Evolution and development of ESP

Evolution and development of ESP

1. This first approach, which took place mainly in the 1960s and 1970s

   • The aim of the analyses carried out at the time was, therefore, to identify the grammatical and lexical features of those registers. Frequency studies became very important since the early days of ESP.
   • The peculiarities of languages for specific purposes were first and foremost of a quantitative nature.
   • In the first stage of its development, ESP had focused on language at the sentence level
   • The point is made that language varíes in relation to the different people who speak it and in relation to the different purposes to which it is put. (P. Strevens, 1964)
     • It is claimed, divide into two types:
       • one is associated with the different users and these are dialects
       • the other is associated with different uses and these are registers
   • The first approach (register analysis) is quantitative and tells us what linguistic forms occur and how frequently,
   • ESP materials that appeared in the mid-1960s took skills as their principal means of selection.
   • One of the earliest concepts to emerge from the development of ESP was that of authenticity
     • The concept of authenticity was central to the approach taken to the reading skill but, at the time, it was limited in several ways: it was confined to authenticity of text, with no differentiation between different kinds of scientific/technical texts.

2. The thetorical or discourse analysis phase [approximately 1974-1980]

   • The second phase of development shifted attention to the level above the sentence, as ESP became closely involved with the emerging field of discourse and rhetorical analysis.
     • The leading figures in this movement were Henry Widdowson in Britain and the socalled Washington School of Larry Selinker, Louis Trimble, John Lackstrom and Mary Todd-Trimble in the United States.
       • Widdowson argued for a program of research on scientific English which, he claimed, should not be considered a variety of English defined in terms of its formal properties but as a kind of discourse
         • The discourse analysis approach tended to concéntrate on how sentences are used in the performance of acts of communication and to genérate materials based on functions (definitions, descriptions of experiments, inductive/deductive statements, instructions ... etc).
   • The focus was thus on the sentence, and on the writer's purpose rather than on form» (Robinson 1991:24).
   • This new approach is qualitative and tells us what the forms count as communication, how they express elements of discourse
     • More recently, in the 1980s, ESP has seen an attempt to look below the surface of language and to consider not the language itself but the thinking processes that underlie language use.
       • The principal idea behind the skills and strategies approach is that underlying all language use there are common reasoning and interpreting processes, which, regardless of the surface forms, enable us to extract meaning from discourse
   • The one major textbook series of the time was the Nucleus Series (M. Bates and T. Dudley-Evans (eds.), Longman). This series is historically important in ESP because of its best-selling status

3. The conception of need — The target situation analysis [approximately 1980-1987]

   • This stage did not really add anything new to the range of knowledge about ESP.
     • What it aimed to do was to take the existing knowledge and set it on a more scientific basis by establishing procedures for relating language analysis more closely to the learner's reasons for learning.
   • The purpose of an ESP course is to enable learners to function adequately in a target situation.
   • Needs analysis
     • ESP course 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 identified features will form the syllabus of the ESP course.
         • The ESP course designer is asking the question «What does the expert communicator need to know in order to function effectively in this situation?
         • This information may be recorded in terms of language items, skills, strategies, subject knowledge .. etc.
     • Needs analysis is a complex process, involving much more than simply looking at what the learners will have to do in the target situation.
       • Both target situation needs (language use) and learning needs (language learning) must be taken into account
   • A learning-centered approach and genre analysis [1987-]
     • Genre Analysis
       • This approach involves the study of the forms of discourse that particular discourse communities engage in, their communicative conventions and purposes, the role texts play in particular environments, their genre products, and crucially the differences between the discourses within and of different discourse communities.
     • A learning-centered approach
       • A learning-centered approach says: That is not enough either. We must look beyond the competence that enables someone to perform; what we really want to discover is not the competence itself, but how someone acquires that competence.

4. The skills and strategies approach

   • Skills and strategies-based approaches to ESP have enlarged now the conception of authenticity in two principal ways.
     • First, authenticity of text was both broadened to include texts other than written texts and narrowed to differentiate between the different types of text generated by each skill
     • Secondly, the conception of authenticity was enlarged to embrace authenticity of task.
   • In terms of materials, then, this approach generally puts the emphasis on reading and listening skills.
   • The characteristic exercises get the learners to reflect on and analyze how meaning is produced and retrieved from written and spoken discourse.

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