my sweet moment

English For Specific Purpose

What is ESP ?

English for specific purposes refers to teaching and learning of English as second or foreign language where the aim of the learner is to use English in particular domain.

1.The Origins Of ESP

The main reasons common to the emergence of all ESP :

1.      The demands of a Brave New world

The end of second world war in 1945 heralded an age of enormous and unprecedented expansion in scientific, technical and economic activity on an international scale. this expansion created a world united and dominated by two forces – technology and commerce  - which in their relentless progress soon generated demand for an international language. For various reason, most notably the economic power of  the United States in the post-war-world, this role fell to English.

The effect was to create a whole new mass of people wanting to learn English, not for the pleasure or prestige of knowing the language , but because English was the key to the international currencies of technology and commerce. Previously the reasons for learning English ( or any other language ) had not been well defined. A knowledge of a foreign language had been generally regarded as a sign of a well-rounded education, but few had really questioned why it was necessary. Learning a language was to speak , its own justification. But as English became the accepted international language of technology and commerce it created a new generation of learners who knew specifically why they were learning a language – business man and – women who wanted to sell their product, mechanic who had to read instruction manuals, etc. Most importantly , they knew hwy they need it.

2.      A revolution in linguistics

At the same time as the demand was growing for English courses tailored to specific needs, influential new ideas began to emerge in the study of language. Traditionally the aim of linguistics had been describe the rules of English usage, that is the grammar. However the new studies shifted attention away from defining the formal features of language usage discovering the ways in which language is actually used in real communication (Widdowson, 1978).

In short , the view gained ground that the English needed by particular group of learners could be identified by analyzing the linguistics characteristics of their specialist area of work study.’ What you need English for and i will tell you the English that you need become the guiding principle of ESP.

3.      Focus on the learner

New developments in educational psychology also contributed to the rise of ESP, by emphasizing the central importance of the learner and their attitudes to learning. Learners were seen to have different needs and interest , which would have an important influence on their motivation to learn and therefore on the effectiveness of their learning. This is lent support to the development of course in which relevance to the learners needs and interests was paramount. The standard way of achieving this was to take texts from the learner specialist area – texts about Biology for Biology students etc. The assumption underlying this approach was that the clear relevance of the English course to their needs would improve the learners motivation and thereby make learning better and faster.

2. The development of ESP

From its early beginnings in the 1960s has undergone three main phases of the development. It is now in a fourth phases with a fifth phases starting to emerge. ESP is not a monolithic universal phenomenon. ESP has developed at different speeds in different countries, and example of all the approaches we shall describe can be found operating somewhere in the world at the present time It will be noticeable in the following overview that one area of activity has been particularly  important in the development of ESP. This is the area usually known as EST ( English for science and technology). Swales ( 1985) in fact uses the development of EST to illustrate the development of ESP in general :

1.      The concept of special language : register analysis

This stage took place in the 1960s and early 1970s was associated in particular with the work of Petter strevens ( Halliday, Mcintosh and strevens,1964), Jack ewer ( Ewer and latorre , 1969 ) and Jhon swales ( 1971). Operating on the basic principle that English of , say, Electrical engineering constituted of specific register different from that of , say, Biology or of general English, the aim of the analysis was to identify the grammatical and lexical features of these register teaching materials then took these linguistic features as their syllabus. A good example os such syllabus is that of  A Coursein Basic Scientific English by Ewer and Latorre ( 1969 ).

2.      Beyond the sentence : rhetorical of discourse analysis

There were , as we shall see, serious flaws in the register analysis based syllabus, but, as it happened, register analysis as a research procedure was rapidly overtaken by developments in the world of linguistics. Whereas in the first stage of its development, ESP had focused on language at he sentence level, the second phase of development shifted attention to the level above the sentence, as ESP become closely involved with the emerging field of discourse or retrhorical analysis. The leading lights in this movement were Henry Widdowson in Britain and this so – called Washington school of Larry Selinker, Louis Trimble, Jhon Lackstorm and Marry Todd Trimble in the United States.

Register analysis had focused on sentence grammar, but now attention shifted to understanding how sentences were combined in discourse to produce meaning. The concern of research, therefore, was to identify the organizational patterns in text and to specify the linguistic means.

3. Target situation analysis

The stage that we come to consider now did not really add anything new to the range of knowledge about ESP. What it aimed to do was to take the existing knowledge and set it on a more scientific basis, by establishing procedures for relating language analysis more closely to learners reasons for learning. Given that the purpose of an ESP course is to enable learners to function adequately in a target situation, that is the situation in which the learners will use the language they are learning, then the ESP course design process should proceed by first identifying the target situation and then carrying out a rigorous analysis of the linguistic features of that situation. The identify features will form the syllabus of the ESP course. This process is usually known as needs analysis. However, we prefer to take Chambers’ (1980) term of target situation analysis,’ since it is a more accurate description of the process concerned.

            The most thorough explanation of target situation analysis is the system set out by John Munby in Communicative Syllabus Design (1978). The Munby model produces a detailed profile of the learners’ needs in terms of communication purposes, communicative setting, the means of communication,language skills, functions, structures etc. (see below p.55)

            The target situation analysis stage marked a certain ‘coming of age’ for ESP. What had previously been done very much in a piecemeal way, center of the course design process. It proved in the event to be a false dawn. As we shall see in the following chapters, the concept of needs that it was based on was far too simple.

4. Skills and strategies

We noted that in the first two stages of the development of ESP all the analysis had been of the surface forms of the language (whether) at sentence level, as in register analysis or above, as in discourse analysis). The target situation analysis of learner need it still looked mainly at the surface linguistic features of the target situation.

            The fourth stage of ESP has seen an attempt to look below the surface and to consider not the language it self but the thinking processes that underlie language use. There is no dominant figure in this movement, although we might mention the work of Francoise Grellet (1981), Christine Nuttall (1982) and Charles Alderson and Sandy Urquhart (1984)nas having made significant contributions to work on reading skills. Most of the work in the area of skills and strategies, however, has been done close to the ground in schemes such as the National ESP project in Brazil (see below p. 172) and the University of Malaya ESP Project (see ELT Documents 107 and Skills for Learning published by Nelson and the University of Malaya Press).

            Both these projects were set up to cope with study situations where the medium of instruction is the mother tongue but students need to read the medium of instruction is the mother tongue but students need to read a number of specialist texts which are available only in English. The projects have, therefore, concentrated their efforts on reading strategies.

            The principal idea behind the skills –centered approach is that underlying all language use there are common reasoning and interpreting processes which , regardless of the surface forms, enable us to extract meaning from discourses. There is , therefor, no need to focus closely on the surface forms of the language. The focus should rather be on the underlying interpretive strategies, which  enable the learner to cope with the surface forms, for example guessing the meaning of words from context, using visual layout to determine the type of text, exploiting cognates (i.e. words

Which are similar in the mother tongue and the target language) etc. A focus on specific subject registers is unnecessary in this approach, because the underlying processes are not specific to any subject register.

            It was argued that reading skills are not language specific but universal and that there is a core of language (for example, certain structures of argument and forms of presentation ) which can be identified as “academic” and which is not subject- specific.’ (Chitravelu, 1980).

·         it is interesting to note, however, that not all such projects have such a focus. The ESP project at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology in Bangkok , Thailand , for example, has to cope with a very similar study situation, but the focus here is on the full range of skills (reading writing listening, speaking ).

As has been noted, in terms of materials this approach generally put the emphasis on reading or listening strategies. The characteristic exercises get the learners to reflect on and analyze how meaning produced in and retrieved from written of spoken discourse. Taking their cue from cognitive learning theories (see below p. 43), the language learners are treated as thinking beings who can be asked to observe and verbal interpretive processes they employ in language use.

5. A learning – centered approach

In outlining the origins of ESP (pp. 6-8), we identified three forces, which we might characterize as need, new ideas about language and new idea about learning. It should have become clear that in its subsequent development , however, scant attention has been paid to the last of thes forces- learning.

All of the stages outlined so far have been fundamentally flawed, in that they are all based on descriptions of language use. Whether this description is of surface forms, as in the case of register analysis , or of underlying processes , as in the skills and strategic approach, the concern  in each case is with describing what people with language. But our concern in ESP is not with language use – although this will help to define the course objectives. Our concern is with language learning. We cannot simply assume that describing an exemplifying what people do with language will enable someone to learn it. If that were so, we would need to do no more than read a grammar book and a dictionary in order to learn a language. A truly valid approach to ESP must be based on an understanding of the processes of language learning .

      

3. ESP : approach not product

The survey above shows that in its relatively brief history there have been several major shifts in the development of ESP both in theory and practice. However, we have tried to show that, in spite of their differences, the successive stages have all concentrated on the linguistic aspect of ESP: they are all essentially language- centered approaches. In later chapters we shall look in greater detail at how this has shaped the way in which people see ESP. For now let us return to the question posed at beginning of this section : What is ESP ? to answer this question fully , we need first of all to establish a context which will help us to see how ESP at the present time relates to the rest of ELT . what exactly is the status of the citizens of ESP and its satellite settlements in relation to the general world of ELT ?

            In the time – honored manner of linguistics, we shall represent the relationship in the form of a tree (see figure 3).

            The tree represents some of the common divisions that are made in ELT. The topmost branches of the tree show the level indicate individual ESP courses occur. The branches just below this level indicate that these may conveniently be divided into two main types of ESP differentiated according to whether the learner require English for academic study (EAP: English for Academic Purposes) or for work training (EOP/EVP/VESL: English for Occupational Purposes / English for Vocational Purpose/ Vocational English as a Second Language).

This is, of course, not a clear – cut distinction : people can work and study simultaneously  it is also likely that in many cases the language learn for immediate use in a study environment will be used later when the student takes up, or returns to, a job.

            At the next level down it is possible to distinguish ESP courses by the general nature of the learners specialism. There large categories are usually identified here: EST (English for Science and Technology) EBE (English for Business and Economics) and ESS (English for the Social Sciences). This last is not common, probably because it is not thought what is ESP ?

To differ significantly from more traditional humanities –based General English/As we go down the tree we can see that ESP , is just one branch of EFL/ESL, which are themselves the main branches of English Language Teaching in general. ELT, in turn is one variety of many possible kinds of language teaching .But, of course , there is more to a tree than is visible above ground: a tree cannot survive without roots. The roots which nourish the tree of ELT are communication and learning.

The analogy of a tree can help us to get a bit closer to a definition of ESP not so much by showing what ESP is, but rather by showing what ESP isn’t.

a)      ESP is not a matter of teaching ‘specialized varieties’ of English . The fact that language is used for a specific purpose does not imply that it is a special form of the language, different in kind from other forms, Certainly, there are some features which can be identified as ‘typical’ of a particular context of use and which, therefore, the learner is more likely to meet in target situation. But these differences should not be allowed to obscure the far larger area of common ground that underlies all English use, and indeed , all language use.

b)      ESP is not just a matter of Science words and grammar for Scientists , Hotel words and grammar for Hotel staff and so on. When we look at a tree, we see the leaves and branches, but there is much more to the tree than just these-much of it hidden from view inside and beneath the tree. The leaves do not just hang in the air: they are supported by a complex underlying structure. In the same way there is much more to communication than just the surface features that we read and hear. We need to distinguish, as Chomsky did with regard to grammar, between performance and competence, that is knowledge and abilities which enables them to do it (Hutchinson and Waters, 1981).

c)      ESP is not different in kind from any other form of language teaching, in that it should be based in the first instance on principles of effective and efficient learning. Though the content of learning may vary there is no reason to suppose that the processes of learning should be any different for the ESP learner than for the General English learner. There is, in other words, no such thing as an ESP methodology, merely methodologies that have been used in the learning of any kind of English.

So what is ESP ? Having stressed the commonality of language and learning, how does ESP differ from other forms of ELT ? To answer this, ESP must be seen as an approach not as a product. ESP is not a particular kind of language of methodology, not does it consist of a particular type of teaching material. Understood properly, it is an approach to language learning, which is based on learner need. The foundation of all ESP is the simple question : Why does this learner need to learn a foreign language? From this question will flow a whole host of further questions, some of which will relate to the learners themselves, some to the nature of the language the learners will need to operate, some to the given learning context. But this whole analysis derives from an initial identified need on the part of the learner to learn a language . ESP, then, is an approach to language teaching in which all decisions as to content and method are based on the learner’s reason for learning .

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you will get everything you want if you really meant it.
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