The Development of ESP

Nowadays ,there are fifth phases of ESP development. All the approaches that related to the ESP development can be found in all around the world and we can measure the speeds of the development by seeeing the application of the approaches.  They grow with the different speeds in each country based on its needs to English. Related to the Development of ESP we should take our attention to one are of activity that has been particularly important in the development of ESP. We’ve known this as EST (English for Science and Technology). Swales (1985) has pointed that the use of EST’s development can be used to illustrate the development of ESP in general :          

            

“EST has set and continues to set the trend in theoretical discussion, in ways of analysing language, and in the variety of actual teaching materials.”

Here are the fifth phases and its explanation :

1.The concept of special language : register analysis

The needs of English here back to their needs according to their area of study or work by operating the basic principle of English in a spesific register or general english. They need to know them with an aim to identify the grammatical and lexical features of these registers. Then, we need teaching materials to take these linguistic parts as its syllabus. The main motive behind register analyses is the pedagogic one of making the ESP course more relevant to learners’ needs. The aim is to produce a syllabus which give high priority to the language forms that the students will meet or won’t meet in each of their studies. For example , we can compare the language on Science textbook and general english textbook. Of course, there will be significant differences between them, we can find that general english books neglect some of the language forms that commonly find in the Science textbook. The conclusion is ESP course should give precedence to these forms.

2.Beyond the sentence : rhetorical or discourse analysis

If in the first phase, ESP had focussed on language at the sentence level, but in this phase, the development shifted into the level above the sentence. So, ESP became closely involved with the emerging field of discourse or rhetorical analysis. The basic hypothesis of this stage is expressed by Allen and Widdowson (1974) :        

”The difficulties which the students encounter arise not so much from a defective knowledge of the system of English, but from an unfamiliarity with English use, and that consequently their needs cannot be met by a course which simply provides further practice in the composition of sentences, but only by one which develops a knowledge of how sentences are used in the performance of different communicative verbs.  Rhetorical patterns of text organisation differed significantly between specialist area of use. The structure placed according to the area of work or study. The typical teaching materials based on the discourse approach taught students to recognise textual patterns and discourse markers mainly by means of text diagramming exercises.

3.Target situation analysis

The aim of this phase is to take the existing knowledge and set it on a more scientific basis, by establishing procedures for relating language analysis more closely to learners’ reasons for learning. There is a purpose of ESP course that support this phase, the purpose is to enable learners to function in situations which the learners will use the language they are learning, then the ESP course design process should proceed by first identifying the target situation and then carrying out the right analysis of the linguistic parts of that situation. It will form the syllabus of the ESP course. This process known as “needs analysis”. What had been done previously in piecemeal way become something’s systematised and learner needs was apparently placed at the centre of the course design process.

4.Skills and strategies

In this phase, it’s consider not only the language itself but also the thinking processes that underlie language use. This phase was set up to cope with study situations where the medium of instructions is the mother tongue but students need to read a number of specialist texts which are available only in English. As a result, it concentrated their efforts on reading strategies.

In this phase , we don’t need to focus closely on the surface forms of the language. The focus should be placed on the underlying interpretive strategies, which enable the learner to cope with the surface forms of the language, for example guessing the meaning of words from context, so on. This approach generally emphasise on reading or listening strategies. The characteristic exercises get the learners to  reflect on and analyse how meaning is produced in and retrieved from written or spoken language.

5.A learning centred approach

Previously, in the origins of ESP, we knew that there were 3 forces that had role in ESP and became its characteristics , they were needs, new ideas about language and new ideas about learning. We use all the approaches so far based on the descriptions of language use and the concern in each case is with describing what people do with language, but the concern is not actually on the language use only, our concern should with language learning too because a truly valid approach to ESP must be based on an understanding of the processes of language learning. With this statement , it brings us to this fifth stage of ESP development. The importance and the implications of the distinction that we have made between language use and language learning will hopefully become clear for us to understand each of the stages of  ESP development.