LISTENING - A NEGLECTED SKILL IN ESP COURSES AT IT DEPARTMENTS IN SERBIA

Listening in another language is a hard job so English teachers have to use various strategies to make it easier and to be very careful in choosing the material for listening in order to motivate their students and keep their attention. Most of the listening activities have for their main purpose the comprehension, but one should have one more perspective in mind, and that is acquisition. The main reason is that the youth is immersed into the world of multimedia which has become a part of their everyday life which implies that they listen to and/or watch various materials in English. It is especially true for the students studying Information Technologies (IT). The generation attending ESP courses are fully oriented towards a wide range of audio-visual sources in English whether for the purpose of entertainment or informing about stateof-the-art technologies or both. The author of the paper conducted a research that investigated the needs of IT students at eight IT departments in five towns in Serbia during the academic year 2011/2012.. The author used mixed-method research which included quantitative and qualitative research methods. The researcher used two questionnaires were used, one for professors and assistants teaching IT subjects (N=77) and one for IT students of II and III year of IT studies (N=735), a structured interview (10 professors, 10 assistants and 16 students) and simultaneously analysed 25 English courses specifications at IT departments were the research was conducted. This paper will present merely the results that address the needs of IT students regarding the properties of listening material that the informants have found appropriate and significant. The obtained results can help ESP teachers to reconsider the amount of listening activities in their classes and to think about the potentials of offered listening materials and the way of incorporating them into their classes. Keywords: listening, ESP, Information Technologies, listening material