Chapter 2 The Development of Esp

CHAPTER 2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ESP
1. Register Analysis
In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a
particular purpose or in a particular social setting. Register analysis
is an analysis of grammatical and lexical features of the language
used for particular purpose or in particular social setting. This
concept comes from the principle of ESP that English of a specific
science differs from each other in terms of its grammatical and
lexical features of the registers. By register analysis, the lecturer or
teacher can produce a syllabus which gave high priority to the
language forms students would meet in their Science studies and in
turn would give low priority to forms they would not meet. Ewer
and Hughes-Davies (1971), for example, compared the language of
the texts their Science students had to read with the language of
some widely used school textbooks. They found that the school
textbooks neglected some of the language forms commonly found in
Science texts, for example, compound nouns, passives, conditionals,
anomalous finites, (i.e. modal verb). Their conclusion was that the
ESP course should, therefore, give precedence to these forms.
2. Rhetorical/ Discourse Analysis
In this stage, 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. It focuses
to understand how sentence were combined in discourse to produce
meaning. The concern of research, therefore, was to identify the
organizational patterns in texts and to specify the linguistic means
by which these patterns are signaled. These patterns would then
form the syllabus of the ESP course. Stages of ESP development:
1. First stage focused on language at the sentence level.
2. Second phase shifted attention the level above the sentence
(putting into play discourse or rhetorical analysis).
As in stage 1 there was a more or less tacit assumption in this
approach that the rhetorical patterns of text organization differed
significantly between specialist areas of use: the rhetorical structure
of science text was regarded as different from that of commercial
texts. The typical teaching materials based on the discourse
approach taught students to recognize textual patterns and discourse
markers mainly by means of text-diagramming exercises.
If we take this simple sentence: “I don’t have enough money”and
we put it into two different dialogues, we can see how the meaning
changes.
Do you want a cup of milk?
I don’t have enough money
Have you get lunch?

I don’t have enough money
3. Target situation analysis
According to Hutchinson and Waters (1987), target situation
analysis was aimed to take student’s existing knowledge and setting
it on a more scientific basis by establishing procedures for relating
language analysis more closely to learners’ reasons for learning. In
ESP course, there will be a process of knowing students’ purpose to
learn English known as need analysis or target situation analysis.
Target situation analysis will lead the teacher to form a
syllabus. John Munby in Communicative Syllabus Desig , produces
a detailed profile of the learners’ need in term of communication
purposes, communicative setting, the means of communication,
language skills, functions, structures, etc.
4. Skill and Strategies
In this stage, we concern to the two thing, thinking
process underlie language use and focus on underlying interpretative
strategies. Some experts have made significant contributions to
work on reading skill to describe about this process where the
medium of instruction is the mother tongue but students need read a
number of specialist texts which are available only in English.
The principal idea behind the skill centered approach is that
underlying all language use there are common reasoning and
interpreting processes, which, regardless of the surface forms,
enable us to extract meaning from discourse.
The focus should rather be on the underlying interpretative
strategies, which enable the learners to cope with the surface forms,
for example guessing the meaning of words from context, using
visual layout to determine the type of the text, exploiting cognates,
(i.e. words which are similar in the mother tongue and the target
language), etc. A focus on specific subject registers is unnecessary
in this approach, because the underlying processes are not specific
subject to any subject register.
5. A Learning-Centred Approach
ESP concern with language learning rather than language use.
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 chapters. There
are some main points that to be main focus in this stage:
· This is anyhow not the main concern of ESP since describing and
exemplifying what people do with language will not automatically
enable someone to learn it.
· Therefore, a valid approach to ESP must be based on an
understanding of the processes of the language learning.

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CHAPTER 2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ESP

Have you get lunch?

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