An Exploration Of Business English Teaching In The Department Of Commerce At Mouloud Mammeri University Of Tizi-ouzou

Résumé: The present study is intended to evaluate Business English teaching in the Department of Commerce at Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou. This investigation is based on four main objectives. First, it identifies the different needs of third year Marketing students for learning English. Second, it examines whether teachers of English of the Department of Commerce conduct a needs analysis. Third, it explores the main difficulties encountered by learners, and which hinder their learning of English. Fourth, it investigates whether the teachers of English design a course and which model they adopt to design it. In order to reach these objectives a mixed methods research has been adopted, thus it combines both quantitative and qualitative methods that are used for collecting and analysing data. For the data collection, two main instruments have been used: a questionnaire that has been administered to a sample of fifty (50) third (3rd) year Marketing students and a structured interview with three teachers of English. As a theoretical framework, this study has adopted Dudley Evans and St Johns’ theory (1998) which focuses on the role of needs analysis in course design as well as the parameters of course design suggested by Graves (1996) and Frendo (2005). The questionnaire results have demonstrated that students have several needs for English learning. Thus, most of them need English for a professional purpose that is to get a job in the future. Moreover the outcomes reveal that most of students encounter difficulties in the English language use, probably in their communicative competence that is in their speaking abilities as well as in writing. Additionally, the outcomes of the interview have revealed that needs analysis is partially performed by English teachers of the Department of Commerce. Indeed, there is not a designed course provided by the Department of Commerce for teaching English. However, teachers elaborate their own course without following all the steps of course design and without adopting any of the two models of course design that are suggested by Graves (1996) and Frendo (2005).

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