Listening

Year

1970

Skill-based courses at the end of the 70s intended to address the learners’ specifi foreign language needs; to do so, needs analyses had to be carried out. The movement believed that teaching how language works was not enough; and so did needs analyses (Maleki, 2008).

1987

During the 1960’s, changes in the world’s markets resulted in the rising of ESP as a discipline. According to Hutchinson and Waters (1987), ESP emerged due to the development of the world’s economy, which entailed the progress of technology, the economic power of oil-rich countries, and the increasing amount of overseas students in English-speaking countries

1987

The decades of 1970’s and 1980’s saw the consolidation of the ESP movement. Numerous articles on the fild were published, such as Munby’s model for needs analysis and Hutchinson and Waters’ inflential papers. The latter two authors questioned many ESP long-held ideas and believed that ESP students should be led towards developing the “underlying competence” (1987) to eventually become independent learners. Closely related to this concept, Hutchinson and Waters outlined the concept of learner-centered approach, which focuses on the process of learning, emphasizes the exploitation of the learner’s already possessed skills (acquired at work or through academic study), and takes into account students’ different learning styles (Dudley-Evans & St. John, 1987).

ESP has existed as a separate branch of language teaching for around 40 years. At the beginning, it focused upon the specific lexicon of technical and scientific texts, but it soon changed its emphasis towards the rhetorical uses of language in precise discourses. Next, the four skills, which were neglected by all previous methods, were assessed and addressed through the introduction of needs analysis studies. Finally, Hutchinson and Waters (1987) polished the concept of ESP and established the importance of teaching students the skills and language that they need to achieve their desired language performance.

1991

According to Johns and Dudley Evans (1991), the international community recognized the importance of learning English not only as a means to achieve the transmission of knowledge and communication but also as a neutral language to be used in international communication

The decades of the 70s and 80s were also witness to controversy in ESP. The analysis of ESP resulted in two main views: that of “the wideangle approach,” which advocated for the teaching of English through topics beyond students’ specialist areas, and the “narrow-approach,” which claimed that the focus of the language studies should be on the students’ specific area of development.

2000

The concept of rhetorical moves is also highly salient in ESP. The moves contribute to constituting a genre and serve a communicative purpose subordinate to the overall communicative purpose of the text. In traditional genre analysis, a text’s moves or “functional components” (Connor, 2000) are used for some identifiable rhetorical purpose that is clearly different from other parts of the text.

2001

Rhetorical and discourse analysis attempted to answer these questions and in doing so, as Dudley-Evans (2001) commented, “introduced the idea of relating language form to language use, making use the main criterion for the selection of ESP teaching materials”.

2002

During the last twenty years the ESP fild has increased dramatically. Hewings (2002), co-editor of the journal English for Specifi Purposes, analyzed the issues of this journal for the last twenty years and came up with some interesting conclusions in his article “A History of ESP Through ‘English for Specifi Purposes.’” First, the increased number of studies conducted outside the U.S. and U.K., such as Central and South America, China and Hong Kong, demonstrates the growing acceptance of ESP as an academic discipline –a conclusion also drawn by Johns and explained below. A second interesting conclusion explained in his article is the specifiity towards which ESP, which includes EAP and EOP, is headed. Thirdly, the topics observed seem to have become more EOP oriented and apparently, they have obviated more general program descriptions. The current trend, according to Hewings, is text or discourse analysis.

2003

The first boost of ESP came from the register analysis of scientifi and technical writing. Logically, the movement gave special importance to semi- or subtechnical vocabulary. Smoak (2003) describes the instructors’ believed job as “to teach the technical vocabulary of a given fild or profession.While this detailed study of language in specifi registers demonstrated a very positive, early interest in functional lexis, it showed an extreme concentration on form and offered little explanation about why and how the sentences were formed and combined as they were.

2008

This new movement in ESP prioritized the rhetorical functions of language over its form since, as Maleki (2008) clearly explained, discourse analysis “focused on the communicative values of discourse rather than the lexical and grammatical properties of register” (ESP Background, para. 4) and reinforced the area’s emphasis on research and analysis of texts.

2013

Johns (2013) described through a series of sample research papers the shift of emphasis of ESP during this period, going from statistical grammar accounts to a deeper interest in the relation between grammar and rhetoric. However, the discourse analysis of ESP was primarily concerned with language and gave no attention to the development of study skills.

According to Johns (2013), a study carried out by Tarone et al in 1981 not only maintained the rhetorical-grammar relationship but also introduced the concept of using the area specialist as a content expert consultant. From that moment on, “subject-specialist informants” were more commonly involved as part of ESP research. Content and skill specificity, material design, and the instructor as an expert were topics of debate during the 70s and 80s.

2013

Paltridge (2013) affims that today’s defnition of genre is based on Swales’: “a class of communicative events with some shared set of communicative purposes”. Delimiting what a discourse community’s genre is “establish[es] the constraints on what is generally acceptable in terms of how the text should be written or spoken, what issues it will address, and how it can do this” (Paltridge, 2013). Identifying an aimed genre may help ESP students reproduce it and participate in it successfully by imitating conventions and limitations of the text.