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Unit 1english For Specific Purposes

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Unit 1english For Specific Purposes

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UNIT 1

ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

This term refers to the teaching of a specific genre of mostly technical English for students with
specific goals, careers or fields of study. Examples include English for Academic Purposes
(students will enter an English-speaking university), English for Business & Management, or
Hotel & Catering English (for hotel and tourism professionals).
THE ORIGIN OF ESP

ESP was not a planned and coherent movement, but rather a phenomenon that grew out of a
number of converging trends. These trends have operated in a variety of ways around the
world, but we can identify three main reasons common to the emergence of all ESP.

THE DEMANDS OF A BRAVE NEW WORLD.

The end of the Second World War in 1945 heralded an age of enormous and unprecedented
expansion in scientific, technical and economic activity on an international scale. This
expansion created a world unified and dominated by two forces – technology and commerce –
which in their relentless progress soon generated a demand for international language.
The effect was to create a whole new mass of people wanting to learn English, not for the
pleasure or prestige of knowing the language, but because English was the key to the
international currencies of technology and commerce. The general effect of all this
development was to exert pressure on the language teaching profession to deliver the
required goods.

A REVOLUTION IN LINGUISTIC

At the same time as the demand was growing for English courses tailored to specific needs,
influential new ideas began to emerge in the study of language. Traditionally the aim of
linguistic had been to describe the rule of English usage that is the grammar. However, the
new studies shifted attention away from defining the formal features of language usage to
discovering the ways in which language is actually used in real communication (Widdowson,
1978). One finding of this research was that the language we speak and write varies
considerably, and in a number of different ways, from one context to another. The idea was
simple if language varies from one situation of use to another; it should be possible to
determine the features of specific situation and then make these features the basis of the
learners’ course.

In short, the view gained ground that the English needed by a particular group of learners
could be identified by analyzing the linguistic characteristics of their specialist area of a work or
study.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ESP

ESP has develop at different speeds in different countries, and example of all the approaches
we shall describe can be found operating somewhere in the world at the present time.

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 Melcintosh and Stevens, 1964), Jack Ewer (Ewer
and Lattore, 1969) and John Swales (1971).
Operating on the basic principle that the English of, say, electrical engineering constituted as
specific register different from that of, say, biology or of general English, the aim of the
analysis was to identify the grammatical and lexical future 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).

The aim was to produce a syllabus which gave high priority to the language forms students
would need in them. Sciences studies and in turn would give low priority to forms they would
not meet. Ewer and Hughes-Davies (1971.

BEYOND THE SENTENCE: RHETORICAL OR DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

ESP had focused on language at the sentence level, the second phase of development shifted
attention to the level about the sentence, as ESP become closely involved with the emerging
field of discourse or rhetorical analysis.

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 analyzing 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 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 need 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 thought 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.

SKILLS AND STRATEGIES

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 Francoise Grellent (1981).

The principal idea behind the skills centered approach is that underlying all language use there
are common reasoning interpreting processes, which, regardless of surface forms, enable us
to extract meaning form discourse. There is, therefore, no need to focus closely to 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 lay out 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 in unnecessary in this approach, because the underlying processes are not
specific to any subject registers.

A LEARNING-CENTERED APPROACH

Our concern is with language learning. We can´t simply assume that describing and
exemplifying what people do with language will enable someone to learn it. A truly valid
approach to ESP must be based on an understanding of the processes of language learning.
The important and the implications of the distinction that we have made between language use
and language learning.

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