The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes

Brian Paltridge, Sue Starfield, Brian Paltridge, Sue Starfield

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118339824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Featuring a collection of newly commissioned essays, edited by two leading scholars, this Handbook surveys the key research findings in the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP).

•Provides a state-of-the-art overview of the origins and evolution, current research, and future directions in ESP •Features newly-commissioned contributions from a global team of leading scholars •Explores the history of ESP and current areas of research, including speaking, reading, writing, technology, and business, legal, and medical English •Considers perspectives on ESP research such as genre, intercultural rhetoric, multimodality, English as a lingua franca and ethnography

1

The History of English for Specific Purposes Research

ANN M. JOHNS

Introduction

Reviewing the history of English for specific purposes (ESP) research presents at least three problems: the first is deciding when the review should begin, that is, at what point in ESP’s long history. This problem was solved by taking the lead from John Swales (1988), whose movement history, Episodes in ESP, begins in the early 1960s. The second problem is more difficult: though much of the research cited in this review was written for international journals, there has always been considerable localized, on-site ESP/LSP research that is either unpublished, published in a language other than English, or in local journals. For example, there are, or have been, regional ESP journals in Brazil (ESPecialist) as well as conferences and research publications in other parts of Latin America (see Horsella and Llopis de Segura 2003), where the Latin American ESP community has been active for many years¹. In Europe, ASP: la revue du GERAS (see e.g. Gledhill 2011) and Ibérica, the official journal of AELFE, the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes, often publish relevant articles (see e.g. Bhatia 2002). The European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW) conferences include a variety of papers that could fall under the ESP rubric (see Futász and Timár 2006). IATEFL also has a special interest group in ESP http://espsig.iatefl.org/ which publishes research reports (http://espsig.iatefl.org/). At this writing, at least three other publications are also available: the Asian ESP Journal (http://www.asian-esp-journal.com/), ESP World (http://www.esp-world.info), and the international (currently print and online) journal, English for Specific Purposes (ESPJ). Because of this wide variety of possibilities, it is sometimes difficult to make clear-cut decisions about trends in research or which articles to cite.

A third problem confronts the reviewer, as well: making a clear distinction between research and practice. Unlike many other research areas in theoretical and applied linguistics, ESP has been, at its core, a practitioners’ movement, devoted to establishing, through careful research, the needs and relevant discourse features for a targeted group of students (see e.g. Richterich and Chancerel 1977). As Belcher (2009a: 3) points out in her edited collection:

ESP specialists accept the responsibility for finding out what their learners will likely need (and want) to be able to read, write, speak and comprehend as listeners to achieve their goals.

This conflation of research and pedagogical practice may explain why John Swales’ ground-breaking Episodes (1988) history includes eleven pedagogical pieces and only three other entries that would be considered research by the current reviewers of ESPJ or why Issues in ESP (Waters 1982) includes five chapters on research-based pedagogies. This may be why Tom Huckin and Leslie Olsen, respected ESP researchers, wrote Technical Writing and Professional Communication for Nonnative Speakers (1991) for the classroom, or why Michael Long’s (2005) research-based collection is devoted exclusively to needs assessment, fundamental to ESP curriculum design. No doubt this is why Ken Hyland, a prolific English for academic purposes (EAP) researcher, addresses teaching approaches in his volume titled, Genre and Second Language Writing (2004), why Helen Basturkmen (2006, 2010) combined research on learning and pedagogy in her ESP overview volumes, or why Swales and Feak (2000, 2004, 2009, 2011a, 2011b, Feak and Swales 2009, 2011) have produced pedagogical volumes that apply current ESP research to teaching. Undoubtedly, there are more published and unpublished examples of this research/teaching interaction in many parts of the world.

Given the frequent – and required – conflation of research and pedagogical practice in ESP, how can a history of research, in contrast to systematic preparation for teaching practices, be written? To identify some distinctions between the two, four sources have been consulted: Hatch and Farhady (1982), whose volume on applied linguistics research design remains one of the best, even today; Martin Hewings’ “A History of ESP through English for Specific Purposes (ESPJ)” (2001); Peter Masters’ “Research in ESP” (2005), and the international journal English for Specific Purposes (ESPJ), founded as The ESP Journal in 1981.

Hatch and Farhady defined research as “a systematic way for searching for answers to appropriate questions …” The researcher’s task is viewed as “asking the appropriate questions, selecting the best and optimally the shortest ways to find answers, and interpreting the findings in a way which we can justify” (1982: 1). On the other hand, in his 2005 overview of ESP research, Peter Master, who served as ESPJ co-editor, includes a variety of pieces on course design which might not qualify under the Hatch and Farhady definition; thus his view of the nature of ESP research is considerably broader, influenced, no doubt, by his pedagogical practice. However, as Hewings points out, and which should be clear from the discussion that follows, since its inception, the premier international journal, English for Specific Purposes (ESPJ), has become increasingly empirical, as exploratory and course design papers have become relatively rare. Not surprisingly, the number of ESPJ articles on program description has decreased significantly: from 36 in the first five volumes to 10 in volumes 16–20 (Hewings 2001: 1). One result of this move toward empiricism is that the journal has now been included in the prestigious Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) “which is widely used as an indicator of quality research publications in, for example, US tenure committees and the UK Research Assessment Exercise” (Hewings 2001: 1).

Using these sources and my own experiences as a previous ESPJ co-editor and researcher, I have divided the research history that follows into four sections: The Early Years (1962–1981), The Recent Past (1981–1990), The Modern Era (1990–2011), and The Future (2011 plus), principally citing the articles in ESPJ as evidence, but drawing from a number of other sources as well.

The Early Years 1962–1981 (From Text-based Counts to “Rhetorical Devices”)

This review begins in the years following World War II, where Swales (1988) began in Episodes in ESP. At that time, the central focus of ESP research was English for science and technology (EST) in academic contexts, an interest that remains strong to this day. In the first years of this period, research tended to be descriptive, involving statistical grammar counts within written discourses. Swales’ first example in Episodes, by Barber (1962), was devoted to counting grammatical features across genres (textbooks and journal articles), in an attempt to determine some general sentence-level characteristics of EST. However, as Swales noted, this type of work “had descriptive validity but little explanatory force” (1988: 59). So this approach was soon overridden, as influential EST researchers, John Lackstrom, Larry Selinker, and Louis P. Trimble (see e.g. Lackstrom et al. 1972), began to dominate the field. For these North American authors from what was called “the [University of] Washington School,” the relationships between EST grammar or lexicon and the authors’ rhetorical purposes in texts were central, a connection that continues to be the focus of much of the ESP discourse analysis. Their “Grammar and Technical English” (1972), republished and discussed in Episodes (1988: 58–68), had a major impact. Joined by Mary Todd Trimble, Louis Trimble, and Karl Drobnic (1978) they edited a collection that also focussed upon science and technology. Along with chapters on curriculum design, this publication included sections on contrastive discourse analyses for Spanish, Macedonian, and Japanese, investigating both lexical and grammatical EST features.

In addition to contrastive analysis studies, a forward-looking chapter in the Trimble, Trimble, and Drobnic volume called “Purpose, device, and level in rhetorical theory” was contributed by a Washington School colleague, Robert Bley-Vroman. There, the author laid out the goals of ESP rhetorical theory as “establish[ing] a correspondence of purpose with device,” with “device” referring to “the linguistic means by which the author achieves his [sic] end” (1978: 280). In general, these scholars’ research, though ground-breaking, did not involve efforts to interview students or disciplinary experts to verify their hypotheses gleaned from texts.

Nonetheless, Washington School work represented an important turning point for ESP, with rhetorical concerns, particularly as they were inferred from “devices” within the text, becoming a central research focus. Probably the most famous of the studies in this period is found in Tarone et al. (1981), which appeared in the first volume of what was then called The ESP Journal, established by Grace Burkhart at the American University in Washington, DC and was reprinted, with commentary, in Episodes in ESP (1988: 174–187). In contrast to some of their predecessors, Tarone and her colleagues were not attempting to generalize about features of scientific language across genres; instead, they focussed on one arguably central characteristic of scientific prose, syntactic voice, as it had been argued that about 25 percent of the verbs in research articles are in the passive (Swales 2011). Whereas Barber was concerned with counts of grammatical items across EST, Tarone and her colleagues were testing hypotheses about the functions of a specific grammatical feature as it influenced rhetorical decisions among a narrow range of research articles in astrophysics. Another relatively new characteristic of this 1981 study was the involvement of an expert as a “specialist informant” with whom Tarone and the other applied linguists tested their conclusions.

Through the Tarone et al. study and the Washington School work precedents were set that can be found in much of what has been published in succeeding years. Among other contributions, these researchers brought to the fore two influential approaches in ESP methodology identified by Selinker (1988) in his research overview: “consultations with subject-specialist informants,” and “rhetorical/grammatical analyses” of specific types of texts, generally in science and technology disciplines. In less internationally conspicuous, more localized work, content specialists were also beginning to be consulted. For example, in a Regional English Language Centre/Singpore University publication edited by Jack C. Richards (1976), there appeared a chapter titled “The language of science from the viewpoint of the writer of science” (Godman: 71–78).

The trend towards more narrowly defined ESP research topics and texts, found in Tarone et al., was influential then, and remains central (see Hyland 2011). Dudley-Evans (2001: 311), in his final comment as ESPJ editor, noted that these trends toward in-depth, empirical and focussed work have continued:

… as ESP research becomes more sophisticated and the range of its activity much broader, it has inevitably developed a much more focussed approach that looks at more detailed questions.

Though this is a review of ESP research, it is important to note that ESP coursebooks, often supported by the British Council, as well as published and unpublished research were being distributed widely in the EFL world, particularly in the Middle East and Latin America. Among the most famous were the Nucleus series, edited by Martin Bates and Tony Dudley-Evans (1976–80), Ewer and Latorre’s (1969) A Course in Basic Scientific English, and John Swales’ Writing Scientific English (1971/6) (see also Ewer 1971).

The More Recent Past: 1981–1990 (Broadening the Scope/Introducing Central Concepts)

A second historical period in ESP is bounded by the work of John Swales, whose seminal “Aspects of Article Introductions,” first appeared in the United Kingdom in 1981. The approach described there became widely recognized when it appeared in augmented form in Genre Analysis (1990), initiating a research boom that has yet to end.

ESP leaders w...