History, Growth, and Development Phases of ESP
History
and Growth of ESP
Over
the past 40 years ESP has grown up
fast and become one of the important approaches in English language
teaching. In the beginning 1960s when ESP is started, the way English teacher view the
field of ESP today is far
different than the way they viewed it in the 1960s. In the 1960s ESP practitioners believed their main job was to
teach the technical vocabulary of a given field or profession. If they were
teaching nursing students, their task was to teach the learners the medical
vocabulary of nursing. Later, teachers of ESP
began to recognize the importance of sub-technical vocabulary, that is, the
words and phrases that surround the technical words
In
1970s, Hutchinson and Waters first introduced the
idea of learning English through content of a subject (e.g. Economics or
management). By the 1980s, in many parts of the world, a needs-based philosophy
appeared in language teaching. Many students learnt ESP
not because they were merely willing to know English but rather to do a task in
English. There then emerged some specific disciplines: English for Law, English
for Hotel Industry, English for Tourist Management, English for Marketing, and
English for Banking.
Krashen
in 1981 came up with “natural language acquisition idea” which then supports
the ESP approach. It is said that
the best way in learning a language is to use it for meaningful aims. In
response to the meaningful aims in learning English, various application of ESP have appeared: EAP (English for Academic
Purpose), CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), CBI (Content-based Instruction), and TBL (Task-based Learning).
CLIL
is an approach for learning content through an additional language (foreign or
second), thus teaching both the subject and the language. Many experts
considered CLIL a great way in learning English which give the learners with
meaningful input and authentic suggested.
The next application of ESP is TBL
also knwn Task-based language learning (TBLL) or task-based language teaching
(TBLT) focuses on the use of authentic language and on asking students to do
meaningful tasks using the target language. Such tasks can include visiting a
doctor, conducting an interview, or calling customer service for help.
Assessment is primarily based on task outcome (in other words the appropriate
completion of tasks) rather than on accuracy of language forms. This makes TBLL
especially popular for developing target language fluency and student
confidence.
PHASES IN THE
DEVELOPMENT OF ESP
1. Register analysis
In
the register analysis phase the language teachers’ aim at the time was to
identify lexical and grammatical features of these registers. The teaching materials focused on these
linguistic features which represented the syllabus. Now that a first stage in
the exploration of English has reached its terminal point, namely the study of
the word structure down to its smallest lexical component, the E.S.P. teachers
decide it is time to move on to a new linguistic level, the sentence.
The
criticisms against register analysis were:
·
It restricts
the analysis of text to the word and sentence level
·
It is only
descriptive, not explanatory
·
Most materials
produced under the banner of register analysis follow a similar pattern,
beginning with a long specialist reading passage which lacks authenticity.
2. Rhetorical and discourse analysis
The 1980s recorded a step ahead in the approach to ESP , with Louis Trimble
The priorities, for this decade, mean:
·
understanding
how sentences were combined in discourse to produce meaning
·
To identify the
organizational patterns in texts
·
To specify the
linguistic means by which these patterns are signaled. All these patterns
represented the syllabus.
3. Target situation analysis
The target situation analysis is also known as the learner-centered
approach. In this phase, ESP was
based on the reasons why student learnt English. The purpose of an E.S.P.
course focused on target situation analysis 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 learning
·
to identify the
target situation
·
to carry out a
rigorous analysis of its linguistic features
4. Analysis of study 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 enable learners to extract meaning from discourse.
The focus should be on the underlying interpretive strategies which
enable learners to cope with the surface forms:
·
guessing the
meaning of words form context;
·
using visual
layout to determine the type of text;
·
exploiting
cognates (i.e., words which ar e similar in the mother tongue and the target language)
This approach generally concentrates on reading and listening
strategies, the characteristic exercises get the learners to reflect on and
analyze how meaning is produced in and retrieved from written or spoken
discourse.
5. Analysis of learning needs (a
learning-centered approach)
This is the next stage of ESP
development: the learning-centered approach. It involves considering the
process of learning and student motivation, working out what is needed to
enable students to reach the target, exploiting in the EOP /EAP
classroom skills which students develop from their specific academic study and
taking into account the fact that different students learn in different ways.
