ESP
The field known as English for specific purposes (ESP) began as
an international movement within the field of English
language teaching, focusing mostly on helping international
students in English-medium universities with their academic
writing and researchers in non-English speaking countries get
published in English (Johns, 2013; Johns and Dudley-Evans,
1991). The field has now expanded to include areas such as
English for occupational purposes, English for vocational
purposes, English for science and technology, English for
medical purposes, English for business purposes and English
for community membership (Belcher, 2009, 2013).
The origins of ESP lie very much in the field of linguistics where
early interest was in the grammatical features of specialized
texts such as scientific reports. Following parallel
developments in linguistics, ESP researchers then moved their
interests beyond the sentence to the discourse level, and
focused on 'rhetorical functions' (Trimble 1985) such as
descriptions, narratives, definitions, exemplification,
classification, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, and
generalizations in specific purpose texts. Research has now
moved to a further level by looking at linguistic forms and
discourse structures within the context of specific texts, or
genres.
The notion of genre is now an extremely important one in ESP
teaching and research. Many ESP genre analyses have been
based on Swales' (1981, 1990, 2000) work in this area. These
studies have examined, for example, the discourse structures
since been applied to the Introduction section of other genres
such as theses and dissertations (see Bunton 2002; Paltridge
2012; Paltridge and Starfield 2007). Cross-cultural
examinations of the CARS model are summarized in Connor’s
(1996) Contrastive Rhetoric and in her (2011) Intercultural
Rhetoric in the Writing Classroom.
The analysis of discourse structures in ESP research has not
been confined to academic genres, however. Professional
genres that have been examined in ESP research include
corporate disclosure documents, letters of application,
newspaper law reports and popularized medical texts. Much
of this work is informed by Bhatia’s research such as his (1993)
Analyzing genre: Language use in professional settings and his
(2004) Worlds of written discourse: A genre-based view.
Bhatia, and others (e.g. Askehave and Swales 2000; Swales
2004; Flowerdew 2002) suggest researchers might take a
‘text-first’ or a ‘context-first’ approach to the analysis of a
particular genre. That is, they may start by looking at typical
language and discourse patterns in the texts (a text-first
approach), or they may commence with an examination of the
context of the texts they want to investigate (a context-first
approach) and then proceed to examine typical language and
discourse patterns in the text. There is no hard and fast rule
on the sequence an analyst might take in carrying out an
analysis. Rather, it depends on what the researcher is aiming
to find out and the overall goal and purpose of the research;
that is, whether the researcher is primarily interested in
looking at linguistic and discourse features of the texts (text-
first), or understanding more about the context in which the
text is produced (context-first).
The issue of purpose has been given particular attention in ESP
genre work. In his book, Genre analysis, Swales (1990) argued
that communicative purpose was the key factor that leads a
person to decide whether a text is an instance of a particular
genre or not. He has since, however, revised this view, saying
that it is now clear that genres may have multiple purposes
and that these may be different for each of the participants
involved (Askehave and Swales 2001). Also, instances of a
genre which are similar linguistically and rhetorically may
have, in the words of Swales and Rogers (1995: 223) ‘startling
differences in communicative purpose’. The communicative
purpose of a genre, further, may evolve over time. It may
change, it may expand, or it may shrink (Swales 2004).
Communicative purpose, further, can vary across cultures
even when texts belong to the same genre category. Bhatia
(2004) discusses ‘genre colonies’ as an extension of this
discussion; that is, genres such as annual reports and
feasibility reports that share a communicative purpose, but
are different in other respects such as discipline, profession,
and context of use.
Further directions in ESP genre studies
ESP genre studies have continued to consider contextual
aspects of genres, taking up Swales’ (1993) argument for the
need to go beyond structural and linguistic examinations of
texts in order to better understand social and contextual
features of genres (see Swales and Rogers, 1995; Paltridge and