English for Specific Purposes

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is a subfield of English as a second language. The goal of ESP is to provide English language training to individuals entering specific academic or professional contexts. Education, linguistics and communication are three of the most important disciplines influencing ESP theory and practice. In particular, corpus linguistics has had a great impact in recent years on the development of ESP language materials. In the classroom, ESP draws on theories of experiential learning and intercultural communication to provide task based approaches that help students develop sociocultural competence. This article provides a brief overview of the major theoretical bases and practical realizations of the ESP field.

English for specific purposes (ESP) is a subfield in the field of English as a second language. Courses in ESP are designed to teach English and communication skills needed within a particular discipline or career. For instance, courses in medical, business, and scientific English are commonly offered. These give professionals practice using English in simulated and authentic job tasks. The goal is to provide the English skills needed to function well within the professional role.

As a field of study, ESP is informed by theories in education, linguistics, and communication. One of the most central tenets of the field is that language required within a particular discipline may differ from language in other disciplines in terms of grammar, vocabulary, register, discourse, and genre (Dudley-Evans, 2000). Thus, one of the research goals within the field is to identify the characteristics of specific texts that mark them as being part of a discipline.

Pedagogically, ESP classes are guided by the philosophy that courses should be experiential and needs driven. This means that courses are designed with the understanding that ESP students need practical lessons that simulate real life experiences. Rather than attempting to teach everything there is to know about the English language, teachers focus on the language that is necessary to function in a particular role. They may utilize the methodologies and activities that are common to the area of study. Furthermore, since most students taking ESP courses are adults, lessons may draw heavily upon students' prior knowledge of content and language systems (Anthony, n.d.).

Applications

Discourse Communities

The principle theory underlying ESP is that language will vary according to the context in which it is used. Over time, variations in language use have been found both in the structure of texts and in their linguistic features. Genre analysis is the subject that deals most extensively with variations in the structural elements of texts. Genre analysts argue that within discourse communities (groups of people who communicate with one another regularly with a shared purpose or who have similar interests) members develop similar ways of speaking and writing to one another. Therefore, the texts produced within a discourse community will tend to share common elements and to be structured alike (Dudley-Evans, 2000). Genre analysts work to identify and understand the patterns of occurrence of elements in a text that give them form. Swales' (1990) highly regarded genre analysis of academic research articles is a case in point. He proposes that research articles can be broken down into a series of moves and steps. The introduction of an academic research paper, his work shows, usually contains three main moves:

• Establish a topic for the research and present key findings of previous research;
• Establish a need for additional research by highlighting a deficiency in current research;
• Indicate how the writer's research will fill the gap.

Within each of these moves are a series of steps that writers typically follow to fulfill their communicative purpose. Important for the field of ESP is that members of a discourse community recognize the essential and optional moves and steps of a specific genre. For instance, members of a business community would recognize the elements of a business memo as including the date, to and from lines, subject line, body, etc. Thus, in teaching ESP, especially writing, instructors help students to notice the textual elements they must reproduce in order to create texts that meet discourse community expectations.

Along with structural elements, linguistic features of the text may be affected by genre or discourse community style. Researchers have found differences in how writers in various disciplines use verb tenses and modality (Salager-Meyer, 1992), first person pronouns (Hyland, 2001), and hedging (the use of words and phrases to suggest tentativeness or possibility) (Hyland, 1994). For instance, in academic and medical discourse, it is common for scholars addressing one another to increase their use of hedging. Instead of using I know, which presents a degree of definiteness, they use terms such as suggest, assume, or perhaps it could be, to indicate that their understanding is open to alteration if presented with contradictory evidence (Varttala, 1999).

Corpus Linguistics

The textual element that seems to be most impacted by variations in discipline and/or purpose is vocabulary, or lexis. Corpus linguistics is the field of study that examines word usage in both spoken and written text. Through the analysis of computerized corpora (collections of texts that include millions of words), linguists can identify words that frequently occur both within the general English language and a variety of its subsets. Moreover, corpora can be used to identify the most common meanings a word assumes within a given corpus as well as the most common grammatical patterns associated with its use. This information is helpful from an ESP perspective because it provides a means for focusing student learning. In ESP, students are not interested in learning every meaning and grammatical pattern of a word, but only those that will be useful within a given context. With the use of corpora, instructors and publishers can choose to focus on lists of words and grammatical patterns that are common to the target field. Consequently, publishers have developed multiple resources, including textbooks, dictionaries, and computer programs, that target ESP learners. These resources provide explanations of the most common word usages so that students do not waste their time learning a meaning or grammatical pattern that they will never encounter.

Additionally, ESP programs use word lists to structure learning. University programs teaching English for academic purposes (EAP), for example, often use a general list of the 2,000 most frequently used words and Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, which includes 570 word families that are most commonly found in college texts. A word family consists of a root word and its derivatives, such as nation, nationalize, national, nationally. Knowing the words on these two word lists is said to provide 75-80 percent and 10 percent coverage (combining for a total of 85-90 percent coverage) of words in a college text, respectively (Nation & Waring, 1997). Because word knowledge is essential to comprehension, students who have a solid understanding of the words on both lists are more likely to understand their college reading. Thus, EAP programs, like other ESP programs, aim to give students a basic foundation in vocabulary that will allow them to perform their subject specific roles.

While research in corpus linguistics has primarily been used to drive ESP content development, some teachers have advocated that students be trained in corpus work in order to conduct their own language analyses (Conrad, 1999; Gavioli, 2005). Methods that utilize corpus data include using a concordancer, a computer software program that searches through a corpus, to find and produce a list of a word's occurrences in the corpus. In the following example, the word factor has been taken from the Brown corpus of 1,000,000 words:

While availability of mortgage money has been a FACTOR in encouraging meaning of a home rule charter was cited as a FACTOR which has caused the in 1915), the human element was the compelling FACTOR in Sloan's art. Christian faith entered as at least one creative FACTOR. At times we can say and leaders were constantly shifting. A final FACTOR which contributed The heightened tension, in fact, had been a major FACTOR in the President's curious position on the sales tax was a major FACTOR in contributing to its it gradually had to relinquish them. One FACTOR was the statement of Senator influence and intrigue. This, more than any other FACTOR, led to the fiasco

(http://conc.lextutor.ca/concordancers/)

Using such lists, students are encouraged to look for patterns in how the words are used. For instance, in the small sample above, students might notice that the word factor is frequently preceded by an adjective or that it is correctly followed by the preposition, in.

Gavioli (2005) argues that there are four areas where corpus work can assist language learners. These are:

• Gaining a conceptualization of a word and its appropriate use within a text;
• Raising awareness of genre and text-based similarities in word usage;
• Deepening understanding of material provided in other textbooks;
• Improving a learner's ability to produce naturally sounding speech and writing.

Sociocultural Competence

While learning the language is obviously an important goal in ESP courses, just as important is gaining sociocultural competence. Sociocultural competence refers to one's ability to use language appropriately according to social and culture norms. One aspect of sociocultural competence involves assuming an identity that is appropriate for the professional discourse. Honing a professional identity involves becoming familiar with the language and behaviors expected of someone operating in a specific professional role. Generally, experience and maturity are considered necessary for the achievement of a solid professional identity. However, Wiwczaroski and Magdolna (n.d.) emphasize that teachers can facilitate identity development by exposing students to projects and authentic tasks that replicate situations similar to those they will face in the professional world.

A second aspect of sociocultural competence is learning how cultural factors can affect communication. ESP students are often training for international careers where they will interact with people from many different cultures or they plan to work in an English speaking country with a different cultural framework. As such, they are likely to face many situations where cultural differences can negatively impact communication. Gaining an understanding of how cultural factors influence communication can lead to more intelligible and productive interactions. For example, in the United States, international medical graduates have sometimes been confused by patients who challenge physician authority by bringing in information that they have found online or from other outside sources. To these doctors, who often come from cultures where authority is revered, the concepts of egalitarianism and patients' rights pose obstacles to the doctor's effectiveness in doctor-patient interactions. With training on the cultural values that underlie and drive patient behavior, these doctors have a greater chance of understanding, and being understood by, their patients (Hoekje, 2007).

The field of intercultural communication, which studies communication between members of different cultures, provide useful insight for gaining sociocultural competence. Intercultural communication highlights first that culture is an ever-changing social construct that encompasses all ways of living including behavioral norms, language, communicative styles, thinking patterns, beliefs, values, and attitudes (Jiang, 2006). One of the first lessons from this field is that one should not assume that people from another culture see the world in the same way that one does. In ESP courses, instructors confront ethnocentrism, which is the tendency to judge other cultures by the standards inherent to one's own culture, by asking students to think about their own values, beliefs, and attitudes, and then considering those thoughts in relation to other ways of thinking. One popular method for introducing cross-cultural communication is the simulation in which students take on various roles and must accomplish a communication-oriented task. Business English classes are well known for using this task-based approach to introduce students to the various roles, role relationships, and power issues that can occur during negotiations. In these simulations, students have a chance to explore and gauge their effect on people who hold alternative goals or who do not share the same nationality, personality type, or cultural characteristics (Gimenez, 2001).

While simulations and discussions of cultural differences can be insightful, there is no cookie-cutter mold into which all members of a culture can be placed. In a world where more and more people regularly move through geographic boundaries, and the world's media and communications have become globalized, individual characteristics are influenced by many cultures and cultural factors (Gimenez, 2001). Though ESP instructors recognize similarities and differences that may be attributed to culture, they are quick to counter stereotypes, which ascribe characteristics to an individual solely on the basis of the individual's cultural, racial, ethnic, or gender group. Instead, they encourage students to adopt open-minded, investigative attitudes when interacting with members of another culture so that they can determine the kinds of adjustments in language or behavior that may be needed on a case-by-case basis.

Issues

While the field of ESP has existed for several decades, developments in corpus linguistics have had a great influence on improving the quality and quantity of current ESP program materials. This, combined with a rapid globalization since the 1990s that has increased opportunities for English speakers around the world, has increased the popularity of ESP programs.

It may be of some surprise, then, that many questions and problems remain unresolved regarding the language that should be taught in an ESP classroom. Though corpus linguistics has had a positive influence on the shape of current ESP program content, the exact nature of the vocabulary that ESP students should acquire is still debated. One reason for this is that defining technical vocabulary can be somewhat tricky. In order to establish that a word is "technical" in nature, the context in which the word occurs must be considered. Although computer programs can locate the use of a word, it often takes a human expert to determine whether a word should be considered a technical form (Chung & Nation, 2004). This requires more time and resources to be allocated, and for some subjects, such as engineering, the compilations of appropriate word lists have only just begun (Ward, 2009).

Secondly, linguists and teachers have more to learn about the role of collocations in specialist disciplines. Collocations are words that occur together more frequently than would be expected by the individual frequencies of the word (Hyland, 2008). For example, commit and crime are collocates as are demand and for. One type of recognized collocation is the lexical bundle. These are words that occur together in a fixed order, such as on the other hand or all of a sudden. Evidence exists that lexical bundles vary by discipline; in fact, Hyland (2008) found that less than 50 percent of the top 50 bundles occurring in subject specific lists appeared in any other list. This finding would suggest that bundles, or chunks, should be taught as part of a specialist vocabulary. However, not enough research has been done to establish with precision which bundles belong to which technical vocabularies. Additionally, not all collocates occur in fixed bundles. Positionally variable collocates (where the words can move to various positions but still remain close to each other) are still little understood and require more research to determine whether they should or can be taught (Durant, 2009).

Thus, while many advances have been made in ESP, the field is still robust with research as linguists and educators attempt to fine tune our understanding of language and its role in specific contexts.

As a subcategory within the field of English as a second language, ESP provides learners with the language needed to function in an academic or career role. As an interdisciplinary subject, ESP draws upon the theories and methdologies of education, communication, and linguistics as well as from the disciplines that its courses serve. While medicine, business, and science have long offered ESP courses, the field has been growing due to advances in linguistics and globalization. As new categories of professional language are extrapolated from computerized corpora and as more careers become culturally diversified, more disciplines are likely to recognize the value of specialized language training and to turn to ESP for this service.

Terms & Concepts

Academic Word List: The Academic Word List is a compilation of the 570 word families that are found most frequently in academic texts.

Collocations: Collocations are words that appear together in a text more frequently than would be expected given the frequencies of the individual words.

Concordancer: A concordancer is a software program that is used to search a corpus for linguistic data.

Corpus: A corpus is a collection of texts.

Corpus Linguistics: Corpus linguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language by looking for language patterns in large collections of texts.

Discourse Community: A discourse community involves a group of people who communicate regularly and share a common purpose or common interests.

Ethnocentrism: Ethnocentrism is viewing and judging the world from the standpoint that one's own culture is the best.

Genre Analysis: Genre analysis is the area of linguistics which investigates the structural elements of a text and how texts in different genres differ from one another.

Intercultural Communication: Intercultural communication is the field that investigates what happens when members of different cultures interact with one another.

Lexical Bundle: A lexical bundle is a collocation in which the words occur in a set order.

Lexis: Lexis is the linguistic term for vocabulary.

Sociocultural Competence: Sociocultural competence is the ability to use language appropriately according to the social and cultural norms of a community.

Stereotypes: Stereotypes are perceptions that people have about a person or group of people that may not be true.

Bibliography

Anthony, L. (n.d.). English for Specific Purposes: What does it mean? Why is it different? Retrieved July 28, 2009, from www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/abstracts/ESParticle.html

Belcher, D., Johns, A., & Paltridge, B. (2011). New Directions in English for Specific Purposes Research. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Chung, T. M., & Nation, P. (2004). Identifying technical vocabulary. System, 32(2), 251-263.

Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic wordlist. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213-238.

Conrad, S. M. (1999). The importance of corpus-based research for language teachers. System, 27, 1-18.

Dudley-Evans, T. (2000). Genre analysis: A key to a theory of ESP? Ibérica, 4-11. Retrieved July 29, 2009, from AELFE website http://www.aelfe.org/documents/text2-Dudley.pdf

Durrant, P. (2009). Investigating the viability of a collocation for students of English for academic purposes. English for Specific Purposes, 28(3), 157-169.

Gavioli, L. (2005). Exploring corpora for ESL learning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Gimenez, J.C. (2001). Ethnographic observations in cross-cultural business negotiations between non-native speakers of English: An exploratory study. English for Specific Purposes, 20(2), 169-193.

Ho, B. (2011). Solving the problems of designing and teaching a packed English for specific purposes course. New Horizons in Education, 59(1), 119-136. Retrieved December 10, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Education Resource Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=63021777

Hoekje, B.J. (2007). Medical discourse and ESP courses for international medical graduates (IMGs). English for Specific Purposes, 26(3), 327-343.

Hyland, K. (1994). Hedging in academic writing and EAP textbooks. English for Specific Purposes, 13(3), 239-256.

Hyland, K. (2001). Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles. English for Specific Purposes, 20(3). 207-226.

Hyland, K. (2008). As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for Specific Purposes, 27(1), 4-21.

Jiang, X. (2006). Towards an intercultural communication: From micro to macro perspectives. Intercultural Education, 17(4), 407-419. Retrieved July 28, 2009, from EBSCO online database, Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=22897387&site=ehost-live

Mu-hsuan, C. (2013). Strategy use for reading English for general and specific academic purposes in testing and nontesting contexts. Reading Research Quarterly, 48(2), 175-197. Retrieved December 10, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Education Resource Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=86463046

Nation, P., & Waring, R. (1997). Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists. In N. Schmitt & M. McCarthy (Eds.). Vocabulary: Description acquisition and pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Salager-Meyer, F. (1992). A text-type and move analysis study of verb tense and modality distribution in medical English abstracts. English for Specific Purposes, 11(2), 93-113.

Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Varttala, T. (1999). Remarks on the communicative functions of hedging in popular scientific and specialist research articles on medicine. English for Specific Purposes, 18(2), 177-200.

Vogt, K., & Kantelinen, R. (2013). Vocationally oriented language learning revisited. ELT Journal: English Language Teachers Journal, 67(1), 62-69. Retrieved December 10, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Education Resource Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=84556541

Ward, J. (2009). A basic engineering English word list for less proficient foundation engineering undergraduates. English for Specific Purposes, 28(3), 170-182.

Wiwczaroski, T., Magdolna, S. (n.d.). Communication theory applied to the professional development of the communication student. English for Specific Purposes World. Retrieved July 27, 2009, from http://www.esp-world.info/Articles%5F10/Hungary.htm

Suggested Reading

Kotthoff, H., & Spencer-Oatey, H. (Eds.). (2007). Handbook of Intercultural communication. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Maleki, A., & Sajjadi, S. (2012). The role of non-linear methods in teaching English for medicine: Example of storytelling. Journal of Applied Sciences, 12(18), 1972-1977. Retrieved December 10, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Education Resource Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=82687812

McEnery, T., & Wilson, A. (2001). Corpus linguistics: An introduction (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Nation, P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sinclair, J. M. (1991). Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tsai, S. (2011). Courseware integration into task-based learning: a case study of multimedia courseware-supported oral presentations for non-English major students. Recall, 23(2), 117-134. Retrieved December 10, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Education Resource Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=60692484