Abstract
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) began around fifty years ago as a result of pressing worldwide demands for fast-paced language training in occupational and professional settings, rapid revolutions in theoretical linguistics, and burgeoning pressures on schools and educators to focus on, and to be responsive to, learners’ needs. It started within the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) but has gradually established itself as an autonomous subfield of Applied Linguistics (AL). This paper will review the origins, evolution, and status quo of ESP, and then predict the future directions of this important field. The theoretical, analytical, and methodological evolutions of ESP are reviewed, the positions of genre analysis, target language use situation analysis, and context in ESP are described, the ‘just-in-case’ EAP and ‘just-in-time’ EOP approaches are compared, and the text-first and context-first approaches to discourse structure analysis are compared. The paper predicts that ESP will adopt a wide-angled epistemological stance to survey the (a) discursive, (b) generic, (c) social, and (d) organizational structures of specialized texts and discourses, as well as those of texts and discourses simplified for the popularization of science, in a systematic and contextualized manner. ESP practitioners are also warned about the potential threats of teaching genres of power within ESP.
Highlights
About fifty years ago, English for specific purposes (ESP) started within the discipline of English Language Teaching (ELT) with the aim of helping international students with their academic writing tasks at universities where English is the medium of education
249 | Studies in English Language and Education, 7(1), 247-268, 2020 others—to claim that English for Specific Purposes (ESP) can perhaps be defined best by arguing what it is ‘not’, rather than what it is. This approach can be seen in attempts that tried to distinguish ESP from other specific or general approaches to the teaching of English—e.g., English for General Purposes (EGP), English for Academic and Occupational Purposes (EAOP), English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Occupational Purposes (EOP), English for Science and Technology (EST), etc
The most logical differentiation that one might make would be between English for General Purposes (EGP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP); I personally have always felt uneasy with this dichotomy, though; by the same token that Mackay and Mountford (1978) rejected English as a Restricted Language (ERL) as a specific form of language, I have always considered ESP as the practical application of language to a specific ‘use’ context—not as a self-sustained autonomous language in and of itself (Salmani Nodoushan, 2002)
Summary
English for specific purposes (ESP) started within the discipline of English Language Teaching (ELT) with the aim of helping international students with their academic writing tasks at universities where English is the medium of education. A less important aim was to help scholars from non-English countries with their publications in English-medium journals (Johns, 2013; Johns & DudleyEvans, 1991) It gradually grew out of the pressing demands of a fast-developing postwar world in which satellite communication, rapidly-growing international trade, multinational companies, digital technology, etc. The developments of language teaching methodology in the 1960s and the 1970s ( the emergence of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and the Notional Functional approach) made ESP a plausible and cost-effective way of teaching English to nonTESOL learners In her discussion of the origins of ESP, Robinson (1991) argued that it has emerged as a result of (a) worldwide demands, (b) a revolution in linguistics, and (c) focus on the learner. I will (1) provide a brief review of the past few decades of ESP, (2) distinguish between ‘just in case’ and ‘just in time’ approaches to the teaching of ESP, (3) discuss Content and Language Integrated Learning as well as Content-Based Learning, and (4) outline the future directions of ESP
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