Genre awareness in ESP teaching: issues and implications

Abstract

This paper focuses on how research on conventional discourse patterns in professional settings provides useful insights into the design of LSP/ESP courses. A central issue in any discussion of LSP teaching is the identification of learners’needs. This paper rejects the notion that an LSP course should concentrate on teaching specialized vocabulary and a specific register; instead it should aim at developing the students’genre awareness. This involves sensitizing the students to the relationship between language and culture in general and between patterned language use and norms and identities of the discourse community in which these genres and rhetorical patterns are used. Genre analysis provides important data for such courses, including models of rhetorical movement which writers and speakers conventionally make. One of the questions this paper raises —“Should genre conventions be explicitly taught?”— is discussed in relation to the Australian genre debate. Also discussed is the concept of authentic texts in relation to genre awareness, and audience awareness as part of genre awareness. Most of the specific examples of ESP courses will be related to English for Business courses.