Abstract:

Being for a long time a bilingual country from the time of the French colonization era, Tunisia has been using Arabic and French as official languages in education, administration and all public sectors, Tunisia, as most francophone countries is now faced with the challenge of using English to set up partnerships, to do business and to communicate with the rest of the world. The requirements of the international relationships have entailed an awareness of the role of English in the economic development.
Hence, over the last decades English has become increasingly important in the educational system in Tunisia, reforms have been carried out taking into account the new international context of globalization. Regulators and ministry officials have stated the urge for a new reform that adapts to the requirements of the international market place and to the professional needs in terms of economic and cross-cultural communication. This paper highlights the main difficulties and the challenges met by English teachers in higher education scientific and technological institutions in the design and implementation of a new curriculum that responds to students needs and prepares them for the workplace in which English is becoming a key factor to professional success and achievement. The paper surveys some of the communication practices in the Tunisian workplace. It presents an overview of the position of English teaching and learning in an engineering school in Tunisia (INSAT) the National institute of applied science and technology, it describes the approaches and methodology used; it also describes the main difficulties encountered and finally presents curriculum guidelines for the English course for engineers.

Keywords:

english, performance, needs analysis, curriculum design, workplace, and engineering.