Vanda STAN
DISCOURSE COMMUNITY – RELATED ESP, CURRICULUM
DESIGN AND MATERIALS. WRITING FOR THE TERTIARY
EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM1
Abstract: The article discusses the concept of Discourse Community, English for Specific Purposes
and the vital importance of adjusting curricula and materials design to 21st century ever changing
discourse communities. It also outlines developments in ESP and discourse analysis and their impact
on ESP curriculum design and materials writing throughout the last decades. It shows that wellknown linguists have diligently worked to maintain ESP as a distinct field, in which practice is deeply
rooted in theory. Specific problems pertaining to curriculum design and materials writing are also
discussed since the field of ESP undergoes permanent change and enrichment due to the increased
interest of specialists in all fields of activity in enhancing their knowledge of English, in order to
function efficiently in their discourse community, on the current labour market and in nowadays’
compulsory ESP requirements for non-English professionals.
Key Words: career, professionals, community, oriented, linguistic competence
1. The Concept of Discourse Community
A Discourse Community is a group of people who share a set of discourses,
understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals.
Linguist, John Swales defined discourse communities as “groups that have goals or
purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals”. Most people move within and
between different discourse communities every day. We all are part of various discourse
communities throughout our lives.
The term can describe a group of people who have common interests, or a group
of highly trained scientists or technicians. Any set of people using a common language can
be described as a discourse community. The idea of the discourse community provides a
kind of intersection between linguistics and anthropology or related social sciences.
The term was first used by sociolinguist Martin Nystrand in 1982 and further
developed by American linguist John Swales.
Writing about the acquisition of academic writing styles of those who are learning
English as an additional language, Swales presents six defining characteristics:
A discourse community:
1.1. has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.
1.2. has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.
1.3. uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.
1.4. utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance
of its aims.
1.5. in addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis.
1.6. has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and
discoursal expertise.
James Porter defined the discourse community as: “a local and temporary
constraining system, defined by a body of texts (or more generally, practices) that are
1
Vanda STAN, University Vasile Goldis, Faculty of Humanities, Political and Administrative
Sciences, Deptm. English, Arad, Romania, Email: vanda_stan@yahoo.com
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Vanda STAN
unified by a common focus. A discourse community is a textual system with stated and
unstated conventions, a vital history, mechanisms for wielding power, institutional
hierarchies, vested interests, and so on.”
Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyceta offer the following statement on the
conditioned nature of all discourse, which has applicability to the concept of discourse
community: “All language is the language of community, be this a community bound by
biological ties, or by the practice of a common discipline or technique. The terms used,
their meaning, their definition, can only be understood in the context of the habits, ways of
thought, methods, external circumstances, and tradition known to the users of those terms.
“Producing text within a discourse community,” according to Patricia Bizzell,
“cannot take place unless the writer can define her goals in terms of the community's
interpretive conventions.” Obviously, one cannot simply produce any text — it must fit the
standards of the discourse community which is is addressing. If one wants to become a
member of a certain discourse community, it requires more than learning the lingo, it
requires understanding concepts and expectations set up within that community.
This is in contrast to the speech community (or the 'native discourse community',
to use Patricia Bizzell's term), who speak a language or dialect inherited by birth or
adoption.
The defining characteristics of a discourse community are, in essence, social, in so
far as “social” means that the members are marked by mutual communication instances, but
are not social in the sense of members living in the same community in one place. There
may be considerable distance between the members of a discourse community ethnically
and geographically, they are unlikely to share an accent and they may not share a first
language.
A discourse community, according to Swales has a broadly agreed set of common
public goals, has mechanisms of intercommunication between its members, uses
participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback, owns genres, has developed
specific lexis, and has a reasonable ratio of experienced members and novice members.
Hence, a discourse community requires a network of communication and common goals. In
contrast, a speech community and even a speech fellowship requires physical proximity.
Analyzing a discourse community will facilitate increased understanding of how
language shapes our realities and how arguments are made within and towards particular
cultural, historical, and sociological situations, within particular groups, and towards
specific individuals.
The development of new discourse communities – which is a constant
phenomenon in the ever changing socio-economic-technical context of the 21st century- can
serve positive ends, but discourse communities create risks as well. To be trapped within
the discourse of a particular community is to put at risk the ability to communicate across
discourses.
Membership to a single discourse community can impair the habit of critique and
has been a permanent threat to the flexible teachers of ESP.
2. Historical Background of the Concept
Since 1982, ESP has continued to develop and has taken over more and more
specific domains.
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It was outstanding linguists who helped encourage interest in ESP at a time when
much that it stood for went against the prevailing “fashions” in linguistics and language
learning theory.
At a time when the major linguistic paradigm was an idealized linguistic
competence (Chomsky, 1965), Swales was concerned with language use in social contexts,
and, at a time when research focuses on language learning, psycholinguistic issues, and
acquisition theory, Swales seems to never have lost faith in teachers and actual needs-based
teaching.
For the purposes of this article it is imperative to discuss his position with respect
to ESP materials and methods as his is, to this very day, the most pertinent approach and
standpoint regarding this issue..
3. Approach to Teaching in ESP Contexts / DC
The major part of Swales’ writing, his English language textbooks , his collections
of papers and articles, books on applied linguistics or editorials, have all been directed at
the better teaching of English for Specific Purposes, particularly of English for Academic
Purposes.
In them, Swales does not present his views on ESP as an easy set of rules on how
to teach ESP, but they are there to be found in complex arguments relating to other people’s
work in both Episodes in ESP (henceforth Episodes) and Genre Analysis.
It is in Episodes that he traces, by discussion of a collection of articles arranged
chronologically, the historical development of ESP from language courses in which
students practised English sentence grammar based on quantitative linguistic analysis of
specialized texts to courses where they engaged in “purposeful activities” related directly to
the communicative events of their target specialist communities.
A successful ESP course will prepare each student for the variety of social roles
he/she needs throughout his professional life.
4. ESP Teacher and Materials Design
4.1.General Considerations
For the ESP teacher, a valuable insight was the emphasis given to the international
character of many discourse communities, large and small. This changed the ultimate
objective of the language learner from the language of the “ideal native speaker” (striving
to achieve near-native communicative competence) to the language needed to become part
of the discourse community, even if only as a novice member.
This raised the status of non- native speakers, both as communicators and as
teachers, and encouraged students to comprehend the ways in which specialist fields are not
just international but also anti-national, in that most of them depend for their existence on
communities that cut across political or geographical boundaries.
All the above have had a direct impact on the very practical task in ESP of
designing courses and syllabuses. Course and syllabus designers in ESP are aware of the
fact that international students who wish to fully’ participate in the life of their discourse
communities need linguistic access to more than one community. Students of medicine
need to communicate in speech and writing with the academic medical community in all its
complexity, and if they are to practise in an English speaking country, they will also need to
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learn how to communicate with patients, and, if they are to have a social life, they will need
some of the language of the immediate speech community as well.
Students specialising in Business Administration , Hotel Management, Tourism,
Finances etc also need to be speakers of EGP or GE ( English for General Purposes or
General English) but they should, first and foremost, be able to elate to their professional
peers through their good grasp of domain-oriented ESP. Pedagogically, a solid
understanding of basic EGP should precede higher-level instruction in ESP if ESP
programs are to yield satisfactory results. English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is research
and instruction that builds on EGP.
When designing ESP curricula and/or designing materials, the discourse
community identification is of great help to the course designer, who can identify speakers
and the means of communication within the relevant communities, study the texts and
structures of discourse and use the findings to construct teaching materials and tasks.
4.2. Swales’ Perspective – The Current Norm
Swales illustrates developments in classroom practice, and by the selection of
readings which present different positions on the nature of the language to be taught in the
ESP classroom, he emphasizes controversies in the field that will be with us for many years
yet. These controversies, concerning how far students need to be exposed to samples of
original, authentic subject-related discourse, and how far teachers need to appreciate,
explain and describe the features of subject specific materials, are represented.
Among his examples we do find, Allen and Widdowson (1974), who argue for the
use of constructed texts, written by textbook authors, which are especially composed rather
than derived from existing texts to “avoid syntactic complexity”. At the other end, is the
argument of Phillips and Shettlesworth (1978), who make a clear stand for the use of
authentic resource materials, with attention being paid to the difficulty of the classroom
tasks rather than the difficulty of texts.
Swales, who for the purposes of this article has been taken as the “mediator”,
pragmatically ends the controversies by putting them down to different teaching
experiences or different teaching styles
In discussing different approaches to ESP, he writes of preferred teaching styles:
“temperamentally, some teachers put a higher value on methodology than they do on
information about the use of language, and others the opposite; and this phenomenon may
be related to whether particular holders of ESP positions are at heart language teachers or
linguists”, he concludes.
Although Swales agrees that there are many ways to approach the curriculum and
teaching of ESP, we witness his growing personal commitment to a genre-based approach,
one which differs from traditional register or text analysis in “the importance attached to
communicative purposes within a communicative setting”.
In Genre Analysis, we notice a much firmer commitment by Swales to the use of
authentic texts in the classroom, but what matters, he makes clear, is not simply the way in
which the texts are selected, but also the ways in which the texts are interpreted. The
pedagogical texts need to be appropriate to the learners’ target situations in terms of genre
and the linguistic realization of genre, and, equally importantly, the tasks the learners are
engaged in, require a recognition of the communicative purpose of the text and the intrinsic
rhetorical features of the communicative event.
ESP classrooms worldwide fall into the trap of using appropriate texts in
inappropriate ways. Reading classes too often focus on the factual interpretation of the text
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at the expense of such matters as the interpretation of the writer’s rhetorical function,
personal attitude or critical stance.
ESP materials such as texts and exercises are very important and need to be
accurately adjusted to the discourse community’s professional needs. As Mary J.
Schleppegrell points out in her treatise on ESP program design, when selecting texts
(spoken or written), it is necessary to identify the language skills that are needed by the
learner to perform the task, and that are reflected in the text.
Hutchinson and Warters also claim that both the ESP learning situation and the
target situation will influence the nature of the syllabus, material, methodology and
evaluation procedures and that the course design needs to have built-in feedback channels
to enable the course to respond to changes in the students' needs .
There are several kinds of ESP textbooks available to students, such books as
English for Careers (Career English), Instrumental English, Professional English and
Special English published in England and the United States – they do not always meet the
particular need of a country’s students - but in most countries there have been attempts at
locally designed ESP course books which enjoy great success.
There is ample discussion on the nature of a pedagogical task included in the
course design, an issue which has given rise to much debate within the materials writers’
community. When debating upon tasks, Swales draws on definitions and discussion by
Crookes (1986: p. 32), Candlin (1987: p. lo), Breen (1987: p. 23) and Hutchinson and
Waters (1987: p. 109), to come up with his own suggestion which actually form a
characteristic statement about his approach to ESP:
An ESP task, Swales claims, is one of a set of differentiated, sequence-able, goaldirected activities drawing upon a range of cognitive and communicative procedures .
In his definition of a task, Swales introduces three specifically ESP factors: a) the
fact that the activities are goal directed; b) the requirement that the activities are related to
the acquisition of genre skills; and c) that they are appropriate to a foreseen or emerging
socio-rhetorical situation. This definition incorporates, in methodological terms, the
essential differentiating element of the ESP course: target needs analysis.
Problems do arise in devising such tasks, without a proper understanding of the
target community of discourse, without a study of the communicative events in which the
community engages and of the goals of these events, and without a knowledge of the ways
in which the goals are realised.
In their endeavour at materials writing ESP teachers can start with texts, tasks or
with the exploration of the discourse community, or even approach all simultaneously. The
ESP language teacher and materials writer needs to be able to grasp the conceptual
structure of a subject his students are studying if he is to understand properly how language
is used to represent that structure.
5. Teachers’ Handbook to ESP Curriculum Design
Upon embarking on ESP curriculum design it is imperative to follow the following
steps:
5.1.1. Needs Analysis
ESP is driven by the specific learning needs of the language learner. The first step
for ESP curriculum reform is research to identify the specific learning needs of the students,
for these will influence the decisions you make about the ESP program.
5.1.2. Establishing learning targets
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Answers to the fundamental questions regarding the place where the students shall
use the language , in what situations, for what purposes and what skills are required for
them to do it properly. Clear objectives make program design much easier.
5.1.3 Establishing entry levels
Identifying the language targets toward which students must aim may comprise the
largest percent of needs analysis, but it does not comprise it all. We must also discover
where our students currently stand and how much distance lies between them and the target
before we can begin to determine where instruction is necessary.
5. 2 Program Design
Program design is guided by three parameters:
1)
target learning goals, 2) entry-level language competence, and 3)
available resources for education. These three elements shape the design of ESP.
Though curriculum designs and their development will inevitably vary from
context to context, the following seems like a universal formula:
5.3. Content selection
The following steps will aid you in content selection.
5.3.1. Identify the following in the target language: essential vocabulary, essential
grammar , essential spoken scripts , essential extra-linguistic features
5.3.2. Determine which elements your students don't know.
5.3.3. Consider your resources: time available for instruction , faculty size and
qualifications, facilities and equipment, budget , other relevant, university-specific matters
5.3.4. Determine how much of the content material can be reasonably taught given
student entry-levels, the quantity of teaching material and available time.
5.4. Content Division
Phase 1: Transition and Review; Phase 2: Listening/Speaking Instruction &
Reading/Writing Instruction; and Phase 3: Integrated Applications.
The first phase provides transition to university-level education and review in the
basics. It assists students in the transition from the educational style and material
accustomed to in high schools to that appropriate for learning in university.
The second phase in this system offers students specific ESP-targeted instruction.
One part focuses on mastering spoken ESP discourse, and the other on written ESP
discourse.
These two groupings in the second phase form the bulk of the tertiary system ESP
program and may be divided into several different courses, arranged in increasing levels of
difficulty.
The third and final phase in this system is devoted to integrated applications. It
implies integration of the four language skills in realistic or genuine target situations.
5.5 Content delivery
The nature of the content, the staff and facilities available, and the nature of your
students’ needs will guide this decisions. A self-study program where students can learn
some parts of the material at their own pace via CDs is recommended. Lectures with group
work or class discussion should be alternated.
5.6 Materials development
This is undoubtedly one of the most time consuming parts. A small number of
materials sold in bookstores fit the specific needs identified in a needs analysis. ESP
textbooks, for example, must appeal to consumers in a wide variety of contexts..
Consequently, the best course of action is to find as much prepared material as possible that
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genuinely meets your students' needs, and then supplement it with material of one’s own
design
5.7.Implementation, Assessment and Adjustment
Plans are implemented, student progress measured, educational effectiveness
assessed, and the program improved subsequently.
Conclusion
All the above are an attempt at introducing professionals to ESP , the concept of
Discourse Community and some initial considerations for when embarking upon the
cumbersome and quite tricky endeavour at designing curricula and materials for the
teaching of ESP. There will certainly continue to be developments in all these areas, and
there will always be something new in ESP. The tremendous sped at which our everyday
life evolved triggers about countless change in all domains of expertise; hence, the
permanent necessity to improve and update existing materials and keep abreast with all the
new perspectives in ESP.
Possibly the biggest need at the moment is research and experiment in the field of
validation - the search for a means of evaluating the large number of recent ESP works in
terms of their performance objectives, and not academic criteria.
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