Drawing on the concept of experiential continuum (Dewey, 1938/1997), I report on lived experiences (van Manen, 1990) of designing oral production courses in languages for specific purposes for real beginners based on discourse genres, mapping my professional experience and my transformation from a teacher to a course designer, based on the design of nine ESP courses developed over a five-year period. To report on these experiences, qualitative research methods of a heuristic-phenomenological-hermeneutic nature are adopted so as to reach the so-called phenomenological reduction (Husserl, 1973, 2000).
lived experiences; ESP course design; heuristic-phenomenologic-hermeneutic approach