As an international language, English nowadays plays an important role in academic studies, professional success and personal development in the world of economic integration and globalization. The number of learners of English increases quickly day by day. In fact, all courses of English usually start with the question “Why do these learners need to learn English?” These courses are based on a perceived need of some sort. Otherwise why would English find its way on to a school or college timetable: “someone at sometime must have decided there was a need for it”. Most learners have realized their core need to learn English for their current or future job. Thus, English for Specific Purposes has become more in demand than General English.
Public Relation, a new field in Vietnam, is still seen as more reactive than proactive. The numbers of public relations agencies are still miniscule for a country with a population of over eighty million. The only training place for PR has just been established for three years at the Academy of Journalism and Communication with the purpose of training a number of PR officers for the whole country in the new context of social and economic integration.
In training, materials are very important in teaching and learning. Many types of materials can be used during the process of teaching and learning to provide basic knowledge to students and improve their knowledge about and skills in the subject matter. In terms of training at the PR Faculty, as PR materials in Vietnamese are rather limited, ESP materials of PR is even more important for students of the PR Faculty. Both teachers and students face many difficulties in teaching and learning ESP. The most outstanding one is the design and development of PR materials for use in the PR ESP program. The materials are developed solely by teachers of General English, Academy of Journalism and Communication while they should be jointly developed by an expert team comprising both teachers of English and teachers of PR. As the Public Relation Faculty is a new one, the teachers teaching ESP course are young and inexperienced in this effort. Additionally, all teachers are trained to be teachers of General English and they lack knowledge of PR and so they have to study by themselves when they teach ESP in Public Relations. They make a great effort to help students improve their language skills by adapting the textbooks or teaching materials. Students start learning ESP of PR at the fifth semester, so only 32 students learnt the first ESP course of PR. Thus, there would be many questions to be answered about the effectiveness of this course. My research, therefore, aims to study how the teachers at PR faculty use the current ESP material in order to suggest effective implications on teaching methods and ESP materials design at PR faculty.