research criteria and review of the titles, abstracts and full text and reaching the saturation of the required data. the results indicate that teaching esp is challenging because the teachers are generally english for general purposes teachers. moreover, teaching esp courses requires not only the teachers’ english proficiency but also the mastery of knowledge in a specific field of study. some realities related to esp practice become a stumbling block for the advancement and growth of esp practice in general, especially in higher education.