The Future of ESP Studies: Building On Success, Exploring New Paths, Avoiding Pitfalls
The Future of ESP Studies: Building On Success, Exploring New Paths, Avoiding Pitfalls
The Future of ESP Studies: Building On Success, Exploring New Paths, Avoiding Pitfalls
la revue du GERAS
66 | 2014
Intersections - l'anglais de spécialité, creuset
multidomaine
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/asp/4616
DOI: 10.4000/asp.4616
ISSN: 2108-6354
Publisher
Groupe d'étude et de recherche en anglais de spécialité
Printed version
Date of publication: 1 November 2014
Number of pages: 137-150
ISSN: 1246-8185
Electronic reference
Christopher Williams, « The future of ESP studies: building on success, exploring new paths, avoiding
pitfalls », ASp [Online], 66 | 2014, Online since 01 November 2015, connection on 02 November 2020.
URL : http://journals.openedition.org/asp/4616 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/asp.4616
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• needs assessment
• curriculum development and evaluation
• materials preparation
• discourse analysis
• descriptions of specialized varieties of English
• teaching and testing techniques
• the effectiveness of various approaches to language learning and language teaching
• the training or retraining of teachers for the teaching of ESP.
14 Seven out of nine topics may be defined as learner-centred, the two exceptions being
“discourse analysis” and “description of specialized varieties of English” which may or
may not be primarily concerned with teaching ESP. Indeed, as Isani observes, there is a
consolidated tradition of ESP studies carried out by
researchers who view ESP in its broader perspective of specialized language,
discourse and culture or who, like Bhatia (2004) have moved away from pedagogic
applications towards the analysis of specialized varieties of English as objects of
study per se. (2013: 192–193)
15 This also applies to EAP where legions of scholars have been involved in recent years in
pinpointing, for example, the features which distinguish one subgenre of research
article from another, often as an intellectual pursuit rather than with a pedagogical
objective in mind.
16 In my opinion, this dual nature of ESP studies deserves to be foregrounded more
explicitly than perhaps it has been to date. The major strand in ESP is learner-centred,
but there is also a robust minor strand in ESP that is concerned with analysing the
features that characterize the myriad of subfields that constitute ESP today without
necessarily being preoccupied about whether this will be beneficial to the way non-
native speakers learn English.
17 I shall now briefly examine a number of ways in which the field of ESP may profitably
develop in the future.
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33 And yet, according to Prior (2013: 520), “multimodality seems to have remained a
somewhat peripheral area of ESP research [...] the dominant research questions
continue to be questions of language forms in monomodal frames.”
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Conclusion
38 I have briefly outlined above my perspective on the rapidly-changing scenario of ESP
studies, with a few suggestions as to which aspects may become the fruitful foci of
interest for future research. Despite the prolonged economic crisis affecting most parts
of the globe, the momentum of globalization bringing in its wake the consolidation of
the phenomenon of English as a lingua franca and the spread of what is commonly
known as “international English” continues apace. Hence the unabated expansion of
English for Specific Purposes not only in terms of the number of students worldwide
wishing to learn specialized English of a technical nature but also in terms of research
into ESP. Notwithstanding its relatively young existence as a discipline, ESP research
has already reached an appreciable level of maturity, but there is clearly scope for new
approaches and insights which will help to improve our knowledge of ESP not only as
an inexhaustibly rich field of research but also in terms of how best to teach the subject
to the growing millions of non-native speakers requiring tuition in ESP.
39 And while it is undeniable that research in ESP has made great strides over the last few
decades, there is always the danger of resting on one’s laurels and of not taking full
advantage of the potential of this rapidly growing area of research in which there has
been an exponential growth in the number of researchers involved in ESP as well as the
number of journals devoted to ESP. I would therefore argue that any new work in the
field should be truly innovative, focusing on aspects that stretch or question the
boundaries of ESP. It is no longer sufficient (if ever it was) to take a corpus of texts on
some aspect of specialized discourse and simply see what “turns up”. ESP researchers
should ideally start with a hypothesis and then investigate the validity of that
hypothesis. In the increasingly competitive world of academia where researchers are
obliged to “publish or perish”, the gatekeepers of ESP studies need to ensure that only
high quality work is accepted by rigorous peer reviewing.
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APPENDIXES
1. Journals devoted to ESP (the country, academic affiliation or publisher, where
known, is provided in brackets)
English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier)
The Asian ESP Journal
College ESP Journal (China)
ESP World (Russia/Asia)
ESP Today: Journal of English for Specific Purposes at Tertiary Level (Belgrade, Serbia)
Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes (Nis University, Serbia)
ARTESOL English for Specific Purposes Interest Section (Argentina)
Taiwan International ESP Journal (Taiwan ESP Association)
ESPecialist (Brazil)
ASp (France)
ESP Across Cultures (Italy)
2. Journals devoted to Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) in general
Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice (Equinox Publishing)
Ibérica (Universidad de Cadiz, Spain)
LSP Journal – Language for special purposes, professional communication, knowledge
management and cognition (Copenhagen, Denmark)
Revista de Lenguas para fines específicos (Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria,
Spain)
Scripta Manent, the journal of the Slovene Association of LSP Teachers (Ljubljana,
Slovenia)
3. Journals devoted to specific subfields of LSP
International Journal of Legal English (China University of Political Science and Law)
International Journal of Law, Language and Discourse (City University of Hong Kong)
Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Elsevier)
Journal of Academic Language and Learning (University of Queensland)
Journal of Academic Writing (University of Coventry)
The Journal of Medical English Education (Japan)
4. Journals devoted to CLIL
CLIL Magazine (The Netherlands)
International CLIL Research Journal (Finland)
Latin American Journal of Content and Language Integrated Learning (Columbia)
NOTES
1. The search was carried out on 16 March 2014.
2. See < http://www.journals.elsevier.com/english-for-specific-purposes> last accessed 20 May
2014.
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ABSTRACTS
In this paper I give a synopsis of the state of the art in ESP, briefly outlining the ways in which it
has developed and the role it plays today in academic research and in foreign language teaching.
I then suggest some of the ways in which ESP studies might evolve in the future, focusing in
particular on the following: the need for deeper engagement with non-linguistic fields of
knowledge (medicine, law, engineering, economics, etc.) and for more dialogue with
practitioners operating in such fields; the importance of studying and teaching popularized
forms of specialized discourse; exploring (and exploiting) further the phenomenon of
multimodality in relation to ESP studies; the potential of Content and Language Integrated
Learning (CLIL/EMILE) as a tool for research and for language teaching methodology in the field
of ESP; the need to ensure that future ESP studies focus on what is genuinely innovative,
relevant, and interesting to teachers and practitioners. This very succinct overview of ESP
studies past, present and future is aimed in particular at scholars who may be approaching ESP
for the first time or whose knowledge of ESP may be relatively limited.
L’auteur fournit dans cet article un résumé de l’état de l’art en anglais de spécialité (ASP) ; il
souligne la façon dont l’ASP s’est développé et le rôle qu’il joue actuellement au sein de la
recherche universitaire et de l’enseignement d’une langue étrangère. Il propose ensuite des voies
sur lesquelles l’ASP peut évoluer dans le futur et il se penche en particulier sur les pistes
suivantes : la nécessité d’une implication plus profonde dans des domaines non linguistiques
(médecine, droit, ingénierie, économie, etc.) et de plus de dialogue avec les praticiens de ces
domaines ; l’importance de l’étude des formes de vulgarisation du discours spécialisé et de leur
enseignement ; l’exploration (et l’exploitation) du phénomène de la multimodalité en lien avec
les études en ASP ; le potentiel de l’enseignement d’une matière par l’intégration d’une langue
étrangère (EMILE/CLIL) ; la nécessité de veiller à ce que les études en ASP se penchent sur ce qui
est à la fois innovant, pertinent et intéressant pour les enseignants et les praticiens. Cette brève
présentation des études en ASP passées, présentes et futures est destinée en particulier aux
chercheurs en ASP novices ou à ceux dont les connaissances en ASP sont réduites.
INDEX
Mots-clés: anglais de spécialité, EMILE, innovation, interdisciplinarité, multimodalité,
vulgarisation
Keywords: CLIL, ESP, innovation, interdisciplinarity, multimodality, popularization
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AUTHOR
CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
Christopher Williams is full professor of English at the Department of Law of the University of
Foggia, Italy. His main research interest in recent years has been in legal English with
publications that have appeared in The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change
with Corpora (Cambridge University Press 2013) and Canadian Journal of Linguistics (2013). Besides
co-editing with Maurizio Gotti Legal Discourse across Languages and Cultures (Peter Lang 2010), he
has also co-edited with Ilse Depraetere the special issue of English Language & Linguistics (2010) on
“Future Time Reference in English”. He is Chief Editor of the journal ESP Across Cultures and Head
of the Language Centre of the University of Foggia. [email protected]
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