This book is aimed at novice researchers in the field of ESP, graduate students of TESOL and applied linguistics and ESP practitioners who wish to understand ESP and conduct research. ESP practitioners tend to be experienced English teachers who have branched into ESP as a career path. Frequently, the job description includes elements of course design and courses are designed based on needs analysis. These tasks require an understanding of research and some research skills. The book does not assume experience or knowledge in research methods and practice. The focus is on formal research projects that lead to a dissertation, a research report or journal article, but the book also addresses practitioner research which aims to improve classroom practice. Many of the areas that contribute to an excellent ESP research project are the same as for other research areas, notably TESOL and applied linguistics. The areas presented in this book are accompanied by examples of published research in ESP. These examples have been drawn from academic journals and master’s dissertations. The two main journals are English for Specific Purposes and the Journal of English for Academic Purposes. The examples from dissertations are taken from the British Council master’s dissertation awards website and The Asian EFL Journal thesis collection. By using these sources, it should be possible for readers, at least for university students, to access the sources. The dissertations cited are all available free of charge online at www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/elt-masters-dissertations/winners (accessed November 8, 2021) and www.asian-efl-journal.com/thesis/index.htm (accessed November 8, 2021).

Emerging in the 1960s, ESP’s development was driven by economic forces seeking to conduct business on an increasingly international scale (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998). One major aim of ESP is to deliver required language skills in the most efficient way rather than attempting to teach the whole language system. ESP is driven by work- or study-related language requirements. Typically, ESP courses target adult learners with clear language needs, usually related to work or study. These are based on a needs analysis and can ascertain which language skills need to be taught and, importantly, those that do not. For an excellent introduction to ESP, see Anthony (2018) in this series. Table 1.1 summarises the major characteristics of ESP.

Approaches to research in ESP tend to be qualitative with more quantitative studies emerging recently, based on corpus studies. There is also a recent increase in mixed-methods studies in ESP. For a systematic review of methodological approaches in English for Specific Purposes and the Journal of English for Academic Purposes, see Gollin-Kies (2014). In terms of the popularity of research topics these have shifted over the past decade. In the early years of ESP research (1970s–1990s), research focused on investigating and establishing ESP as a field worthy of study. There was a great deal of emphasis on needs analysis. In the 2000s the field saw a focus on methodological developments, particularly in the fields of genre, corpus-based research and critical and contextual approaches in ESP. Since then, there has been a trend to re-investigate areas from early ESP and combine research areas. Current research areas include disciplinary academic discourse, ethnolinguistic variation, academic vocabulary, meta-discourse in English academic writing and academic English in a global context. Liu and Hu (2021) provide further explanation of the development of ESP research in their co-citation analysis. Co-citation analysis examines the number of times a text is cited across publications (Liu & Hu, 2021).