Resume The development of ESP

The development of ESP

Resume

v  From its early beginnings in the 1960s ESP has undergone three main phases of development. It is now in a fourth phase with a fifth phase starting to emerge.

THE FIFTH PHASE of ESP development :

1.      The concept of special language : register analysis

·         According to the work of Peter Steven, Jack Ewer, and John Swales, the aim of the register analysis was to identify the grammatical and lexical features of the English basic principle operating.

·         The main motive behind register analyses such as Ewer and Lattorre’s was the pedagogic one of making the ESP course more relevant to learners need. The aim was to produce a syllabus which gave high priority to the language forms student  meet in sciences studies and in turn would give low priority to forms they would not meet.

·         The ESP course should, therefore, give precedence to these forms (eg., compound nouns, passives, conditionals, anomalous finites(i.e. modal verbs)).

2.      Beyond the sentence : rethorical or discourse analysis

·         ESP became closely involved with the emerging field of discourse of rhetorical analysis. The leading light of this movement were :
1. Henry Widowson in Britain
2. Louis Trimble
3. John Lackstorm and Marry Tod Trimble in the US

·         The rethorical patterns of text organization differed significantly between specialist areas of use: the rhetorical structure of science texts was regarded as different from that of commercial  texts.
( based on the stage I of “EST chart”: A discourse approach by Louis Trimble (1985)

·         The typical teaching materials based on the discourse approach taught students to recognize textual patterns and discourse markers mainly by means of text-diagramming exercises.

3.      Target situation analysis

·         The purpose of an ESP course is to enable learners to function adequately in a target situation, that is the situation in which the learners will use the language they are leraning.

·         The target situation analysis stage marked a certain ‘ coming of age’ for ESP.

4.      Skills and strategies

·         The principal idea behind the skills-centered approach is that underlying all language use there are common reasoning and interpreting processes which, regardless of the surface forms, enable us to extract meaning from discourse.

·         This approach generally put the emphasis of reading  or listening strategies.

5.      A learning-centered approach

·         A truly valid approach to ESO must be based on an understanding of the processes of language learning. This 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.