Abstract:
This study aimed at describing the practices and challenges of teaching English in
Oromia Police College: Degree trainees in focus to achieve the objective of the study 122
degree police trainees were selected using comprehensive sampling technique as the
participants of the research. The purpose of the study was to explore the teaching
learning practices of teachers and police trainees, classroom activities often used by the
teacher, the roles of teachers and students in teaching and learning ESP, the factors that
cause challenges in teaching English. Descriptive case study with mixed methods
research was employed to guide the research. Three instruments were used in order to
gather sufficient and reliable data. These are: questionnaire for student, interview for
teachers and classroom observation. The data obtained through the questionnaire and
semi-structured interview were organized under similar category and analyzed
quantitatively by using frequency and percentage then followed by qualitative
description. The findings of the study demonstrated that teachers were not employing
appropriate English teaching to police trainees according to the profession approaches
rather they were using the customary general English teaching method and the police
trainees were not happy with the methodology their teachers employed. There was no
good culture of using more recent language teaching techniques such as pair work, small
group work and sometimes individual work, information gap and problem solving that
could promote active learning in language lessons. As Oromia Police College is military
oriented college, all the English Language teaching and learning needs to employ ESP
approach and trainees should equip with their professional vocabularies. On the other
hand, students were mostly interested to practice police and military oriented passage,
audios, grammar and written texts, role play, group and pair works, word games,
incident reports, videos, conversational drills, problem solving activities, information
gap activities. Furthermore, the teachers didn’t allocate ample time so that students
could complete different tasks in the class. The mechanism of feedback provision for
students was also not encouraging. Though teachers were doing their best according to
the classroom observation and teachers interview, the data drown from the entire dat
