A HISTORY OF ESP THROUGH ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 

Martin Hewings
The University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

 

3 Topics of papers

For an initial overview of the topics focused on in ESPj, the papers are divided into those dealing with ESP in general - including papers on, for example, evaluation of ESP textbooks, training ESP teachers, and culture and ESP -English for Academic Purposes (EAP) - including papers on English for Science and Technology (EST) and English for Occupational Purposes (EOP). The results are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4
Focus of articles

There has been a steady and marked decline in the proportion of papers that look at ESP in general, with a corresponding steady increase in papers on EOP (particularly in business contexts). The most notable change, however, has been the increase in papers dealing with aspects of EAP; so much so that in volumes 16-20 some 80% of papers reported analysis and activity in this area.

 A number of possible reasons can be suggested for these trends. First, the decline in general ESP, if it might be described in this way, reflects the apparent tendency for ESP to become more specific. So, for example, an approach toassessment of ESP textbooks now has less value to researchers and practitioners than an approach to the evaluation of Business English textbooks or EAP textbooks. Similarly, programmes for training teachers for EAP will look rather different, developing different approaches and skills, from a general ESP teacher training programme.

Second, in the main location of ESP research around the world, the universities and other tertiary education institution, the main branch of ESP that is taught is, I suspect, EAP. Teaching, research and writing for publication often go hand in hand, and hence the increase in published papers on EAP. There is a parallel here with the situation in the 1960s and 1970s where EST was probably the branch of ESP most frequently researched because it was the main activity taking place in the home of that research, the universities. While EAP encompasses EST, it is a much broader activity, with so many more academic subjects being studied through the medium of English by non-native speakers of English.

A third, related point is that it is EAP rather EOP that has grown significantly at the expense of articles in general ESP. This is surprising given that the main expansion area of ESP over the last few years has been Business English. So far this expansion has not been substantially reflected in the reporting of research that can underpin teaching. It may be, of course, that this research is simply being published elsewhere, and in journals like the Journal of Business Communication papers are found on Business English from an ESP perspective. However, the research base on Business English for ESP is still in its infancy, and one of the reasons for this is that, with a number of notable exceptions, it is only very recently that Business English has started to be taught in universities. Once this happens, research is likely to expand in the same way that EAP has expanded over the last 20 years, and this will be reflected in the pages of ESPj. Indeed, this trend appears to have begun.

Figure 5 provides a more detailed breakdown of the topic of papers, with seven main categories identified. These are papers which: (i) analyse written text or spoken discourse; (ii) describe a programme or course or part of a course; (iii) focus on needs analysis or syllabus design; (iv) are concerned with materials or methods; (v) present an argument or discussion in other words, have no data or material as such to present; (vi) focus on testing; and (vii) deal with teacher training. A fairly small number of other papers do not fit comfortably within this categorisation.

	Vol 1-5	Vol 6-10	Vol 11-15	Vol 16-20
Text/ discourse analysis	34	33	51	49
Programme description	36	11	14	10
Needs analysis/ syllabus design	11	12	6	9
Materials/ methods	5	8	9	6
Argument	0	12	4	8
Testing	2	3	4	6
Teacher training	5	1	1	3
Other	7	7	10	9

Figure 5
Topic of papers (%)

Two main changes will be highlighted here. The first is the considerable increase over the period in papers that have text or discourse analysis at their centre. A typical patternin this kind of paper is to report the analysis in the main part of the paper, following this with an account of pedagogical implications for ESP either possible ones, or in the form of a brief account of how what has been found in the text or discourse analysis has been used in a course. The increase in this type of paper seems to reflect two main developments. One is the growing realisation that to provide convincing and effective ESP courses or materials, we need to know a considerable amount about target situations. So, for example, in order to teach business negotiation we need to examine what happens in authentic negotiation (not necessarily involving native speakers, but certainly experienced negotiators); or if we are helping students to write theses, we need to be able to identify the valued characteristics of theses in particular disciplines. The other development is related. Tools and techniques have been developed which allow us to analyse this kind of data in ways so as to provide insights for ESP teaching. Of particular note is work on genre analysis and corpus analysis.

The second main change is the relative decline in programme descriptions. In the first few volumes of ESPj there was a high proportion of papers that gave an account of successful programmes or procedures; for example, A made-to-measure ESP course for banking staff, and a course in information structuring for engineering students. More recently there has been a relatively lower proportion of this kind of paper. Optimistically, this might reflect the developing maturity of the discipline; that is, because our courses are improving, we need fewer accounts of successful practice to guide us! However, more realistically, it is more likely to be a further reflection of the increased specialisation of ESP noted above; as ESP becomes more specialised it becomes more difficult to write an account of a particular programme that will be of relevance to a wide part of the readership of the journal.

 Given that papers presenting text and discourse analysis predominate, the rest of this section will examine these in further detail. To begin, Figure 6 divides these papers into those which analyse writing and those which analyse speech.

It is clear that, while analysis of written text has always been the dominant focus, this has become even more marked in recent volumes, with only some 13% of these papers focusing on speech in Volumes 16 20. In looking for an explanation, it is perhaps useful to consider the early days of ESP, and in particular EST. In regions such as Central and South America and the Near East perhaps the most common pattern of ELT programmes was for students to be taught General English, with a focus on speaking and listening, followed by an EST programme focusing on reading English language textbooks and writing academic genres, in preparation for university degrees in EFL settings. Historically, then, the focus has been on the analysis of written text. However, other reasons might be put forward. Swalesian genre analysis has been particularly influential in ESP research, and this approach was initially developed with and has been largely applied to written text. There may also be practical reasons why speech is relatively neglected. Speech is slippery: analysing speech involves collecting and transcribing data, followed by seeking a suitable analytical approach for making sense of often messy natural spoken discourse. Analysing written text, on the other hand, can begin with no greater effort than reaching for a textbook. For corpus work, too, it is normally a much easier matter to obtain computerised written text.

However, it is debatable whether the majority of the end use of ESP courses that is, the target situations in which English is to be used is written rather than spoken. Probably in most target situations for EOP programmes including business uses speech predominates, and in many aspects of EAP settings listening to lectures, participating in seminars, giving presentations, conference papers, etc. speech is more important than writing. It may well be, then, that the bias in published research in ESPj towards writing does not reflect the focus of ESP courses, and this is perhaps an area of concern.

A further division can be made among text/ discourse analysis focused papers. Some of these analyse professional products; for example, published textbooks and research articles for EAP, or consultations conducted by experienced native English speaking doctors for EOP. Others analyse student products; for example, essays or dissertations for EAP, or class business role plays for EOP. Figure 7 presents a breakdown into these two groups and a third in which there is a comparison between professional and student products.

The main underlying motivation for papers on text/discourse analysis is needs analysis, and broadly speaking needs can be established by examining bytargets (the writing and speech that learners are required to produce and understand in specific contexts) or the gap between what the learners are able to do at a particular stage of their studies and what will eventually be required of them. The predominance of papers on professional products suggests a clear focuson the first of these broad categories, with much less emphasis on the current abilities of students or direct comparison between what students and professionals do. Perhaps this is a healthy bias: the results of the analysis of professional products may well have wider generalisability and applicability than findings from the study of a particular group of students. However, it may also be that the tools and frameworks available for the analysis of text and discourse from learners, which maynot be well formed, do not produce answers which lend themselves clearly to the development of ESP courses and teaching materials. The area of applied linguistics which has perhaps studied most carefully what learners say and write, and which has the most developed mechanisms for analysing learner language, is Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Attention has particularly between on grammatical errors within the clause or sentence. In ESP, however, the tendency in course design and teaching materials has been to look beyond the sentence, with genre analysis being particularly influential. Some might consider that it would be valuable to redress this imbalance, with more attention paid to errors (or however we might wish to label discrepancies between student and professional products).