Development of English for Specific Purposes - Essay Example

The Development of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) The Development of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) ESP has undergonethree stages since its inception in the 60’s. The fourth stage is already in progress, with the fifth beginning to emerge from the horizon. We shall describe each of the five stages in detail in later chapters, but it will provide a useful perspective giving a brief summary here. ESP is not a monolithic universal phenomenon. Nevertheless, it has developed at different rates in different countries and we will describe all approaches in the world presently. The summary; therefore, will have a general focus. However, one area, English for Science and Technology EST), has been instrumental in the development of ESP. in fact, Swales (1985) uses the development of EST to illustrate the development of ESP in general: ‘With one or two exceptions…English for Science and Technology has always set and continues to set the trend in theoretical discussion, in ways of analyzing language, and in the variety of actual teaching materials.’ We have not restricted our own illustrations to EST in this book, but we still need to acknowledge, as Swales does, the pre-eminent position of EST in the ESP story. 1. The Concept of Special Language: Register Analysis The phase took place between 1960’s and 1970’s. The major proponents of this phase included Peter Strevens (Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens, 1964), Jack Ewer (Ewer and Latorre, 1969) and John Swales (1971). Operating on the basic principle that the English of, say, Electrical Engineering constituted a specific register different from that of, say, Biology or of General English, it is important to distinguish the grammatical and lexical features of these registers. Teaching materials have adopted these linguistic features in their syllabus, a good example being A Course in Basic Scientific English by Ewer and Latorre (1969) (see below p. 26). In fact, as Ewer and Latorre’s syllabus shows, register analysis revealed that there was little distinction in the sentence grammar of scientific English beyond the tendency to favor particular forms such as the present simple tense, the passive voice and nominal compounds. However, the syllabus did not reveal any forms found in General English. But we must be wary of making unfair criticism. Although there was an academic interest in the nature of English registers per se, the main motive behind register analyses, such as, Ewer and Latorre’s was the pedagogic one of making the ESP course more relevant to learners’ needs. The main purpose was to create a syllabus that would give priority to forms of language that students would use in their Science studies. Ewer and Hughes-Davies (1971), for example, compared the language of the texts their Science students had to read with the language of some widely used school textbooks. They discovered that school textbooks excluded some of the language forms commonly found in Science texts. Such language forms include compound nouns, passives, conditionals, anomalous finites. They concluded that such language forms should get due attention in ESP. 2. Beyond the Sentence: Rhetorical and Discourse Analysis There were, as we shall see, serious flaws in the register analysis-based syllabus, but, as it happened, developments in the world of linguistics overtook register analysis as a research procedure. Initially, ESP had focused on language at the sentence level. However, the second phase shifted focus to the level above the sentence, effectively linking ESP with the emerging field of discourse or rhetorical analysis. The leading lights in this movement were Henry Widdowson in Britain and the so called Washington School of Larry Selinker, Louis Trimble, John Lackstrom and Mary Todd-Trimble in the United States. Allen and Widdowson succinctly express the basic hypothesis at this stage: ‘We take the view that the difficulties which the students encounter arise not so much from a defective knowledge of the system of English, but from an unfamiliarity with English use, and that consequently their needs cannot be met by a course which simply provides further practice in the composition of sentences, but only by one which develops a knowledge of how sentences are used in the performance of different communicative acts’ The focus of ESP shifted from sentence grammar in register analysis to the creation of the understanding of how sentences combine in discourse to produce meaning. The concern of research; therefore, was to identify organizational patterns in texts and to specify the linguistic means by which these patterns are signaled. This would form the basis of the syllabus of ESP course. The Rhetorical Process chart below (from EST: A Discourse Approach by Louis Trimble (1985)) is representative of this approach: Figure 2: Rhetorical Process Chart The tacit assumption in this approach as the rhetorical patterns of text organization differed significantly between specialist areas of use. It regarded the rhetorical structure of science texts as different from that of commercial texts. However, as Swales (1985: pp 70-71) examined, the results of the research into subject-specific academic texts were also used to make observations about discourse in general (Widdowson, 1978). Typical teaching materials using the discourse approach were instrumental in teaching students how to recognize textual patterns and textual markers mainly through text-diagramming exercises (see below p. 36) The English in Focus series (OUP) is a good example of this approach. 3. Target Situation Analysis This stage contributed nothing new to the range of existing knowledge on ESP. However, the major aim at this stage was to use the existing knowledge at a scientific level by establishing procedures for relating language analysis to the learners’ reasons for learning. Given that the purpose of an ESP course is to enable learners to function adequately in a target situation, that is, the situation in which the learners will use the language they are learning, the ESP design process should proceed by first identifying the target situation and then carrying out a rigorous analysis of the linguistic features of that situation. The design process will then use such features to form the syllabus of the ESP course. Nevertheless, we give preference to Chambers (1960) ‘target situation analysis’ term since it offers a more accurate description of the process under consideration. However, John Munby (1978) in Communicative Syllabus Design offers the most accurate explanation of a target analysis. The Munby model gives a detailed profile of the learners’ needs in terms of communication purposes, communicative setting, the means of communication, language skills, functions, and structures, among others (see below p. 55). The target situation analysis marked the coming of age of ESP. It marked the departure from the piecemeal way of doing things to a more systematic method. They achieved this by placing learner needs at the center of the course design process. However, this proved to be a false dawn because the concept of needs was far too simple to form the framework for an ESP course. 4. Skills and Strategies As noted in the first two stages of the development of ESP, analysis was on the surface forms of language (whether at the sentence level, as in register analysis, or above, as in discourse analysis). The target situation analysis did not actually change the earlier approach since the analysis of learner needs still focuses on the surface linguistic features of the target situation. The fourth stage in the development of ESP is an attempt to go beyond the surface by putting into consideration the thinking processes that mark language use. There are no dominant figures in this movement although Francoise Grellet (1941), Christine Nuttall (1982) and Charles Alderson and Sandy Urquhart (1984) made significant contribution to the study of reading skills. However, the bulk of the work in the area of skills and strategies has been done close to the ground in schemes such as the National ESP Project in Brazil (see below p. 172) and the University of Malaya ESP Project (see ELT Documents 107 and Skills for Learning published by Nelson and the University of Malaya Press. The aim of these projects was to help cope with study situations where the medium of instruction is another language other than English. This would enable the students to read specialist texts that are available only in English. The main focus of such projects; therefore, is reading strategies.1 The rationale of the skills-centered approach is that all languages have common reason and interpreting processes, which, regardless of the surface forms, enable users to extract meaning from discourse. It is; therefore, nor necessary to focus entirely on the surface forms of language. Therefore, researchers should give attention to the underlying interpretive strategies that enable the learner to cope with the surface forms, such as, guessing the meaning of words from context, the use of visual layout to determine, exploiting cognates ( that is, words that are similar in the mother tongue and the target language), among others. It is; therefore, not necessary in this approach to focus on specific subject registers as the underlying processes are not specific to any subject register. Chitravelu (1980) supports this view, thus: ‘It was argued that reading skills are not language-specific but universal and that there is a core of language (for example, certain structures of argument and forms of presentation) which can be identified as “academic” and which is not subject-specific.’ The skills and strategies approach generally lays emphasis on reading and listening strategies. The characteristic exercises enable the learners to reflect on and analyze how to produce and retrieve meaning from written and spoken discourse. Taking their cue from cognitive learning theories (see below p. 43), the language learners are treated as thinking beings who can be asked to observe and verbalize the interpretive processes they employ in language use. 5. A Learning-centered Approach There are three forces characterizing the origin of ESP. These are need, new ideas about language, and new ideas about learning. However, it is clear that in the subsequent development that the last of the three forces, learning, has received little attention. The first four stages of the development of ESP have fundamental flaws since they lay their basis on the descriptions of language use. The concern is in describing what people do with language regardless of whether the description is of surface forms, register analysis, underlying processes or the skills and strategies approach. The main concern of the fifth approach is language learning. Consequently, the language-centered approach will form the subject of this book. It is my hope that the importance and the implication of the distinction between language use and language learning will become clear in the subsequent chapters of this book. Read More