The document discusses English for Specific Purposes (ESP), which focuses on tailoring language courses to meet the specific needs of learners based on their work or study roles, rather than general English language teaching. It highlights the significance of needs analysis, text analysis, and the design of targeted curriculum for professionals in various fields such as medicine and engineering. The document also covers the evolution of ESP research, emphasizing its practical applications and effectiveness in improving learners' communicative competence within their specific contexts.

1. ESP An Introduction
Instructor: Dr. Shirazizadeh
By: Somayeh Sorouri
Winter 1398

2. What is ESP?
 They are courses narrower than ELT courses
 Tasks prescribed by the work or study situations
 ESP views learners in terms of their work or study rples
 The focus: work or study-related needs
 Not personal or general needs
 ESP involves analysis of texts and language use learners will
encounter in work or study situations

3. An Expert Explanation
The basic insight that language can be thought of as a tool for communication
rather than as sets of phonological, grammatical and lexical items to be memorized
led to the notion of developing learning programs to reflect the different
communicative needs of disparate groups of learners. No longer was it necessary
to teach an item simply because it is ‘there’ in the language. A potential tourist to
England should not have to take the same course as an air traffic controller in
Singapore or a Columbian engineer preparing for graduate study in the United
States. This insight led to the emergence of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) as
an important subcomponent of language teaching, with its own approaches to
curriculum development, materials design, pedagogy, testing and research.
Nunan (2004, p. 7)

4. Another Expert Explanation
If ESP has sometimes moved away from trends in general ELT, it has always
retained its emphasis on practical outcomes. We will see that the main
concerns of ESP have always been, and remain, with needs analysis, text
analysis, and preparing learners to communicate effectively in the tasks
prescribed by their study or work situation.
Dudley-Evans and St John (1998, p. 1)

5. Areas in ESP
ESP teaching takes place in a number of contexts
Some teaching scenarios
1.Alison: First she was teaching French then shifted into English due to
decline in enrollments in French course. She taught English to secondary
school students. Then to college students. After that she taught immigrants
focusing on settling skills. Later she was asked to teach medical students.
Teaching English for Professional Purposes (EPP)
Teaching English to doctors, pilots, and company executives

6. 2. Derya: She began teaching preparatory English course in an International
university. Recently the engineering faculty expanded the doctoral program
and since the students are not competent enough in English, she was asked to
design a course for them.
Teaching English for Academic Purposes ( EAP)
Teaching English to university students for study-related purposes
3. Estelle: Found a job in a two-year vocational college. She was assigned to
teach English for Office Management. She needed to prepare new instructional
material to teach students aged between 18 to 20 who waned to employ in
international companies.
Teaching English for Occupational Purposes (EOP)
They wanted to be office managers

7. 4. Albert: An English-French bilingual tracks the daily work practices of key
employees at a company and offer English language assistance to them when
they had difficulties using English at their work. The aim is that the employees
eventually become independent in using English.
EPP

8. Some More Details About ESP
 Can be classroom-based or on-site workplace-based
 Teachers can have different backgrounds like beginning by teaching EGAP
 Students may have no experience in field they are going to learn English
for (pre-experience ESP)
 Students may had work experience in L1 but not anymore in the field they
are going to learn English for (post-experience ESP)
 Student may be working currently in their profession (during-experience
ESP)

9. Branch Sub Branches Example
English for Academic
Purposes (EAP)
English for General Academic
Purposes (EGAP)
English for academic writing
English for Specific Academic
Purposes (ESAP)
English for law studies
English for Professional
Purposes (EPP)
English for General
Professional Purposes (EGPP)
English for the health care
sector
English for Specific
Professional Purposes (ESPP)
English for nursing
English for Occupational
Purposes (EOP)
English for General
Occupational Purposes
(EGOP)
English for the hospitality
industry
English for Specific
Occupational Purposes
(ESOP)
English for hotel
receptionists

10. ESP courses
Pre-experience During-experience Post-experience
ESP course timing in relation to work or study experience of learners

11. Demands on Teaching ESP
 Teachers may have little or no prior knowledge of the occupation or subject of study
they are going to deal with.
 They may work alone in an on-site environment.
 They may have far less knowledge in the subject than their learners.
 In some cases they may have specialist knowledge of the subject
 They may have a helpful insider-expert like a sister or brother in that field.
 They may work together and give each other support
 Few universities offer ESP programs and not all teachers receive such formal
training. They usually receive general ELT.
 Both ELT & ESP develop students’ communicative competence. And ELT course
contents should be related to purposes for which learners are expected to use lng for.

12.  ESP teaching is concerned with external goals (uses of language outside the
classroom in the real world) which is an instrumental view of language.
 Learner is seen as a language learner engaged in academic, professional or
occupational pursuits.
 The learner would want to achieve real world objectives that require specific
linguistic competencies.
 The ESP teacher/course developer needs to find out what the language-based
objectives of the students are in the target occupation or academic discipline and
ensure that the content of the ESP course works towards them.
 ESP focuses on when, where and why learners need the language either in study
or workplace contexts. Decisions about what to teach, and sometimes how to
teach are informed by descriptions of how language is used in the particular
contexts the learners will work or study in.
 strong focus in ESP on language as ‘situated language use’.

13.  ELT tends to focus at least in part on language usage while ESP is less concerned
with it.
 important distinguishing feature of ESP is that it deals with ‘domains of
knowledge which the average educated native speaker could not reasonably be
expected to be familiar with’ e.g. medical or legal terminology.
 A great majority of ESP teachers will themselves be graduates and have
considerable experience in academic texts and skills. They are less likely,
however, to have conscious knowledge of them.
 To design and teach a course in academic speaking, the teacher will need to have
an explicit understanding of those skills, such as presentation and discussion
skills.
 ESP makes additional demands on the teacher. The ESP teacher needs to learn
how to design courses in a conceptual area that one has not mastered and develop
the ability to analyses and describe specific texts.

14.  A further demand faced by ESP teachers comes from the fact that ESP
courses often run for a limited period of time as needs and circumstances
change.
 e.g. Immigration patterns and government policy change and the impetus to
provide such a course may end after a couple of years.

15. The Effectiveness of ESP
 Empirical investigation into the effectiveness of ESP teaching has been
limited. This has also been the case in EAP. This is so because there are
few situations in which an experimental study comparing a group of
learners provided with an ESP-oriented course and one with similar
learners provided with a general English course would be possible. There
are few empirical studies investigating the effectiveness of ESP in
workplace training, due to issues of confidentiality in corporate culture and
also time and cost constraints in ESP management.

16. Are ESP programs more effective than programs aimed at general
language proficiency?
Kasper (1997) conducted a study to investigate the effects of academic courses linking
the content of intermediate level English as a Second Language (ESL) courses to
mainstream courses such as psychology in a US college setting. The study aimed to
provide evidence to support the use of ‘content-based’ ESL instruction. One group of
learners received ESL instruction which included a content-based reading class. In the
reading class the students read selected passages from five academic disciplines, language
acquisition, biology, computer science, psychology and anthropology, which were
disciplines the students were most likely to study in the college. The students in the non-
content-based group used a reading textbook with a range of topics (not related to specific
academic disciplines). The study found that content-based instruction impacted
positively on the students’ academic progress and success. Kasper explained this result
saying that the students focused on gathering information/ ideas from the content-based
materials. The materials presented the students with complex information/ideas
communicated through the second language. The students thus acquired information
through sophisticated linguistic input and this helped them move to more advanced levels
of language processing.
Another study revealed similar results.

17. Why are ESP courses more effective?
 Because ESP courses cater to students’ interests and needs, they are more likely
to produce high levels of motivation.
 Students will be more interested in topics and texts related to their work or study
areas.
 If students are more motivated, then learning is more likely to occur.
 ESP courses are more efficient because they have more limited aims than general
ESL courses.
 ESP courses are based on needs analysis, the learning objectives are more highly
proscribed than would be the case in general ESL courses.

18. How do new members of disciplines, professions and
vocations learn the ways of communicating in them?
 According to a theory developed by Lave and Wenger (1991), learning is
social and involves participation in a community of practice. According to
this theory when people first join a community they are on the outer
borders of it and learn from the periphery. As they become increasingly
competent they can move towards the center of the community.
 A community of practice can be described as a group of people sharing
common concerns, problems and interests and who increase their
knowledge and expertise in the area by interacting with each other.
 Communities of practice develop knowledge and act as repositories of it
and are the ideal place to learn community knowledge.

19. Pre-experience ESP learners
 Cannot generally learn from within their targeted community of practice.
Perhaps they feel that they do not have the language skills to work or study
in the target community of practice as yet
 Or perhaps they are excluded from it until such time as they have requisite
language or communication skills in place.
 ESP courses offer them a middle ground between general English classes
and actually being and learning in the target community.
 They involve the learners in the study of communication in the target
community as a means for them to gain knowledge of it.
The end of Basturkmen ch.1

20. The History of Research in ESP
Divided into 4 sections:
1. The Early Years (1962-1981)
2. The Recent Past (1981-1990)
3. The Modern Era (1990-2011)
4. The Future (2011 plus)

21. The Early Years (From Text-based Counts to Rhetorical Devices)
 After WWII Swales “Episodes in ESP”
 Focus: English for Science and Technology (EST)
 Research: descriptive ,statistical grammar counts within written discourses
 Then north American authors from Washington School introduced a new focus: connection
between EST grammar/lexicon and the authors’ rhetorical purposes in texts
 Contrastive discourse analysis and curriculum design
 Goal of rhetorical theory: finding a correspondence of purpose with device
 No interviews with students or experts
 Later Trone focused on central characteristic of scientific prose: syntactic voice
 It had two influential approaches in ESP methodology:
 Consultations with subject-specialists informants
 Rhetorical grammatical analyses

22. The More Recent Past (Broadening the Scope/Introducing
Central Concepts)
 Genre Analysis
 Efforts to expand movement horizons, through ESP journal
 The most frequently appearing topics:
 Needs assessment: concentrate on strategic rather than grammatical or discourse competence needs
 Linguistic devices and their rhetorical purposes: L2 speakers problems with distinguishing btw
objective statements of fact and author marked observations in written texts were explored, functional
account of text usage, mostly on written text,
 Technology: Posters, Telexes, Slides, Computer mediated Instruction: computers were not widely
available, researchers studied the technologies available, juxtaposition of the visual with the verbal,
Two features of Telex ere examined(word omission & word abbreviation), computer as a new medium
of communication in 1988
 Central ESP concepts: genre as linguistic device and rhetorical moves

23. The Modern Age (New International Journals, Genre, Corpus
Studies)
 The introduction & importance of new Intl. Journals:
 Journal of Second language Writing (JSLW), Journal of English for Academic purposes
 Need for publish by academics for promotion and for university ranking
 Intercultural rhetorics:
 e.g. textual approximation in the teaching of writing to Arab students.
 e.g. contrast between metaphors in French and Spanish Medical English
 Genre: The central concept:
 Studies on advanced academic genres continue to predominate
 Theories and research paths in genre studies with different views and goals
 e.g. of type of genre: A text type and move analysis study of verb tense and modality distribution in
medical English abstracts
 Corpus studies: mostly on analyses of written academic genres

24. The Future of ESP
 International authorship is important for scholars
 Researchers roles: a practitioner movement to meet the needs and analyze the
discourses
 Five key roles of the ESP practitioner: teacher, course designer, material provider,
collaborator, researcher and evaluator
 Varied methodologies and triangulation
 Multi modalities: visual verbal interaction in some course books
 Varied locales: need to study more classrooms esp. in vocational and professional
schools
 The Future of Genre Studies: possibilities for complex discussions of text, context,
writer, audience, language, etc.
 ESP may become more specific and contextualized
The end of Paltridge & Starfield ch.1

25. Thank you