e.s.p. as an academic subject

8/11/2019 E.S.P. as an Academic Subject

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ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES.

Theoretical Issues

E.S.P. As an Academic Subject

Main issues

1. The importance of the English language2. The English language for specific purposes3. E.S.P. a revolution in language learning

4. The gradual building of E.S.P.

5. Stages in the development of E.S.P.

Learning objectives

When you have read this presentation, you will be in a position to:

- discuss the importance of English among other languages of the world

- account for the birth of E.S.P.

-

talk about factors and premises which led to the creation of E.S.P., a newacademic subject

- comment upon the stages in the development of E.S.P.

1. The importance of the English language

English has acquired a unique status among the other languages of the world in that it hasbeen acknowledged as a global language. (see Crystal, English as a Global Language,

1997 and Graddol, The Future of English?,1997) English is now spoken in over fortycountries as a first language and in over fifty-five countries as a second language, and the

language seems to be on an ever increasing and unstoppable trajectory of use. (D.

Graddol, 2001:47)Consequently, after the year 1950, more and more people in the world have

embarked upon studying it for various reasons (be they documentary, cultural or

educational). This continuously-growing interest in the study of English has led to the

expansion of the domain of English Language Teaching (ELT), mainly concerned withthe teaching of general English. Nevertheless, new world factors brought about a

particular (professional, occupational or vocational) interest in the study of a particular

domain of the English language. This background of interests resulted in the need of anew methodological field, the study of English for a particular or specific purpose.

Nevertheless, Graddol (2001:48) mentions that English has been in decline in

recent decades in recent decades in terms of the proportions of the global population who

speak it as their first language. [] English has been losing global market share. Chinese,Spanish, Hindi-Urdu and Arabic have all been demographically rising. [] in terms of

native-speaker numbers English has fallen in the global league tables from second to

third or even fourth place . In his defense of English, Graddol (2001:48) states thatEnglish, in other words, has become a language used mainly by bilinguals and

multilinguals. Despite the demographical perspective, English remains popular all over

the world and the main instrument of communication in the diplomatic, political,educational and economic world.


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Theoretical Issues

3. E.S.P. a revolution in language learning

The need for courses tailored to learners specific requirements asked for new ideas in the

study of a language.Traditionally, the aim of linguistics was to describe the rules of English usage,

i.e., the grammar, but language methodologists, such as Widdowson, (1978) directedattention from defining the formal features of language usage to discovering the ways inwhich language is actually used in real communication. The authors major finding was

that the language we speak and write varies considerably, and in a number of ways from

one context to another. Since language varies depending on the situation of use, features

of specific situations will be detected and they will make the basis of the learnerscourse/textbook. Unlike the preceding teaching methodology experience, whose main

emphasis would fall on the English language per se, with the new teaching requirements

the learners needs started to represent the teachers target. Therefore the direction ofstudy went from the learner to the language and not vice versa. If, we consider, for

instance, the study of English the children have to deal with, teachers will consider other

factors, such as age, education needs, ability to use their memory, etc.

4. The gradual building of E.S.P.

The expansion of demand for English to suit particular needs and developments in thefield of linguistics and educational psychology contributed to the growth of E.S.P. Like in

case of lexicography which preceded the outlining of its theoretical background, which is

described by lexicology, the same thing happened with E.S.P. The practical projects andconcerns in the study of certain fields in the English vocabulary precede the theoretical

descriptions teachers must have needed in their attempts at providing well-documentedcourses to include both authentic text samples as well as lexical, grammatical and

translation exercises contributing to the rapid and efficient acquisition of foreign

language patterns.Three steps were taken in the making and growth of E.S.P., that is, the designing

of learning projects, the organization of scientific forums to outspeak the teachers

concerns, needs and difficulties to be solved, and finally the production of a specializedliterature, based on intensive research activities and which includes coursebooks,

technical readers, articles, books and reports, dictionaries and works of reference,

bibliographies, word frequency lists, catalogues of teaching aids, research projects and,finally theses and dissertations on English for specific purposes .

4. 1. ResearchProjects.

The Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CILT), with the

agreement of the involved project managers, reproduced a considerable number of

projects in the British Council bulletin entitled English for Specific Purposes, InformationGuide nr. 2, dated February 1975. Out of research projects, very few have been selected

and will be presented in the following:

- Lexicology and sociolinguisticso an inquiry into the practical aspects of the isolation and identification of

specific registers. The first study is of the professional English of


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Theoretical Issues

salesmen. Field recordings are processed and analyzed by computer.

Information provided from the data and the methodology is to be used

later in the development of parallel research in European centres to

provide special language training in specific registers for special purposes.

-

Spoken English in work situationso analysis of language and preparation of materials for application in

relevant fields of study. Tape-recordings in work situations at factories

and raining centres are used for lexical and structural analysis. This will be

relevant to the teaching of school leavers, particularly immigrants.

- Industrial English Language Training

o research, development and evaluation of in-company courses for teachingEnglish to Asian immigrants at work.

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Management terminology in French and Englisho publication of a glossary of selected terms in French and English planned.

- Registers and Terminologies

o compilation of contributions by various authors on the subject of special

languages, under four main headings: variety in language, special

terminologies, description of special languages, the teaching of languagesfor special purposes.

- Study Skills in English: materials production and course design

o the project is producing functionally-oriented language teaching materials,

including audio- and video- tape for overseas postgraduate students in thearea of English for special purposes (science, technology, business

studies). The materials are designed for the study situation at postgraduate

level in the United Kingdom.

- English Language Skills for Overseas Doctors and Medical Staff

- The National E.S.P. Project in Brazil

- The University of Malaya E.S.P. Project

These two last projects were set up to cope with study situations where the

medium of instruction is the mother tongue, but students need to read anumber of specialist texts which were available only in English. They also

concentrated their efforts on reading strategies.

4. 2.Conferences

The SELMOUS group (Special English Language Materials for Overseas UniversityStudents) is a group of lecturers from British universities, specifically appointed by their


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Theoretical Issues

institutions to research into the language problems of overseas students and to develop

appropriate English language courses.

- the 1980 SELMOUS Easter seminar was held in April at the University of Essex;

the conference proceedings were published by the British Council in London.- the 1981 SELMOUS biennial Easter Conference was also at the University of

Essex;- 1982 PROGRAMATICS the Theory and Practice of E.S.P. was held inBucharest under the management of professor Adrian Nicolescu. The proceedings

were published in the volume having the same name as the conference manager and it

was edited by Tipografia Universitii Bucureti.The academic interests of Europe in E.S.P. still keep alive, since conferences on this topic

are organized in European countries (Brno, 2006, Kosice 2007) annually.

4. 3. The literature on E.SP.

The E.S.P. literature, since its early beginnings has had three basic elements in

focus: language, learner and teacher.A. The focus on language has considered the description of written scientific and

technical English:-

1964, Halliday, M.A.K., McIntosh, A., P. Strevens, The Linguistic Sciences and

Language Teaching, Longman

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1965, Herbert, A.J., TheStructure of Technical English, Longman

- 1967, Brookes, H.F., Ross, H., English as a Foreign Language, London: Heinemann

Educational Books

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1969, Ewer, Jack and G. Latorre,A Course on Basic Scientific English, Longman

- 1971, Swales, J., Writing Scientific English, Nelson

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1976, Selinker and Trimble, Scientific and Technical Writing: the Choice of Tense,

English Teaching Forum

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1980, Vlasova, E.L., Scientific English, Leningrad: Nauka-

1980, Bolitho, A.R., Sandler, P.L., Study English for Science, London: Heinemann

Educational Books

B. The focus on learner has dealt with the:

a) description of the learners attitudes to learning:

- Rodgers, C., 1969, Freedom to Learn, Merrill learners were seen to have

different needs and interests which would have an important influence on theirmotivation to learn and, therefore, on the effectiveness of their learning. This lent

support to the development of courses in which relevance to learners needs and

interests was paramount. The standard way to achieve this was to take texts from

the learners specialist area. The relevance of the English course to their learnersneeds would improve the learners motivation and thereby, make learning better,

faster and more efficient.

b) designing of textbooks or coursebooks intended for specific purposes:

- 2006, Glendinning, E., McEwan, J., Oxford English for Information Technology,O. U. P.

- 2002, Dayan, A., et al.,Engleza pentru marketing si publicitate, Teora

-

1999, Lucian Ionescu, Flavia Toader,English for Banking, Bucuresti: Editura Economica

- 1991, Croitoru, E., Limba engleza pentru TCM, Universitatea din Galati


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Theoretical Issues

- 1989, Jones, J.,Alexander, R.,International Business English, C. U. P.

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1989, Lafrance-Bourbon, M.,Business English, Paris: Les Editions DOrganisation

The structure and format of these coursebooks has changes as time passed by to

reveal the improvement of language teaching techniques, on the one hand and thescientific progress recorded by linguists.

C. The focus on the teacher has been described so far in various articles andstudies, but our mention refers to a whole volume:

- 1981, ELT documents. 112 The E.S.P. teacher: role, development and

prospects, London: The British Council.Even if the bibliographical references in the foregoing are very scarce, as

compared to what has been published so far, it is worthwhile pointing to the fact that

E.S.P. theoretical and practical issues are still a matter of debate. In addition to that, it is

to be noted that an impressive collection of English (language) textbooks on specificpurposes has been produced both by native and non-native speakers of English.

5. Stages in the development of E.S.P.

To make a chronology of E.S.P. it is necessary to record the attempts at tackling the

problems of languages for specific purposes, tackling which involves an insight intoterminological key terms, as well as a sketchy inventory of the books intended for

specific registers.

Hutchinson and Waters (1987:9) state that the early beginnings of E.S.P. start inthe 1960s and that this domain of theory and practice in the teaching of English has

undergone five phases.

1. The concept ofspecial language: register analysis

2. Rhetorical and discourse analysis3. Target situation analysis

4.

Skills and strategies5. A learning-centred approach

In the late 1960s and early 1970s humankind witnessed the greatest expansion of research

into the nature of particular varieties of English. All along these decades ESP and EST

were almost synonymous, but clarifications and distinctions between the two have beenestablished.

5.1.Special language as a concept

The concept of special language (which considers a wide range of topics from register

analysis to sentence grammar) was described in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the

literature mentioned in the foregoing. The basic principleof the above mentioned authors

was that the English of a particular field constituted a specific register different fromanother. The language teachers aim at the time was to identify lexical and grammatical

features of these registers. The teaching materials focused on these linguistic features

which represented the syllabus. Now that a first stage in the exploration of English hasreached its terminal point, namely the study of the word structure down to its smallest

lexical component, the E.S.P. teachers decide it is time to move on to a new linguistic

level, the sentence. Therefore, the syllabus should not only give priority to languageforms which had a high frequency of occurrence in science studies/texts, namely


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compound nouns, but they should also deal with passives, conditionals and anomalous

finites (modals).

5.2.Beyond the sentence (rhetorical or discourse analysis)The 1980s recorded a step ahead in the approach to E.S.P, with Louis Trimbles

(1985)EST: A Discourse Approach, CUP.The priorities, for this decade, mean:

- understanding how sentences were combined in discourse to produce meaning

- to identify the organizational patterns in texts

- to specify the linguistic means by which these patterns are signaled. All thesepatterns represented the syllabus.

This approach is clearly accounted for by the E.ST. Rhetorical Process Chart suggested

by Trimble (1985: 11), which is reproduced in what follows:

Level Description of level

A. The objectives of the total discourse

EXAMPLES: 1. Detailing an experiment2. Making a recommendation

3. Presenting new hypotheses or theory

4. Presenting other types of E.S.T. information

B. The general rhetorical functions that develop the objectives of Level A

EXAMPLES: 1. Stating purpose

2. Reporting past research

3. Stating the problem

4. Presenting information on apparatus used in an experiment

a) Description

b) Operation

5. Presenting information on experimental procedures

C. The specific that develop the general rhetorical functions of Level B

EXAMPLES: 1. Description: physical, function and process

2. Definition

3. Classification

4. Instructions

5. Visual-verbal relationshipd

D. The rhetorical techniques that provide relationships within and between the rhetorical

units of Level C

EXAMPLES: I. Orders

1. Time order

2. Space order

3. Causality and resultII. Patterns

1. Causality and result

2. Order of importance

3. Comparison and contrast

4. Analogy

5. Exemplification

6. Illustration


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5.3.Target situation analysis

Aim: take the existing knowledge and set it on a more scientific basis by establishing

procedures for relating language analysis to learners reasons for learning

The purpose of an E.S.P. course focused on target situation analysis is:

- to enable learners to function adequately in a target situation, that is the situation inwhich the learners will use the language they are learning- to identify the target situation

- to carry out a rigorous analysis of its linguistic features

The representative work to have applied the target situation analysis is John Munbys

(1978) Communicative Syllabus Design, CUP.The Munby model produces a detailed profile of the learners needs in terms of

- communication purposes

- communicative setting- means of communication

- language skills

-

functions-

structures

The target situation analysis marked the coming of age of E.S.P. nevertheless, as any

other model, Munbys had its shortcomings which include the fact that the concept of

needs is far too simple.

5.4.Skills and strategiesThis stage in the evolution of E.S.P. was the object of The National E.S.P. Project in

Brazil and The University of Malaya E.S.P. Project, which had been designed as anattempt to:

- look below the surface forms of the language

-

consider not the language but the thinking processes that underlie language use.The principal idea behind the skills-centered approach is that underlying all language use

there are common reasoning and interpreting processes which enable learners to extract

meaning from discourse.

The focus should be on the underlying interpretive strategies which enablelearners to cope with the surface forms:

- guessing the meaning of words form context;

- using visual layout to determine the type of text;- exploiting cognates (i.e., words which are similar in the mother tongue and the

target language)

This approach generally concentrates on reading and listening strategies, the

characteristic exercises get the learners to reflect on and analyse how meaning isproduced in and retrieved from written or spoken discourse.

5.5.A learning centered approachThe final stage in the teaching of E.S.P. is that the emphasis should be laid not on

language USE but on language LEARNING.

The authors of this new perspective describe their vision of ESP in the volumeEnglish for Specific Purposes. A Learning-centred Approach (1987). They start their


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view on ESP with a metaphorical image presenting the relationship between ESP and

ELT under the form of a tree. The roots of their ELT tree (fig. 3, 1987: 17) represent the

learning communication while the trunk, the language teaching. The next division

represents the English language teaching out of which three branches indicate English asa Mother Tongue (EMT), English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second

Language (ESL). The thickest of the branches, EFL, further divides into General English(GE) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP). ESP distinguishes English for Science andTechnology (EST), English for Business and Economics (EBE) and English for Social

Sciences (ESS). As the authors state, the topmost branches of the tree show the level at

which individual ESP courses occur. Their vision is not only self-explanatory but alsocomplete and useful in accounting for the multitude of purposes for which the English

language may be thoroughly or superficially studied, depending on the immediate aims of

the (individual) learner.

Conclusions

To understand the position of E.S.P. within the wider space of the English

language, a few hints to the importance of this language among the other languages of the

world were mentioned at the outset. The acronym E.S.P. has had an evolution of its own

and it is this etymology presentation which speaks about the stages in the making and thedevelopment of an academic subject with tremendously important practical

consequences.

The demand for the teaching of English for clearly stated aims faced languageteachers with specific demands imposed by the learners personal needs, by the learning

environment, the time learning and individual study constraints resulted in changes andthe introduction of new and efficient teaching methods as well as new principles for the

designing of supportive materials. This demand also resulted in the making of a new

academic subject.The building of such an enterprise requires principles, methods, materials

specialist knowledge, dedication and hard work. That the making of E.S.P. meant a

revolution in language teaching and learning is the result of several factors was wasshown in section 3.

Although much of the underlying literature of speciality was published in the late

1970s and early 1980s, language teaching methodologists are still studying aspectspeculiar to languages for special (theoretical and practical) fields of activity, they

organize scientific events (such as conferences and seminars) intended to contribute to

the dissemination of group/individual research projects and to find the best way to teach

and assess learners knowledge acquired with a well-defined purpose on the part of thelearner.

The development of E.S.P. may be perceived as a never-ending story since new

fields of activity and research keep appearing and developing and in a globalized worldlike ours, knowledge of English is both a must and a personal advantage on the labour

force market.

e.s.p. as an academic subject

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