Interactive Technologies in Teaching English for Specific Purposes: Criteria for Selection Based on the Communicative Tasks of the Profession

The content of English courses designed for professional purposes has been tailored to particular fields for many decades, while the interactive methods used to teach this content have largely remained general. Role plays, discussions and case studies are employed in almost the same ways with future software engineers, managers and marketing specialists, even though professional communication in these fields differs in terms of genres, patterns of participation and the communicative artefacts it generates. Consequently, a course can be profession-specific in its subject matter while remaining generic in the activities students are expected to perform. This article focuses on the issue of justification, understood as the explicit rationale for a teacher’s decision to select one interactive format rather than another for a particular professional profile. The study aims to establish criteria through which the selection of an interactive technology can be justified on the basis of the communicative tasks characteristic of the target profession, and to illustrate how these criteria function across three contrasting profiles: information technology, management and marketing. The research is theoretical and methodological in nature and integrates the analysis and synthesis of academic literature, genre-based examination of professional communication informed by published needs-analysis research, industry standards and contemporary job advertisements, criterial comparison, and generalisation of the author’s own experienceofteachingEnglishforSpecificPurposes simultaneously to students from three faculties within the same university. Six criteria are organised into three levels: professional validity, comprising genre correspondence and participation structure; learning validity, including negotiation potential and appropriately calibrated demand; and operational validity, consisting of an observable product and practical feasibility within the teaching environment. Each criterion is presented as a diagnostic question accompanied by an operational indicator that can be used during lesson planning, before instruction takes place, while the three levels constitute a hierarchy in which possible failures are considered sequentially. When these criteria are applied to the genre inventories associated with the three professional profiles, they produce a differentiated matrix. Within this matrix, the principal genres of each profession – asynchronous written review in information technology, governance-oriented reporting in management, and briefing and pitching in marketing – lead to different combinations of interactive formats rather than a single standardised set. The analysis further demonstrates that formats carrying the same conventional label may possess substantially different professional relevance across the three profiles, and the proposed criteria allow such differences to be identified during the planning process. The findings can be used in the development of English for Specific Purposes syllabi at universities where a single language department supports several faculties, as well as in lesson design and assessment. In assessment specifically, the observable-product criterion provides a concrete professional artefact that can be evaluated instead of relying on an impressionistic judgement of students’ oral participation.