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 .
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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