The concept of customer orientation in the field of marketing can be applied in teaching English.
It is always necessary to understand students’ needs, discuss and share this information as well as
respond to the information accordingly to improve students’ performance. This paper addresses
the need for understanding the students’ needs and teaching accordingly to improve the quality
of English report-writing. A proposed Expectation-based Teaching (EBT) approach was tested
(n=79). The findings of the action research indicated that the students performed better when
they understood what was expected of them in writing a statistical-based English report. The
overall mean score of the students increased significantly after they were briefed and taught
based on the expectations of the writing components. The content quality of their writing was
much better than before. These trends were the same for samples with different demographic
characteristics
