English for specific purposes: Traditions, trends, directions

Abstract

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) began around fifty years ago as a result of pressing worldwide demands for fast-paced language training in occupational and professional settings, rapid revolutions in theoretical linguistics, and burgeoning pressures on schools and educators to focus on, and to be responsive to, learners’ needs. It started within the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) but has gradually established itself as an autonomous subfield of Applied Linguistics (AL). This paper will review the origins, evolution, and status quo of ESP, and then predict the future directions of this important field. The theoretical, analytical, and methodological evolutions of ESP are reviewed, the positions of genre analysis, target language use situation analysis, and context in ESP are described, the ‘just-in-case’ EAP and ‘just-in-time’ EOP approaches are compared, and the text-first and context-first approaches to discourse structure analysis are compared. The paper predicts that ESP will adopt a wide-angled epistemological stance to survey the (a) discursive, (b) generic, (c) social, and (d) organizational structures of specialized texts and discourses, as well as those of texts and discourses simplified for the popularization of science, in a systematic and contextualized manner. ESP practitioners are also warned about the potential threats of teaching genres of power within ESP.

Rhetorical structure in the problem statement section of Iranian postgraduate students' research projects

“…This matter can also be for the interference of the non-natives' first language instructions with the English writing instruction that "a standard schema is needed to write one successfully" (Yasin & Qamariah, 2014, p. 30). In this regard, an accurate and specific rhetorical framework is needed to clarify the scopes and dimensions of how to write various genres for specific academic purposes (Rizki et al, 2019;Salmani-Nodoushan, 2020) which can acknowledge all English writers in the discourse community (Swales, 1990). Discourse communities are "socio-rhetorical networks that form to work towards sets of common goals" (Swales, 1990, p. 9).…”

Developing Industry 4.0-Based English for Hospitality Business Learning Model

“…It focuses on the structure of the language, the general overview of language in use, and daily common communication. On the other hand, ESP introduces English as an instrument of practical use in specific scope of specialty (Buşu, 2019;Salmani-nodoushan & Ali, 2020). It focuses on teaching certain terminologies and specific information related to the purposive scope (Bekteshi & Xhaferi, 2020;Dewi et al, 2019), such as English for business, which specialized for students who wish to learn about how to operate in English in the business world (Harmer, 2007).…”

Grammatical Errors in Students’ Application Letters: A Case Study at Ipb Internasional

“…Preparing the students to the professional level, English mastery has been put as a mandatory subject in vocational education institutions. In its implementation, in any vocational education institutions, English is taught as a specific purpose (henceforth ESP) which focuses on the need on the specific field (Ayuningtyas, 2020;Buşu, 2019;Salmani-nodoushan, 2020). Different from English for Academic Purpose which focuses on improving students' English mastery for academic matters, ESP tends to deal with specific terminologies applied and used in working, by practitioners, as its major concern (Bekteshi & Xhaferi, 2020), such as English for Tourism, English for Medical, English for Engineer, etc.…”