A HISTORY OF ESP THROUGH ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 

Martin Hewings
The University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

 

4 Referring to the literature

The final area to be examined is the literature referred to. As a starting point for this, Figure 8 gives the average number of references in papers. (Only main articles are included; Research and Discussion notes are excluded because they tend to be shorter and have fewer references.)

Figure 8
Average number of references per paper

There has been a steady increase in the average number of references, from 14.9 per paper in Volumes 1-5 up to 29.2 in Volumes 16-20. A number of reasons can be suggested for this. One is simply that as ESP develops as a discipline, publication in most areas within it has grown, and there is more to refer to in order to contextualise a particular piece of work. Related to this, it seems that ESP has, over the years, drawn more and more from a wider range of disciplines: sociology, psychology, learning theory and rhetoric. Perhaps this is a sign of its maturity. It may also be, of course, that as ESP has become more academically respectable, so has the need to cite more, on the basis that the more references a paper has, the more academic it appears!

It is possible to obtain a broad idea of the main influences on ESP by looking at which authors have been cited most frequently, and in Figure 9 the ten most cited authors in each of the four time periods is listed. In calculating this, self-reference is excluded; that is, I have not counted works in reference lists authored or co-authored by the author(s) of the paper.

	Vol 1-5		Vol 6-10		Vol 11-15		Vol 16-20
1	Swales (25)	1	Swales (53)	1	Swales (66)	1	Swales (81)
2=	Mackay (13)	2	Widdowson (40)	2	Dudley-Evans (34)	2	Dudley-Evans (44)
	Selinker	3	Selinker (32)	3	Halliday (23)	3	Halliday (27)
	L Trimble	4	L Trimble (28)	4=	Dubois (17)	4	Myers (25)
	Widdowson	5=	Carrell (13)		Myers (17)	5	A Johns (23)
6=	Lackstrom (9)		Hutchinson (13)	6	Widdowson (16)	6	Sinclair (20)
	Munby	7=	Halliday (12)	7	Huckin (15)	7	Widdowson (19)
8=	Candlin (6)		Tarone (12)	8=	Chaudron (14)	8=	Bhatia (15)
	Drobnik		Waters (12)		A Johns (14)		Hyland
	Dudley-Evans	10=	Krashen (11)		Selinker (14)	10=	Huckin (14)
	Tarone		Lackstrom (11)				Hutchinson
			A Johns (11)

Figure 9
Authors most frequently referred to. (The figure in brackets gives the number of references)

In Volumes 1 to 5 (as was the case for each of the four periods) the author most referred to was John Swales. In this first period, reference was mainly to his work on writing in science and on ESP programmes in the Middle East. References toRonald Mackay are mainly to his book on ESP with Alan Mountford (Mackay and Mountford, 1978), and those to Larry Selinker are both to his work on EST with John Lackstrom, Louis Trimble, and Karl Drobnik,but also to his work on interlanguage. Henry Widdowsons impact on ESP is clear throughout the 21 years of the journal. In this first period reference was mainly to his publications on EST, while later his work on communicative language teaching more generally was influential. John Munbys seminal work on needs analysis (Munby, 1978), published shortly before the start of ESPj, was particularly influential in this first period. Chris Candlin wrote a number of publications on ESP in general. The writings of Tony Dudley-Evans have been widely referred to throughout the history of ESPj. In this first period, most references were to his publications on team teaching. References to Elaine Tarone were mainly to her co-authored influential paper (Tarone, et al. 1981) on the use of passives in two astrophysics papers.

In Volumes 6 to 10 John Swales work on article introductions, which developed into his wider-ranging accountof genre analysis, was of particular significance. Widdowsonstwo books, Teaching Language as Communication (1978), and Learning Purpose and Language Use (1983) were referred to frequently. Selinker, Trimble, and Lackstroms work on EST was clearly still of considerable relevance. Tom Hutchinson and Alan Waters book from 1987 (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987) appears to have taken over from Mackay and Mountford (1978) as the most frequently-referred to general textbook on ESP. A growing interest in reading was reflected in the number of papers on the topic during this period, and Patricia Carrells numerous publications on this area were frequently cited. The impact of Stephen Krashens work on second language acquisition was felt on ESP in this period, as well as in ELT more generally. It is interesting to note the number of references to Michael Halliday increasing during this period. With the growth of text and discourse analysis in ESP, so there was a need to underpin this work with a recognised theory and the influence of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), represented mainly in Hallidays work, has been substantial from this period onwards.

The focus on academic writing in Volumes 11 to 15 is apparent, particularly work on genre analysis and its applications in the writing of John Swales and Tony Dudley-Evans. However, most of the references to Greg Myers, Tom Huckin, and Ann Johns are to their studies of academic writing, too. The work of Betty Lou Dubois on spoken conference presentations and Craig Chaudron on classroom interaction are frequently referred to papers on spoken discourse.

There is considerable overlap in the lists for Volumes 11 to 15 and 16 to 20. The focus on academic writing is reinforced by the appearance of Vijay Bhatia and Ken Hyland. It is also interesting to note the frequency of references to the work of John Sinclair. Sinclair wrote a number of pioneering papers on ESP in the 1970s which shaped the early development of the field, but his more recent influence has been in corpus linguistics, a growing area of interest in ESP