BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN GENERAL ENGLISH AND ESP: PEDAGOGICAL TRANSITIONS AND BEST PRACTICES

The transition from General English (GE) to English for Specific Purposes (ESP) represents a critical pedagogical juncture in higher education. While GE focuses on foundational grammar and everyday communication, ESP demands domain-specific lexical competence, genre awareness, and professional discourse skills. This paper identifies the cognitive and methodological gaps that hinder students’ successful transition between these two paradigms. To address this, the study proposes a synthesized pedagogical framework termed "Scaffolded Domain-Specific Immersion" (SDSI). This framework integrates dynamic needs analysis, corpus-assisted lexical bridging, genre-based pedagogy, and micro-project-based learning. Furthermore, the paper discusses practical strategies for implementing these methods within the context of Uzbekistan’s higher education system, addressing challenges such as large class sizes and varying proficiency levels. The findings suggest that a structured, context-aware pedagogical transition significantly enhances students' professional communicative competence and learner autonomy.