2 The development of ESP
The best laid schemes o' mice and men
Gang aft a-gley.
(Robert Burns)
From its early beginnings in the 1960s ESP has undergone three main
phases of development. It is now in a fourth phase with a fifth phase
starting to emerge. We shall describe each of the five phases in greater
detail in later chapters, but it will provide a useful perspective to give
a brief summary here. It should be pointed out first of all that ESP is
not a monolithic universal phenomenon. ESP has developed at different
speeds in different countries, and examples of all the approaches we shall
describe can be found operating somewhere in the world at the present
time. Our summary must, therefore, be very general in its focus.
It will be noticeable in the following overview that one area of activity
has been particularly important in the development of ESP. This is the
area usually known as EST (English for Science and Technology). Swales
(1985) in fact 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 analysing
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
This stage took place mainly in the 1960s and early 1970s and was
associated in particular with the work of Peter Strevens (Halliday,
Mclntosh 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, the aim of the analysis
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Was to identify the grammatical and lexical features of these registers.
Teaching materials then took these linguistic features as their syllabus.
A good example of such a syllabus is that of 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 very little that was distinctive in the sentence
grammar of Scientific English beyond a tendency to favour particular
forms such as the present simple tense, the passive voice and nominal
compounds. It did not, for example, reveal any forms that were not
found in General English. But we must be wary of making unfair
criticism. Although there was an academic interest in the nature of
registers of English 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 aim was to produce a syllabus
which gave high priority to the language forms students would meet in
their Science studies and in turn would give low priority to forms they
would not meet. 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 found that the
school textbooks neglected some of the language forms commonly found
in Science texts, for example, compound nouns, passives, conditionals,
anomalous finites (i.e. modal verbs). Their conclusion was that the ESP
course should, therefore, give precedence to these forms.
2 Beyond the sentence: rhetorical or discourse
analysis
There were, as we shall see, serious flaws in the register analysis-based
syllabus, but, as it happened, register analysis as a research procedure
was rapidly overtaken by developments in the world of linguistics.
Whereas in the first stage of its development, ESP had focussed on
language at the sentence level, the second phase of development shifted
attention to the level above the sentence, as ESP became closely involved
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.
The basic hypothesis of this stage is succinctly expressed by Allen and
Widdowson (1974):
1
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
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The development of ESP
sentences, but only by one which develops a knowledge of how sentences are
used in the performance of different communicative acts.'
Register analysis had focussed on sentence grammar, but now attention
shifted to understanding how sentences were combined in discourse to
produce meaning. The concern of research, therefore, was to identify
the organisational patterns in texts and to specify the linguistic means
by which these patterns are signalled. These patterns would then form
the syllabus of the ESP course. The Rhetorical Process Chart below (from
EST: A Discourse Approach by Louis Trimble (1985)) is representative
of this approach:
Level Description of level
A. The objectives of the total discourse
EXAMPLES: 1. Detailing an experiment
2. Making a recommendation
3. Presenting new hypotheses or theory
4. Presenting other types of EST 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 rhetorical functions 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 relationships
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 result
II. Patterns
1. Causality and result
2. Order of importance
3. Comparison and contrast
4. Analogy
5. Exemplification
6. Illustration
Figure 2: Rhetorical Process Chart
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As in stage i there was a more or less tacit assumption in this approach
that the rhetorical patterns of text organisation differed significantly
between specialist areas of use: the rhetorical structure of science texts
was regarded as different from that of commercial texts, for example.
However, this point wasr never very clearly examined (see Swales, 1985,
pp. 70-1) and indeed paradoxically, the results of the research into the
discourse of subject-specific academic texts were also used to make
observations about discourse in general (Widdowson, 1978).
The typical teaching materials based on the discourse approach taught
students to recognise textual patterns and discourse markers mainly by
means of text-diagramming exercises (see below p. 36). The English in
Focus series (OUP) is a good example of this approach.
3 Target situation analysis
The stage that we come to consider now 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
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, then the 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. This process is usually known as
needs analysis. However, we prefer to take Chambers' (1980) term of
'target situation analysis', since it is a more accurate description of the
process concerned.
The most thorough explanation of target situation analysis is the
system set out by John Munby in Communicative Syllabus Design
(1978). The Munby model produces a detailed profile of the learners'
needs in terms of communication purposes, communicative setting, the
means of communication, language skills, functions, structures etc. (see
below p. 55).
The target situation analysis stage marked a certain 'coming of age'
for ESP. What had previously been done very much in a piecemeal way,
was now systematised and learner need was apparently placed at the
centre of the course design process. It proved in the event to be a false
dawn. As we shall see in the following chapters, the concept of needs
that it was based on was far too simple.
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4 Skills and strategies
We noted that in the first two stages of the development of ESP all the
analysis had been of the surface forms of the language (whether at
sentence level, as in register analysis, or above, as in discourse analysis).
The target situation analysis approach did not really change this,
because in its analysis of learner need it still looked mainly at the surface
linguistic features of the target situation.
The fourth stage of ESP has seen an attempt to look below the surface
and to consider not the language itself but the thinking processes that
underlie language use. There is no dominant figure in this movement,
although we might mention the work of Fran^oise Grellet (1981),
Christine Nuttall (1982) and Charles Alderson and Sandy Urquhart
(1984) as having made significant contributions to work on reading
skills. Most of the work in the area of skills and strategies, however,
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).
Both these projects were set up to cope with study situations where
the medium of instruction is the mother tongue but students need to read
a number of specialist texts which are available only in English. The
projects have, therefore, concentrated their efforts on reading
strategies.*
The principal idea behind the skills-centred 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. There is, therefore, no need to focus closely on the surface
forms of the language. The focus should rather be on the underlying
interpretive strategies, which enable the learner to cope with the surface
forms, for example guessing the meaning of words from 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)
etc. A focus on specific subject registers is unnecessary in this approach,
because the underlying processes are not specific to any subject register.
'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' (Chitravelu, 1980)
* It is interesting to note, however, that not all such projects have such a focus. The ESP project
at King Mongkut's Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand, for example, has to cope with
a very similar study situation, but the focus here is on the full range of skills (reading, writing,
listening, speaking).
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As has been noted, in terms of materials this approach generally puts
the emphasis on reading or listening strategies. The characteristic
exercises get the learners to reflect on and analyse how meaning is
produced in and retrieved from written or 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
verbalise the interpretive processes they employ in language use.
5 A learning-centred approach
In outlining the origins of ESP (pp. 6-8), we identified three forces, which
we might characterise as need, new ideas about language and new ideas
about learning. It should have become clear that in its subsequent
development, however, scant attention has been paid to the last of these
forces - learning. All of the stages outlined so far have been funda-
mentally flawed, in that they are all based on descriptions of language
use. Whether this description is of surface forms, as in the case of register
analysis, or of underlying processes, as in the skills and strategies
approach, the concern in each case is with describing what people do
with language. But our concern in ESP is not with language use - although
this will help to define the course objectives. Our concern is with
language learning. We cannot simply assume that describing and
exemplifying what people do with language will enable someone to learn
it. If that were so, we would need to do no more than read a grammar
book and a dictionary in order to learn a language. A truly valid
approach to ESP must be based on an understanding of the processes
of language learning.
This brings us to the fifth stage of ESP development - the learning-
centred approach, which will form the subject of this book. The
importance and the implications of the distinction that we have made
between language use and language learning will hopefully become clear
as we proceed through the following chapters.
Tasks
1 Which of the stages outlined above has your country experienced ? Has
it developed in a completely different way ?
2 Why do you think EST has set the trends in the development of ESP ?
3 How far would you agree with Widdowson and Allen's assertion
(pp. 10-11)?
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4 An information leaflet about the Brazilian ESP Project summarises its
aims as follows:
'The "specific purpose" most common within the participant universities is
the reading of specialist literature in English. Consequently there is a
consensus within the project to focus on the teaching of reading strategies
with the use of authentic materials and the use of the native language in
spoken classroom discourse. The teaching of grammar is based on the
minimum necessary for understanding academic texts. The emphasis is
largely on a general course content to cover common problems (such as
reading strategies), rather than specific courses according to the student's
subject specialism (e.g. "English for Engineers").'
a) Why do you think this approach has been adopted ?
b) Do you think that the approach is a justifiable response to the needs
of the students ?
c) How do you think students and teachers will react to this
approach ?
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