THE DEVELOPMENT ESP

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THE DEVELOPMENT ESP

1.      The Concept of Special Language : Register Analysis

This stage took place mainly in the 1960s and 1970s and was associated in particular with the work of Peter Strevens (Haliday, 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 form that of, say Biology or of General English, the aim of the analysis wa 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 Latorre (1969).

In fact, as Ewer Latorre’s syllabus shows, register analysis revealed that there that very little that was distinctive in the sentence grammar or Scientific English beyond a tendency to favor particular forms such as the present simple tense, the passive voice and nominal compounds. It did not, for exsmple, reveal any forms that were not

2.      Beyond The Sentence : Rheorical or Discourse Analysis

Whereas in the first stagenof it is 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 emergic field of discource or rhetorical analysis.

Register analysis had focussed on sentence grammar, but now attention shifted to understanding how sentence grammar were combined in discource to produce meaning.

As in the stage 1 there was a more or less tacit assumption in this approach that the rhetorical of text organization differed significantly between as different from that of commercial texts. The typical teaching materials based on the discource approach taught students to recognise textual pattern and discource markers mainly by means of text-diagramming exercise

3.      Target Situation Analysis

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 in analysis, since it is a more accurate descriptio of the process concerned.

The most thorough  explanation of target situation analysis is the system set aout by John Munby in Communicative Syllabus Design. The Munby models in term of communication purposes,communicative setting, the means of communication,language skills,functions, structure etc.

4.      Skills and Strategies

The fourth stage of ESP has seen an attempt to look below the surface nd to to consider not. The language itself but the thinking processthat underlie language use.

The principal idea behind the skill-centered approach is that underlying all language use there are common reasoning and interpreting processes, which regardless of the surface forms, enable us to axtract meaning fromdiscource. The focus should rather be on the underlyng interpretive strategies, which enable the learner to cope with the surface forms, for exampleguessing the meaning of words from context, using visual layout to determine the type of text, exploiting cognates. A focus on spescific subject registers is unnescassary in this approach , becuse the underlying processes are not specific to any subject register.

5.      A learning-Centred Approach

All of the stages outlined so far have been fundamentally 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.

The brings us to the fifth stage of ESP development- the learning centered 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.