Introducing English for Specific Purposes

Laurence Anthony

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781032031170
• eBook ISBN: 9781351031165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Introducing English for Specific Purposes presents the key concepts and practices of ESP in a modern, balanced, and comprehensive way. This book defines ESP and shows how the approach plays a crucial role in the world of English language teaching. Explaining how needs analysis, language and learning objectives, materials and methods, and evaluation combine to form the four main pillars of ESP, the book includes:

• practical examples that illustrate how the core theories and practices of ESP can be applied in real-world academic and occupational settings;
• discussion of some of the most hotly debated issues in ESP;
• insights on how ESP courses can be organized and integrated to form a complete program;
• reflection boxes, practical tasks, extension research questions, and resources for further reading in each chapter.

Introducing English for Specific Purposes serves as an ideal textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate students studying courses on English for Specific Purposes or English for Academic Purposes, as part of degrees in English for Specific Purposes, Education, ELT, Applied Linguistics, TESOL or TEFL. This comprehensive publication is also an invaluable reference resource for pre-service and in-service teachers of ESP, and for English program managers and administrators.

Section 1
Contextualizing ESP

Chapter 1
Situating ESP in English language teaching and learning

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is one of the most established teaching approaches in English Language Teaching (ELT). It has been informed by over 50 years of research and practice and is perhaps the most influential of all language teaching approaches in academic settings (Charles, 2013) and the workplace (Marra, 2013). ESP is an eclectic approach that takes the most useful, successful, and valid ideas from other theories and practices, combining them into a consistent whole. It incorporates elements from Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), Project-Based Learning (PBL) (Richards & Rodgers, 2014), and many other teaching approaches, but also has its own unique features, including a commitment to learner-centeredness, a close connection with specialist subjects, and a focus on collaboration in both planning and teaching. In many countries, experts in ESP can be the most highly regarded and sought-after members of staff, serving as coordinators for entire academic English programs and playing key roles in companies that are developing their international strategies.

In this chapter, I’ll first present a short, contemporary definition of ESP and introduce the two major branches of ESP that will feature throughout the rest of the book. Next, I’ll describe the characteristic features of ESP before comparing and contrasting ESP with other well-known ELT approaches to highlight their similarities and differences. Then, I’ll review and critique two well-known and commonly cited definitions of ESP in an attempt to resolve some of the confusion surrounding the approach.

By the end of the chapter, you should be able to define ESP, explain its key characteristics, and point out similarities and differences with other ELT approaches. But, most of all, you should get a sense of why ESP is useful in many ELT contexts where learners have particular needs for English that cannot be satisfied through traditional approaches to language teaching.

Opening reflection

In this chapter, you will learn that ESP is aimed at providing language support for learners so that they can successfully address their specific academic or occupational needs. But, what exactly are those needs?

Think of some of the things you do in academia or work that might have some kind of language component. Now, imagine you were a doctor. What are some of the things a doctor does that might require language knowledge or skills?

Commentary

If you are a student in a tertiary education setting, you might have noted that you use English when you write essays, listen to lectures, discuss topics, or even order lunch, make an appointment, or send a message to a friend on social media. If you are currently teaching at a tertiary institution (e.g. college or university), you might have noted that you use English when you explain points to students, attend meetings, or write research funding applications. Doctors around the world also use English in their work; for example, when they read a research study on a new medicine, meet with a patient to discuss their symptoms, write prescriptions, or attend conferences to present on their work. ESP is about offering language support so that people can successfully accomplish current and perhaps future tasks in their studies or work that have a language component.

But, you should note that not all language needs are ESP needs, even though they might be important to achieve a particular language goal. For example, most ESP experts wouldn’t consider ‘mastering the past tense’, ‘learning the top 100 most frequent words of English’, or ‘speaking with good pronunciation’ to be ESP needs. ESP needs are in a sense non-linguistic needs that have a linguistic component. In order for a student to write a good essay, they probably need to know how to use the past tense, but it is the need to write an essay that governs what is taught in the ESP class. When a teacher starts explaining the past tense to students because it might be useful for some unspecified later goal in their lives, we are in the realm of a traditional general English (GE) class.

A definition of ESP

So, what is ESP? Here is the definition that I used in the introduction to this book:

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is an approach to language teaching that targets the current and/or future academic or occupational needs of learners, focuses on the necessary language, genres, and skills to address these needs, and assists learners in meeting these needs through the use of general and/or discipline-specific teaching materials and methods.

In this definition, a few of the words and phrases might be new to you. Academic needs refers to the needs of learners in a school, university, or other setting where the primary goal is learning. To illustrate what these might be, we need only look at some of the common settings where ESP teaching commonly takes place. In Japanese universities, for example, you can find ESP courses that help science students learn how to listen to and understand content lectures given in English through a process of note taking and discussion. In US universities, there are numerous ESP courses offered to overseas students to help them with their academic writing. Around the world, there is an increasing demand for ESP courses that help non-native speakers of English to improve their communication skills as part of Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs.

Occupational needs, on the other hand, refer to the needs of learners in a workplace setting, such as a factory, restaurant, or hospital. In the manufacturing industry, for example, many companies organize special intensive ESP courses to help sales staff improve their presentation skills. In the aviation industry, pilots receive specialized language training so they can communicate effectively with flight controllers, avoiding communication errors that could lead to injury or death. We can also find ESP courses offered as part of vocational training, such as in the Philippines and India, where workers at call-centers are guided on how to respond appropriately to confused or irate customers.

In many cases, though, things are not so simple. What if you are a teacher at a university? Do your needs count as academic or occupational? Or, what if you are in an industrial research center and part of your job is writing research articles? Does that part of your job count as an academic need or an occupational need? Later in this chapter, you will learn that the divisions in ESP are actually quite fuzzy and need to be treated with care. But, let’s stay with these two categories of needs for now.

You may also be unsure how language differs from genre and skills. Here, language is used in a quite broad sense to refer to lexis (words and multiword units), morphology (lexical derivation), syntax (sentence grammar), semantics (lexis and grammar meaning), pragmatics (lexis and grammar use), and phonology (sound systems). Genre, on the other hand, refers to a spoken or written product of language, for example, a research presentation, business letter, or prescription, while also capturing the processes, agents, and contexts that govern how that product is created, interpreted, and acted on (Swales, 1990). Skills refer not only to traditional abilities like reading, writing, listening, and speaking, but also metacognitive skills such as planning, noticing, problem solving, evaluating, and correcting. Again, don’t be too concerned about the different divisions here. Instead, focus more on the fact that ESP addresses many different facets of the communication process that are needed to achieve a particular goal.

Finally, you may be intrigued by the idea that ESP uses both general and/or specialist-field materials and methods to meet the needs of learners. This means that in some cases, the materials and methods used in an ESP classroom will be identical to those used in traditional GE classes. For example, an ESP instructor may ask learners to translate a sentence or passage into their first language, which is a classic grammar-translation method (Larsen-Freeman & Anderson, 2013). They may even drill learners on the pronunciation of a particular vocabulary item, which is one of the core principles of the audio-lingual method (Larsen-Freeman & Anderson, 2013). But, these methods should only be used if they serve the needs of the learners. Clearly, the grammar-translation method would be appropriate if the learners were hoping to become second language (L2) to first language (L1) translators and needed to develop accuracy in their sentence level translation skills. Similarly, drilling learners on the pronunciation of a key vocabulary item might be important if they were hoping to give research presentations at an international conference, where the item had particular importance and needed to be conveyed clearly to the audience. It might also be important if the learners were training to become airline pilots, as comprehensible pronunciation is a crucial factor for maintaining in-flight safety.

On the other hand, ESP instructors will often adopt materials and methods that are quite removed from traditional English classes and more closely match those used in the discipline of the learners. In a business English class, for example, learners may be asked to carry out a case study on the language that they need, following the same principles by which they might conduct a case study of a successful company in their specialist courses. Similarly, in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) English class, learners may be encouraged to collect word frequency data and analyze it using computers in a similar way to how they might collect and analyze temperature or pressure data in lab experiments.

Branches of ESP

You have now learned that ESP is a broad field that focuses on addressing the specific needs of learners in various academic and occupational contexts. If you want to learn more about the broader issues of ESP that span these two contexts, a good place to start is with one of the many journals devoted to ESP, including the oldest, and perhaps most well-known journal, English for Specific Purposes, and newer journals such as the Asian ESP Journal, ESP Today, English for Specific Purposes World (ESP World), and the Taiwan International Journal on English for Specific Purposes. Not surprisingly, though, many discussions on ESP are focused on issues related to more narrowly defined branches of ESP, which sometimes even have their own special acronyms.

Perhaps the most influential branch of ESP is English for Academic Purposes (EAP), which focuses on ESP in academic settings. Many ESP journals, such as English for Specific Purposes, are heavily weighted in favor of EAP topics, and there is even a dedicated journal devoted to EAP work called the Journal of English for Academic Purposes. The huge attention that EAP receives in the field of ESP is not surprising when you consider that many ESP researchers are based in academic institutions and many second and foreign language learners have a strong need for EAP skills in order to complete their school and university studies. However, this attention does sometimes lead to confusion, especially when ESP and EAP are presented as a kind of dichotomy through phrasing such as “ESP and EAP” and “ESP/EAP”, as we see in many of the works in the field (e.g. Boulton, Carter-Thomas, & Rowley-Jolivet, 2012; Ding & Campion, 2016; Fortanet-Gómez & Räisänen, 2008; Holme, 1996).

The other major branch of ESP is English for Occupational Purposes (EOP). Although there is no major journal dedicated to EOP research, you will find papers related to EOP in a broad range of journals, from English for Specific Purposes to the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. You will also find that many foreign language textbooks marketed as following an ESP approach are in the area of EOP; for example, Cambridge English for Nursing (McGerr & Allum, 2010), Aviation English (Emery & Roberts, 2008), and English for International Tourism (Strutt, 2015). As you will learn in Chapter 2, some of the earliest and most important developments in ESP have emerged out of work in EOP settings. Unfortunately, this has led to some researchers (and publishers) using the term ESP as a synonym for EOP, which again leads to a confusing dichotomy between ESP (= EOP) and EAP (≠ ESP).

The two major branches of ESP can be divided further. EAP can be divided into English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) and English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP), and EOP can be divided into English for Professional Purposes (EPP) and English for Vocational Purposes (EVP). Of course, these sub-branches can be divided even further leading to an increasingly narrow set of sub-sub-branches, including English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) (J. Flowerdew, 2013), English for Business Purposes (EBP) (Bargiela-Chiappini & Zhang, 2013), English for Medical Purposes (EMP) (Ferguson, 2013), Nursing English (Bosher, 2013), and Aviation English (Moder, 2013).

Figure 1.1 shows how the branches of ESP might expand out almost indefinitely, with English for Atomic and Nuclear Physics (with a possible acronym of EANP) at one extreme of EAP, and English for Emergency Room Nursing (with a possible acronym of EERN) at one extreme of EOP.

You will notice that none of the neatly boxed categories in Figure 1.1 are really independent of the others. For example, within the EAP categories, students studying atomic and nuclear physics are likely to need general

Figure 1.1 Some of the branches and sub-branches of ESP.

academic listening comprehension skills to help them understand lectures, as well as specific language skills from a range of disciplines to explain mathematical theories (English for Mathematics), nuclear reactions (English for Chemistry), and reactor properties (English for Mechanical Engineering). Similarly, within the EOP categories, learners of emergency room nursing are likely to have overlapping needs with ambulance nurses, and they may even need some of the skills of biologists and phone operators, as well as pre-vocational teamwork skills.

It is also clear that even EAP and EOP cannot be separated so easily. In Figure 1.1, we have the EAP category of Physics on the left and the EOP category of Physicist on the right. How different are the two? Clearly, studying physics is not the same as being a physicist, but the language needs are clearly going to be similar in many ways.

What is important to remember is that all categories are abstractions; they are simplifications of reality that help us to explain and communicate complex ideas. In reality, there is no EAP or EOP. Instead, we have a continuum of needs that are weighted more strongly in one area or setting than another, or relate to one group more strongly than another. Similarly, we have language features that appear more prominent or frequently in one context than another, and genres and skills that are more important for one person or group than another.

In practical terms, this blurring of boundaries means that most, if not all, presentations of ESP will be overly simplistic. We k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: how to use this book
• SECTION 1 Contextualizing ESP
• SECTION 2 Understanding the four pillars of ESP
• SECTION 3 Applying ESP in real-world settings
• References
• Index