Diane Belcher
Georgia StateUniversity
Atlanta,GA,USA
Abstract
This presentation will provide an overview of
state-of-the-art ESP theory and practice. How
genre theory, corpus linguistics, and other recent
developments are helping meet the challenges of
developing needs-informed, needs-responsive,
and needs-knowledgeable ELT pedagogy and
educators will be discussed.
Three readings: Which would you use?
What I won’t discuss today:
Language for General Purposes (all-purpose or nopurpose language instruction)
• General (language for no purpose) courses at any proficiency
level
• almost always teach too much
• and too little
“Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, it is more
defensible to view every course as involving specific
purposes.…” (Long, 2005, p. 19)
English (language) for specific purposes:
Dynamic, diverse, and global
•Definition: ESP—a language teaching
approach that assumes
•Learning needs are unique to specific learners
in specific contexts
•Instruction should meet those specific needs
•but should be critically pragmatic as well
•Whose needs? Whose rights?
• New York:
“I
must admit, I would like to learn to say more than: ‘I have
diced the onions,’ and ‘Did he want scrambled or overeasy?’ said a disconsolate Reyes, speaking through a
translator, following his first lesson.
in Belcher, 2004)
(Siegal, 2002, p. 206, cited
•ESP = Learner-centeredness
Critical pragmatism
vs. cultural accommodation
• Critical pragmatism:
(Pennycook, 1997, p. 267)
Critical Pragmatic EAP
(Benesch,
2001, p. xvii).” (Harwood & Hadley, 2004)
Scope of ESP
• EAP
• EOP
educational
(medical),
EEP (engineering)
(business),
• EAOP
academic engineering purposes)
• ESCP (sociocultural):
(legal),
(English for
(Belcher, 2004, 2009; Morgan & Fleming, 2009)
Essential components of ESP
1. Needs assessment
2. Needs-responsive instructional
materials and methods
3. Needs-knowledgeable instructors
Basic challenges of essential ESP
components
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
How to obtain realistic, accurate assessment of learner
needs:
Identify present and target needs of specific learners in school, at work, in
life:
ESP professionals never assume they know what all language
learners need.
How to develop instructional materials and teaching
methods to meet identified needs:
General language teaching methods are not assumed to be
effective for specific learners.
How to develop specific expertise, specialist
knowledge needed by instructors:
Previous training is not assumed adequate for ESP.
Specific challenges of needs
assessment: Determining target needs
What do those in the target discourse community,
e.g., electrical engineers, computer scientists, do?
What do they routinely write, read, say,
comprehend as listeners? I.e., what are their
common literacy and oracy practices?
Determining discourse practices of
discourse community members
•In the past: opportunistic data collection
• ESP professionals obtained what was available, e.g.,
published texts
•Analysis: looking for & manually counting patterns
• Usually lexicogrammatical, in sample documents,
sometimes with input from specialists in field
•Thus, decontextualized bottom-up register analysis
• Vocabulary and sentence-level grammar
(top down and bottom up
discourse analysis in context)
Genre theory
Genre = socially agreed upon ways of meeting
communicative goals, e.g., business letters,
scientific research articles, engineering design
reports (Belcher, 2004; 2006; 2009; Biber, Connor, &
Upton, 2007; Hyland, 2004)
Interested in macro and micro levels of genres:
• macro-structure, rhetorical organization, or discourse “moves”
(Swales, 1990)
• micro-level features: lexical and syntactic levels (Flowerdew,
2005).
Micro analysis: Corpus linguistics—computer-assisted collection
& analysis of massive amounts of authentic language data
• Huge Corpora of everyday English
• British National Corpus, UK– 100 million words
• Bank of English / Wordbanks Online, UK & US, >500
million words
• Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), US,
>400 million words (continuously updated)
• Genres covered: spoken and written, popular magazines,
newspapers, fiction, academic (COCA only)
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/compare-boe.asp
Specialized corpora for specific genres:
• MICASE: http://micase.elicorpora.info/
• MICUSP: http://micusp.elicorpora.info/
• ELFA: http://www.helsinki.fi/englanti/elfa/elfacorpus.html
For more resources, see Nesi (2013)
Sample studies of engineering genres: (See Parkinson 2013 for
discussion of many of these studies)
Research article: Anthony (1999): Software engineering RA
introductions
Kanoksilapatham (2015) RA variations across 3 engineering fields
Thesis: Koutsantoni (2006): Engineering thesis vs. RA
Design report/presentations: Dannells (2009): Academic and workplaceoriented expectations of engineering faculty (also Marshall, 1991)
Academic engineering lecture: Olsen & Huckin (1990): Problem/solution
structure common
Workplace progress report: Artemeva (1998): Different goals of N. American
and Russian engineering companies: concrete solutions vs. scientific
research
Many engineering research articles, theses, etc now online, hence easy to access,
download, enter in DIY corpora)
Corpus-based genre research:
Realistic expectations
• Rozycki & Johnson (2013): Acceptance of English as a
Lingua Franca usage may be common in engineering
• Their study of “best papers” in IEEE
• Most IEEE reviewers and editors are ELF speakers
• “…NNSEs in the field of engineering have organically grown
a language that allows all language speakers to
communicate with success.”
•
present needs
Focus on learners themselves:
as individuals at certain proficiency levels,
with specific backgrounds,
with specific lacks and wants (objective and
subjective)
•standardized tests and specialized performance
tests
•surveys and interviews of learners, teachers,
supervisors, professionals who interact with learners
•ethnographic participant/observation
•learner corpora
• TOEFL, TOEIC, IELTS, etc.: Only general language
proficiency information
• See Douglas (2000) for language testing for specific
purposes guidelines
• Artemeva & Fox (2010): Engineering genre competence
assessment:
• Ability to identify textual features necessary but not
sufficient for writing engineering genres (Parkinson, 2013,
p. 162)
Survey of workplace communication genres:
Kassim & Ali (2010): Surveyed Malaysian engineers
Concluded: More attention needed for
engineering workplace oral communication, e.g.,
teleconferencing
(not
limited to predetermined questions)
• Kaewpet (2009)
employers, civil engineers,
civil engineering lecturers, ex-civil engineering students of
the technical English course, and ESP teachers.
Fig. 1 Triangulation of engineers’ survey questionnaires,
interviews, onsite observations, and customer interview.
Spence & Liu
Engineering English and the high-tech industry: A case study of an English
needs analysis of process integration engineers at a semiconductor
manufacturing company in Taiwan
English for Specific Purposes, Volume 32, Issue 2, 2013, 97 - 109
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2012.11.003
Jasso-Aguilar (2005): worked with hotel housekeeping staff
in Hawaii, observed
1. real demands of hotel interactions
2. difficulty meeting the demands
3. felt needs for more than “Aloha welcome” language
4. differences between staff wants, short and longterm, and hotel management goals (power differential)
Archer (2008): Give students ongoing opportunity
to reflect on own needs (wants, lacks, personal
goals) vis-à-vis target needs in discipline
“A [transformative] curriculum which draws on students’
experiences and discourses … provides an opportunity for students
to begin to interrogate their past situations as well as their
aspirations. They also start to think critically of engineering as a
profession within [their own local context].” (p. 264)
Learner corpus analysis
ESP: Materials-driven approach
Authentic materials come first
Methods follow
Almost always content-based
•Authentic materials taken out of context and
into the classroom no longer authentic?
(Widdowson, 1979).
But tasks derived from needs assessment
help simulate target situations
•Most:
Mid-range:
Least:
• Some designed by ESP professionals: empirical data, genre
analysis, authentic documents, tasks
EAP: Swales and Feak (2000, 2004) encourage learners
to be discourse ethnographers: gathering genre examples
from own fields
ESP
Glendinning & Glendinning
(1995) Oxford English for Electrical & Mechanical Engineering
(see also Ibbotson, 2008, Cambridge English for Engineering):
• Authentic reading and listening passages covering a wide range of topics, e.g.
materials, mechanisms, forces, safety at work, engineering design, automated
systems, robotics, hydraulics, process control, and CAD.
•T. Johns’ (1994; with King, 1991) data driven
materials, based on learner corpora
Definition:
Language pedagogy: focus on meaning, not abstract
language systems
Content: carrier of language instruction
Language: taught as means of learning content and doing
something with language
Latest version: CLIL (content and language-integrated
learning): Wolff (2009)
Two major content-based approaches:
broad and narrow
Broad gauged approach: often found in EAP, often for
first-year undergraduates
Corpus linguistics EAP research (Coxhead, 2013),
Coxhead & Nation’s (2001) core academic
vocabulary, supports broad approach:
2,000 basic high frequency words plus the
570 reasonably frequent word families of
Coxhead’s Academic Word List provide
90% coverage of most subject areas
Ward (2009) found 299 word types from General Service
list (2000 most frequent English words) plus Academic
Word List gave good coverage for 5 engineering areas,
words such as system, equation, flow (see Parkinson,
2013)
Sample Broad-gauged Method
•Use of literary texts popular in EAP
Hirvela (1990) used science fiction with science
majors at (see also Diaz-Santos, 2000)
Learners read texts about science,
not scientific texts
Advantages of this approach?
Narrow-gauged approach
•More often found in EOP
•Technical vocabulary crucial to
fluently reading and comprehending
disciplinary texts (Hyland & Tse, 2007)
Popular narrow-gauged teaching strategies:
Simulation & consciousness-raising
Simulation:
• PBL very common in engineering: “PBL enculturates students
into the activities of engineering by using group work, as
practicing engineers do, to solve design problems” (Parkinson,
2013, p. 163)
• Neville & Britt (2007): PBL in LSP (German as FL) for biological
engineering
“In addition to organizing the team that will research the feasibility of
• new dialysis membranes, your other short-term goals will be to put this
• research into a historical and physiological framework, evaluate
• potential resources in the development of these membranes, and report
• on experiment results. Your first design brief is expected in Bad
• Homburg in three weeks. In addition, you will be competing with other
• design teams for approval of limited company research and development
• resources.”
Consciousness-raising: Metacognitive and
metalinguistic awareness
Portfolio approach: for reading/writing, or
listening/speaking (see A. Johns, 1997)
Disciplinary portfolios: Hirvela (1997):
students collect authentic examples of genres; produce own
texts; analyze expert and own texts; reflect on portfolio
contents: identify standard practices, evaluate own efforts
E-disciplinary portfolios/DIY corpora Lee &
Swales (2006): students build expert corpus of downloaded
articles in own discipline; use software to analyze and
compare the 2 corpora (see also Charles 2012, 2013, on DIY
corpora)
3. Content-area knowledgeable
instructors
How to build teacher knowledge needed
for ESP:
New subject matter for language
instructors: May threaten sense of
expertise
Students may know much more about
subject matter
How much needs to be learned
about specialist area?
• Ferguson (1997): may be enough to know about an area,
rather than knowing the area itself: learning its values,
epistemological bases, preferred genres
• Dudley-Evans (1997): ESP teachers must learn how to learn
from and with students
• Robinson (1991): intellectual curiosity and respect for
learner knowledge most important
• Dual professionalism: degrees in 2 areas: specialist area and language
education, e.g., Natalia Artemeva; few people willing to commit to dual
expertise
Team teaching: language expert and subject specialist teach
together (Dudley-Evans, 1995)
Linked classes: language class students all take one subject area
course together; that subject matter becomes the content of the
language class (Johns, 1997)
Specialist informants: ESP instructors consult with subject
specialists while developing materials and curriculum for advice on
genres, sample texts, common tasks (Dudley-Evans & St. John, 1998)
• Specialist mentors: Subject specialists provide feedback on ESP (EAP)
student work to complement ESL instructor feedback (Cavusgil, 2007)
Specialist knowledge challenge cont’d
• Promoting learner autonomy
• DIY corpora (Lee & Swales, 2006; Charles 2012, 2013)
• Computer tutorials (Lo, Liu, & Wang, 2014)
• Collaborative digital projects (Hafner, 2014 Hafner &
Miller, 2011;)
Computer-based tutorials build genre knowledge, lexicogrammatical
repertoires, source documentation abilities—Lo, Liu, & Wang (2014)—
“a self-directed system for journal writing”
Architecture of EJP-Write user–system for journal paper writing with three modules (orange) and multiple databases (blue)
Student collaboration
• Collaborative digital storytelling
• Hafner & Miller (2011; Hafner, 2014) English for science
& technology
• Video science documentary course project for
English-language students in Hong Kong
• In groups
• Defined a research problem
• Read relevant research literature
• Re-enacted scripted versions for videos
http://www1.english.cityu.edu.hk/acadlit/index.
php?q=node/29
Challenges and Rewards of ESP
•The ESP approach requires
•Willingness
•to enter as outsider into new domains,
academic and occupational—to be challenged
•to learn from and with students (DudleyEvans, 1997)
•to prepare students for their future, not our
past (Hafner, 2014)
This makes ESP demanding
but also exciting and intellectually
satisfying
Thanks for listening!
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