A Discourse-Oriented Approach To ESP

Abstract

ESP/EAP is essentially concerned with the genre-specific texts students are required to read/write and the kinds of activities they need to participate in. In this paper, we argue that to be effective ESP/EAP teaching and materials must be informed by adequately researched linguistic descriptions of the target genres and texts in general. There are characteristic rhetorical and organisational features and linguistic options which distinguish different genres and, without prior identification of these, ESP teaching will be ad hoc and cannot expect to help learners cope with the demands imposed on them by the need to read and write in their specific disciplines. Successful pedagogy which aims at enabling learners to master these genres must draw on linguistic descriptions which provide insights into the features and organisation of the texts. In this paper, we suggest a discourse-based approach to meet the need for ESP practice which is rooted in an understanding of the communicative purposes of texts and the linguistic manifestations of such purposes. Through an analysis of experimental research articles, we attempt to show that: i) choice of theme in citations can serve as a text organisational device to show the interdependencies and connectedness of the elements making up a stretch of text. ii) the macro-structure of an entire research article can be represented in terms of the generally-recognized Problem-Solution discourse pattern.