Report from Disscusion English for Specific Purpose

Section I What is ESP?
1. The origins of ESP
a. The demands of a Brave New World
The Second World War in 1945 heralded an age of enormous and unprecedented expansion in scientific, technical and economic activity on international scale. For various reasons, most notably the economic power of the United State in the post-war world, this role fell to English. Firstly everyone learn English just for commerce begin from Oil Crises of the early 1970s.
b. A revolution in linguistic
The view gained ground that the English needed by a particular group of learners could be identified by analyzing the linguistic characteristics of their specialist area of work or study. ‘Tell me what you need English for and I will tell you the English that you need’ became the guiding principle of ESP.
c. Focus on the learner
Around the time the purposes of learning English become chance to education.
The growth of ESP, then, was brought about by a combination of three important factors:
1) The expansion of demand for English to suit particular needs;
2) Developments in the fields of linguistics;
3) Educational psychology.

2. The development of ESP
It should be pointed out first of all that ESP is not a monolithic universal phenomenon. ESP has developed at different speeds in different countries, and exemplas of all the approaches we shall describe can be found operating somewhere in the world at the present time.

a. The concept of special language: register analysis
In fact, as Ewer and Latorre’s syllabus shows, register analysis revealed that there was very little that was distinctive in the sentence grammar of Scientific English beyond a tendency to favour particular forms such as the present tense, the passive voice, and nominal compounds.
Register analysis as a research procedure was rapidly overtaken by development in the world of linguistics and sentence grammar.
b. Beyond the sentence: rhetorical or discourse analysis
The second phase of development shifted attention to the level above the sentence, as ESP became closely involved with the emerging field of discourse or rhetorical analysis. In this part the attention shifted to understanding how sentences were combined in discourse to produce meaning. The concern of research, therefore, was to identify the organizational patterns are signaled.
c. Target situation analysis
The ESP course design process should proceed by first identifying the target situation and than carrying out a rigorous analysis of the linguistic features of that situation. The identified features will form the syllabus of the ESP course.
d. Skills and strategies
In terms of materials this approach generally puts the emphasis on reading or listening strategies. The characteristic exercises get the learners to reflect on and analyse how meaning is produced in and retrieved from written or spoken discourse. Taking their cue from cognitive learning theories, the language learners are treated as thinking beings who can be asked to observe and verbalize the interpretive processes they employ in language use.
e. A learning-centered approach
The importance and the implications of the distinction that we have made between language use and language learning will hopefully become clear as we proceed through the following chapter.
3. ESP: approach not product
In this section we should know what is ESP, to answer the question rather by showing hat ESP isn’t.
1. ESP is not a matter of teaching ‘specialized varieties’ of English.
2. ESP is not just a matter of Science words and grammar for Scientist, Hotel words and grammar for Hotel staff and so on.
3. ESP is not different in kind from any other form language teaching, in that it is should be based in the first instance on principle of effective and efficient learning.
ESP must be seen as an approach not as a product, ESP is not a particular kind of language to methodology, nor does it consist of a particular type of teaching material. Understood properly, it is an approach to language learning, which is based on learner need.