Teaching english for specific purposes to generation Y

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate the difficulties that students of generation Y encounter in learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP) at Mykolas Romeris University. Research methodology involved two sources: 1) a questionnaire survey completed by two samples of respondents, and 2) students’ self-assessment of their performance in ESP skills. The data were processed by a means of SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). The findings demonstrated that the main difficulty was ESP vocabulary, and the second difficulty was impromptu speaking on professional issues. Research limitations are due to the small number of survey participants. Research implications allow to apply the findings beyond the studied samples. Originality of the research is to compare East European findings with similar research in Canada, Mexico and Hong Kong.