To have a good understanding of ESP (English for Specific Purposes)teachers’perception of their new identity is critical to the paradigm shift from teaching general English to ESP. This study draws on the data from a questionnaire and interviews, a survey conducted among 109 ESP teachers from more than 40 tertiary institutes. The result shows that the majority of them fail to recognize their new identity nor to devote themselves to teaching discipline-specific ESP. It also shows that the misunderstanding of ESP as content instruction and the loss of ESP as an independent discipline from the MOE discipline lists renders many of them unwilling to replace their original research interest in literature, linguistics and translation with new one in ESP. It is suggested that to draw more English language teachers to embrace the new enterprise ,it is important to restore ESP to its disciplinary status and reform the literature / linguisticoriented assessment of the foreign language discipline