ESP in the course of history (fifty years of research and Pedagogy)

1. ESP in the course of history (fifty years of research and Pedagogy) Prepared by: R. Esfandiari • The early years: 1962-1981 • The more recent past: 1981-1990 • The modern age: 1990-2011 • The future: 2011 plus

2. Lord Acton (1832-1902): “The knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, is an instrument of action, and a power that goes to the making of the future.”

3. The early years: 1962-1981 • Register analysis: 1962-early 1970 • lexico-grammatical variation in scientific language (EST) • Descriptive analysis at sentence level in written language • Contrastive analysis of languages such as Spanish and Japanese • Washington school represented by Lackstorm, Trimple, and Selinker • Limitations: dense and inauthentic passages, unsupportive accompanying diagrammes, and repetitive exercises

4. Discourse or rhetorical analysis: early 1970-1981 • Rhetorical organization of text types beyond sentence level (usually paragraphs) • Analysis of grammatical features and their functions in scientific language such as research articles in astrophysics in written language • Consultation with subject-specialist informants • Widdowson and Washington school

5. Target situation analysis: 1978 • Learners’ needs in target situations • Analysis of linguistic features of those situations • Munby’s communicative syllabus design

6. The more recent past: 1981-1990 • The publication of ESPJ (English for specific purposes journal) in 1986 • The publication of Swales’ aspects of article introductions in 1981 • The publication of Hutchinson and Waters’ English for specific purposes in 1987 • The publication of Swales’ genre analysis in 1990

7. Broadening the scope • Needs assessment • Empirical, triangulated, and complex needs of learners • Strategic needs in addition to grammatical needs • Linguistic devices and their rhetorical purposes: written and spoken • Technology: posters, slides, telexes, and computer-mediated instruction

8. Error analysis • Skills and strategies • Learning-centredness

9. Central ESP concepts • Genre • Rhetorical moves • Shortcomings of this period • Absence of the sophisticated use of computers for gathering corpus data • Focus on only written discourse

10. The modern age: 1990-2011 • The introduction and importance of new international journals • Journal of second language learning (JSLW) in 1991 by Leki and Silvia (writing processes and products, student errors, text analysis, academic argumentation) • Journal of English for Academic purposes (JEAP) in 2002 by Hamp-Lyons and Hyland (evaluation in academic discourse, contrastive rhetoric in EAP, corpus-based EAP, and Academic English in secondary schools)

11. Genre: • Macro and micro structure of text types • Descriptive and explanatory nature of genre studies • Influenced by composition studies in L1 (constraint and choice) • Study of genre sets such as academic essays • Advanced academic genres • Professional genres

12. Rhetorical structures of journal articles such as medicine, biochemistry • Occluded genres • Textographic approaches to genre • Contrastive discourse analysis or intercultural rhetoric • Special issue of English for Specific Purposes in 2008 on genre

13. Corpus studies: written and spoken discourse • Availability of corpora Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/c/corpus/corpus?c=micase;page=simple British Academic Spoken English: http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ll/base_corpus/ British Academic Written English corpus http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collect/bawe/ TOEFL Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus:

14. Analysis of academic discourse: Metadiscourse, evaluative language (hedging), intertextuality • Development of academic word lists • Analysis of non-EAP discourse: Nobel Prize lectures, taxation web-sites, anti-discrimination bills, legal counsel opinions, persuasive and expository press genres, real estate discourse, emails in multinational corporations, sales letters, business faxes, company reports and courtroom discourse Criticisms: atomistic and context-reduced

15. English as a lingua franca • Analysis of organizational and cultural factors affecting the construction of written and spoken text • Analysis of skills and strategies for successful communication • Special issue of English for Specific purposes guest edited by Nickerson in 2005

16. Advanced academic literacies • Writing theses and dissertation by non-native speakers • Analysis of linguistic and non-linguistic challenges non-native speakers face • Qualitative investigations to learn more about this area

17. Identity • Learners’ rights and their multiple roles, their position in power relations, their participation in current and imagined future communities • Writerly self (autobiographical, discoursal or textual, and authorial) • Plagiarism • Stigmatisation

18. Ethnographic approaches • Longitudinal observations • Various forms of data • Insider or participants’ views • In needs analysis and academic socialsation studies to study student enculturation/participation in new communities • Textography: text analysis, document analysis, interviews, observations • Situated genre analysis: genre analysis, sociohistorical analysis, ethnography-oriented study, and interview-based procedures

19. Major ESP books in this period • Dudley-Evans and Johns’ (1998) developments in English for specific purposes: a multi-disciplinary approach. • Swales’ (2004) research genres: exploration and applications. • Basturkmen’s (2006) ideas and options for English for specific purposes. • Basturkmen’s (2010) developing courses in English for specific purposes

20. The future: 2011 plus • Communicative practices or discourses • Communities of practice • The ESP practitioner community • Corpus-based studies • Genre-based studies • Needs assessment • International authorship • Varied methodologies and triangulation • Multimodalities • Varied locals • Researcher roles

21. Communicative practices or discourses • Written discourse • Top-down approach: Swales-style genre analysis (research articles, occluded genres, genre sets, intertextuality—a movement from isolated phenomena to contextualized genre research) • Bottom-up approach: the use of corpus tools to investigate multiple textual features • Spoken discourse: audio and video • bottom-up and top-down approaches to spoken discourse • ELF: analysis of current and target situations and EFL interaction • Digital discourse: podcasts, e-mails, Facebook, Twitter, mobile devices • Facilitative • Debilitative

22. Communities of practice • English for academic purposes • Post-secondary student needs, esp. graduate-level learners in natural and social sciences but not in arts and humanities • Unanalyzed investigation of needs of undergraduates either in classrooms or outside classroom such as faculty offices • Unanalyzed needs of professional academics • Unanalyzed needs of young learners or pre-tertiary language learners

23. English for occupational purposes • English for business purposes • English for medical purposes • Researched multimodal, new media communication such as emails and websites but under researched web-mediated communication such as teleconferencing and podcasts and webinars in business • Moving away from focus on research articles to concluded genres such as nursing care plans and preparing clinic and hospital staff for interaction with English-language patients

24. English for community membership purposes • Needs of language learners outside their schools and employment contexts • Everyday needs of adult language and literacy learners • Optimal content and sequencing • Citizenship

25. The ESP practitioner community • Reflecting on the education of novice ESP educators • Understanding the practices of ESP practitioners • ESP specialists’ needs analysis • Inspection of ESP specialists’ own materials development processes and products • ESP specialist knowledge • Knowledge about an area, accessible topics, sustained-content based approach • Team teaching, the use of the subject-area specialist, and learners themselves • Learning about ESP learning (the relationship between teaching and learning)

26. Corpus-based studies • A bottom-up approach followed by specialist informants • Focus on lexical bundles • Genre-based studies • Toward more contrastive rhetoric across languages • Toward more triangulated methods such as textography and situated genre analysis)

27. Needs assessment • Theoretical, technological, and methodological • Ongoing or critical such as rights analysis • International authorship • Varied methodologies and triangulation

28. Multimodalities • Varied locals • Work on classroom setting in vocational and professional schools • Work on intercultural identities of learners • Researcher roles: teachers, materials developers, syllabus designers, collaborators, evaluators