English for Specific Purposes World, ISSN 1682-3257, www.esp-world.info, Issue 46, 2015 Exploring Instructors’ Conceptions about EGP Teacher Challenges for Becoming an ESP Instructor in Iran: A Qualitative Study Masoomeh Estaji, Naghmeh Nazari 1 Exploring Instructors’ Conceptions about EGP Teacher Challenges for Becoming an ESP Instructor in Iran: A Qualitative Study Masoomeh Estaji, Ph.D; Naghmeh Nazari, MA Abstract Research has revealed that a majority of English for General Purposes (EGP) teachers lack the basic requirements of teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Such teachers decide to stay in their comfort zone resisting change and restricting themselves to teaching general English (Alsolami, 2014). Hence, this study is an attempt to discover the EGP teacher challenges for becoming an ESP Teacher in Iran. To this end, a total of 20 EGP teachers, who were picked through convenience sampling, from different English institutes participated in the study. The study employed a questionnaire, originally developed by Alsolami (2014) entailing open-ended and close-ended questions, with the aim of exploring the obstacles preventing Iranian EGP teachers from becoming ESP practitioners such as lack of specialist knowledge, lack of training, lack of materials. The results of frequency count and descriptive statistics revealed that 90% of the EGP teachers (18 teachers) had never had any experience of specialized training for teaching ESP and only 10% of the participants had the experience of specialized training for teaching ESP. All in all, 20 factors, such as the lack of functional academic literacy and field knowledge, lack of suitable training, lack of course materials, and lack of ESP resources, were mentioned as elements which prevented the EGP teachers in Iran from becoming ESP practitioners. To overcome these barriers, they should consider the ESP teaching situation as a challenging and multi-dimensional field that requires their willingness and awareness. Furthermore, the findings of this study emphasize the significance and need for ESP teacher training courses. Pedagogical implications are provided and discussed in this study. Keywords: ESP, EGP, ELT, TEFL, challenges, barriers 1. Introduction English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is an approach for language instruction to the learners who highly need to develop their language competence to successfully perform real-life tasks in multiple contexts in order to obtain specific or professional purposes. According to Hutchinson and Waters (1987), ESP is considered as an approach rather than a product, by which they mean ESP does not consist of a special kind of language, teaching material or methodology (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998). As Hutchinson and Waters (1987) argue, all courses are always based on a perceived need. Otherwise English would not find its way on to a school or university timetable. What distinguishes