Content-Based ESP Instruction at Hong Kong Tertiary Level: Student and Teacher Perceptions of a Hybrid Approach in a State of Flux During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This quantitative study explores pedagogical approaches to teaching business proposals, press releases, business presentations, and negotiation meetings in the third and fourth-year English Specific Purpose (ESP) course at an English Medium Instruction (EMI) university in Hong Kong. The findings reveal that the enactment of a hybrid approach rather than the teacher-led, direct-instruction approach assisted students in grasping the understanding of persuasive communication in both written and spoken contexts in the workplace environment. The study suggests that blending several inputs (i.e., videos, online quizzes, online annotated reading platform, corpora, face-to-face instruction) provided multimodal experiences that helped students develop their persuasive communication skills in a state of flux during the COVID-19 pandemic.