One or two English for Specific Purposes course(s)?

One or two English for Specific Purposes course(s)? In a university in Hong Kong, the Department of English was requested by the Department of Computer Science to design an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course for their Computer Science students to prepare them for internship and their workplace after graduation. The Computer Science Department insisted that 7 teaching items should be included in the course in order to serve both purposes. Thus, the course became fully packed and caused problems related to the design of the course, the tasks, assignments and the teaching methods. As an initial attempt to tackle the root of these problems, a pilot study was carried out with 18 graduates from the Computer Science programme in this university to identify their English communication needs during their internship and at their workplace after graduation so as to decide whether all of their needs could be met by only one course or whether in fact two ESP courses were needed. A questionnaire on what the participants needed to read and write in English and the occasions on which they needed to speak in English and listen to English during their internship and at their workplace was completed by all participants, and 8 participants were interviewed to collect more in-depth information about the topics. Results show that only one ESP course was needed and it could also become manageable if the irrelevant items identified in this study could be removed from this overly complex course and replaced by the relevant items. Detailed results will be reported and pedagogical implications will be discussed.