Chapter 1 & 2 Introduction & A historical Perspective on ESP

1. CourseTitle: An Introduction to English for Specific Purposes
Course Material: Developments in English for Specific Purposes (Dudley-Evans & John)
Lecturer: Maryam Farnia
Payame Noor University

2.  The history of ESP goes back to Greek Empires
and Roman.
 Since 1960s, ESP plays an active role inTEFL,
whose prepared materials, course descriptions
and research was in the area of EAP.
 Nowadays, advent of new areas of ESP: EBP
 ESP projects used to be staffed by: expatriate
British, North American or Australian teachers
 ESP is part of LSP.

3. What is your definition of
ESP?What aspects would
you include?

4. 1. Hutchinson andWaters (1987): ESP is an
approach rather than a product: ESP does
not involve any particular kind of language,
teaching material or methodology.
- “Why does this learner need to learn a
foreign language?”
- Need is defined by the reasons for which the
student is learning English

5. a) The demands of a brave new world:WWII
growth in commerce, technology exchange, and
economics: need of a common language of
exchange
b) A revolution in linguistics: how the language was
being used for communication.
c) A focus on the learner: development in
educational psychology- the importance of
learners’ needs, interests and objectives towards
the learning of the English language

6. 2. Strevens (1988): his definition lies in four
absolute characteristics and two variable
characteristics of ESP (see page 3)
3. Robinson (1991): confirms the primacy of
needs analysis.
- ESP is ‘normally goal-oriented’
- ESP courses are constrained by ‘limited time
period’

7.  In Stevens’ definition: “related in content”
 In Robinson’ definition: “homogenous class”
 Description: Much ESP work is based on the
notion of a ‘common-core’ of language and
skills.
 A definition of ESP should reflect the
methodology, which is different fro general
English teaching.
 More general ESP courses vs. more specific one
 see page 4&5

8.  The word SPECIAL refers to:
- Purposes for which learners learn language;
not the nature of language
- Restricted repertoire of words and
expressions selected from the whole
language.

13.  According to Strevens (1988), advantages of
ESP are:
1. Being focused on learners’ need, it wastes
no time
2. It is relevant to the learner
3. It is successful in imparting learning
4. It is more cost-effective than General
English
 High motivation vs. low motivation

14. Any teaching activity
is presented in a
context.
Life cycle of a plant:
carrier content
Expressions of time
sequence: real content

15. ESP work extends beyond
teaching. What other roles
does an ESP teachers
have?

16. 1. Teacher
2. Course designer and material provider
3. Collaborator
4. Researcher
5. Evaluator

17.  A basic difference in the methodology of
EGAP, EGBP or ESP is that: the teacher is not
in the position of being the ’primary knower’
of the carrier content of the material.

18.  In some occasions, an ESP teacher acts as:
1. Providers of material: choosing suitable
published materials
2. Adapting materials: when published
material is not suitable
3. Writing material: where nothing suitable
exist

19.  Target situation analysis = taking the existing
knowledge and setting it on a more scientific basis by
establishing procedures for relating language analysis
more closely to learners’ reasons for learning.
 An ESP course is geared to a purpose with which
learners enable to function adequately in a target
situation (situations in work fields).
 This starting point leads to conducting ‘Needs
Analysis’ (the target situation analysis) for designing
the ESP course syllabus, that is done through 2 steps:
identifying the target situation and analyzing the
linguistic features of the situation.

20.  Studies on genre analysis in BE
 ESP teachers should go beyond the first
stage of NeedAnalysis (TSA) to observe the
situations in which students use the identified
skills and analyze samples of the indentified
texts.
 The should be able to incorporate the
findings of research on needs analysis to
design a course or write teaching materials.

21.  Simple cooperation : the ESP teachers find out about
the subject syllabus in an academic context
 Specific cooperation : integration between specialist
studies and the language
1. ESP teacher provides carrier content for the English
course
2. Language teacher prepares learners for the
language of subject lecture
3. A specialist checks and comments on the content of
teaching materials that ESP teacher prepared
4. Team-teach: collaboration of subject expert and
language teacher

22. 1. To assess whether students have the
requisite language and skills to undertake a
particular academic course (e.g. NEABs test)
2. To devise achievement tests to assess how
much learners have gained from a course
3. To evaluate course design and teaching
materials while the course is being done

23. Which of the above roles do you really
undertake?What would you need to
feel confident in each role?

24.  This book is interested in two aspect of ESP:
1. The need and willingness to engage with other
disciplines through teaching
2. The need and willingness to draw on the insights of
researchers in other disciplines
- A key feature of ESP work is research into how
spoken and written texts work.
- There is a need to understand a particular discipline
or profession, how they persuade their audience,
and to do the rhetorical analysis of their writing.
- A need to understand cultural differences and cross-
cultural communication

25. Developments in English for Specific Purposes
Session 1:

26.  ESP started growing since 1950s and 1960s
with the growth of science and technology,
and widespread use of English as an
international language.
 In 1984, there was a need for BE for incoming
Huguenot and Protestant refugees.
 Actual commercial textbooks in ELT was
written in 19th century
 Swales’ Episodes in ESP

27. What materials do you use with your
ESP students?What view of
language learning do they follow?

28. 1. Register analysis
2. Rhetorical and discourse analysis
3. Analysis of study skills
4. Analysis of learning needs

29.  Register analysis is: can be used to determine
authenticity of language in relation to lexical and
grammatical features
 This concept departed from the principle that English of
a specific science differs from each other in terms of its
grammatical and lexical features of the registers.
 Register analyses in ESP was tailored for the pedagogic
purpose, i.e. making the ESP course more relevant to
learners’ needs, not intended for the purpose to discuss
the nature of registers of English per se.

30.  The main purpose of an ESP course was to
produce a syllabus which gave a high priority
to the language forms students would meet
in their field and in turn would give low
priority to forms they would not meet.
 The focus is on the grammar and vocabulary
of scientific and technical English based
lexicostatistics

31. •The concerns in register analysis and
interpretative strategies as in the skills and
strategies approach are actually directed to the
same destination, i.e. language use.
•This is anyhow not the main concern of ESP since
describing and exemplifying what people do
with language will not automatically enable
someone to learn it.
•Therefore, a valid approach to ESP must be
based on an understanding of the processes of
language learning.

32. 1. Analysis of study skills
2. Analysis of learning needs
 A text should be organized at four rhetorical
level (Trimble, 1973)
-Level A: the objectives of the total discourse
-Level B: the general rhetorical functions that
develop the general ones
-Level C: the specific rhetorical functions that
develop the general ones
-Level D: the rhetorical techniques that provide
relationship between the level C functions.

33.  Based onWidowson andAllen’s idea of
relating language form to language use,The
Focus Series was developed, the emphasis of
which was on key functions in scientific and
academic writing: definition, classification,
description and hypothesizing.

34.  The growth of need analysis identified
priorities amongst the four skills in some
situations.
 The reason: insufficiency of teaching
language for the development of the ability
to perform the required task at tertiary level.

35.  Research on the effectiveness of ESP or
General English cookbooks
 Few empirical studies on the effectiveness of
ESP courses
 Munby’s (1978) model for NeedAnalysis: the
model has little influence on the ESP
profession, yet it was an indication of the
coming-of-age of ESP

36. 1. ESP is not a matter of teaching specialized
varieties of English
2. ESP is not just a matter of Science words
and grammar for Scientists
3. ESP is not different in kind from any other
form of language teaching in the it should
be based in the first instance on principles of
effective and efficient learning

37.  Learning-centered approach:
1. To consider the process of learning and
student motivation
2. To help learners develop certain learning
skills from their academic study, or
experience at work, and these skills can be
exploited in ESP classrooms
3. To take into account the fact that different
students learn in different ways

38.  Whether a text for skills should be authentic or
not?
 What does authenticity mean?
 unsimplified or genuine texts used in ESP
materials but originally written for purposes
other than language teaching?
 The genuineness of the text does not guarantee
relevance and that a text is only truly authentic if
it exploited in ways that reflect world use

39.  A key aspect of authenticity is the level of the
text exploited I the ESP class.
 Authenticity lies in the nature of the
interaction between the reader (hearer) and
the text.

40.  Late 1960s and early1970s : commercial
correspondence courses
 Mid 1970s- 1980s: the focus switched more to
spoken interaction based on grammatical and
functional constructs
 Mid 1980s: development of materials with
based on business communication situations

41. What are the trends and
developments in ESP
nowadays?

42.  There is now acceptance of many different
approaches and a willingness to mix different
types of materials and methodologies
 Materials production and text analysis –
written or spoken- are still predominant in
ESP.
 ESP needs to be sensitive to movement in
ELT and applied linguistics, such asWorld
Englishes

44. •Which of the stages of ESP development has our country
experienced? Has it developed in a completely different way?
•Why do you think EST has set the trends in the development of ESP?
•What differences would you expect to find between an EOP course
and an EAP course for doctors? In what ways do you think
occupational and academic needs differ?
• All language teaching should be based on learner needs.Thus in
theory there is no difference between ESP and General English
teaching; in practice, however, there is a great deal of difference.
How far would you agree with this statement?What differences,
either in theory or in practice do you think there are?