Hyland, K. (1999).

English for Specific Purposes 19(3): 297-300

DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES: A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY

APPROACH

Tony Dudley-Evans and Maggie-Jo St John. Cambridge: CUP, 1998, 301 pp.

Reviewed by Ken Hyland

English for Specific Purposes is perhaps the most vibrant and innovative arena of language teaching and

research today, and this volume is an excellent introduction to many of its key aspects. The authors have

taken on a demanding task in trying to set out what is now an enormous body of knowledge, set of

practices, and gaggle of contested perspectives, but the book succeeds in providing a fair and

comprehensive overview of ESP as it is today. It is a practical guide, rather than a theoretical treatise, but

it highlights many of the central elements of the field and identifies the key issues of current relevance,

providing a useful resource for students taking courses in ESP and for teachers wishing to learn more

about this area of practice.

Tony Dudley-Evans and Maggie Jo St John are well known in the field for their practical,

classroom-oriented approach to ESP issues and for the accessible style with which they convey their

enthusiasm for their subject. This book is a good illustration of their typical approach, with a strong

emphasis on clarity and practicality. The book is written in a user-friendly style that will appeal to

students and other newcomers to the field. Each chapter begins with a statement of aims and concludes

with a summary and an annotated list of recommended reading. The chapters also include a useful range

of activities to orientate readers to the ideas discussed, encourage them to reflect on their own situation, or

to engage with the material directly through completing tasks, with feedback given at the back of the

book. The book also includes a helpful 30 pages of extracts of exercises from a range of textbooks. These

illustrate different approaches to exploiting skill development and language points, and serve as a source

of the reader tasks noted above.

The book contains eleven chapters and roughly divides into two main sections. In the first four

chapters the authors attempt to establish what ESP is and what it does, situating it within conceptual,
historical, academic, and professional contexts. The remaining chapters offer a comprehensive survey of

practical issues for the classroom teacher, ranging from needs assessment through skills and language

issues, to course design, materials development, and assessment.

For me the first section is in many ways the most interesting part of the book as here the authors

raise a number of issues central to the field, such as the part played by theory in ESP, the varied roles of

the practitioner, and the notion of specificity.

English for Specific Purposes is often regarded as a purely pragmatic enterprise, an atheoretical,

methodologically-driven set of practices concerned exclusively with practical outcomes. This, of course,

is nonsense, as Dudley-Evans and St John suggest. No pedagogic practice can operate independently of a

view of language, learners, and learning, and ESP has demonstrated a clear theoretical stance on these

issues through a longstanding commitment to linguistic analysis, contextual relevance, and the pedagogic

replication of community-specific communicative events. A development of the paradigm shift to

communicative language learning in the 1970s, ESP has helped mature and refine this concern by

drawing on the theoretical positions that have seemed most likely to offer the best advantages for practice.

These have principally been cross-cultural issues, social constructivism, and discourse analysis strongly

influenced by Systemic Functional Linguistics. By basing pedagogical decisions on these sources of

analyses it has constantly sought to interpret how some particular aspects of the real communicative

world works, and to translate these understandings into practical classroom applications.

In keeping with their practical orientation, Dudley-Evans and St John characterize ESP as a

distinctive methodological approach which emphasizes specific learner needs and a set of teaching

patterns that recognize the learner’s subject-matter expertise. This definition therefore also stresses both

the research-base of the field in terms of the need to identify the language features, skills, and genres of

the target groups to be taught, and the various roles required of the ESP practitioner in this endeavour.

Research has always played a strong part in ESP teaching and the teacher’s role as either a consumer of

this research, or as a user of its techniques of analyzing target events, texts, and contexts of use, cannot be

overemphasized. While they do not discuss what these research skills amount to, Dudley-Evans and St

John implicitly indicate the multi-faceted and complex nature of ‘needs’ by pointing to a key feature of

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ESP: the importance of raising both teachers’ and learners’ awareness of the rhetorical and social

practices of the disciplinary and professional communities in which they operate.

A more problematic feature of the discussion in this section however is the view taken towards

the notion of specificity. The chapters on English for Academic Purposes (chapter three) and English for

Business Purposes (chapters four) both distinguish between general and specific versions, with the former

concerned with generic skills or language that may be useful across a range of disciplines, professions, or

purposes. While such courses obviously exist, and may even be in demand, I am unsure if we should refer

to them as ESP. There is enough research emerging now to demonstrate that the ways different

communities go about their business of conducting tutorials, producing reports, evaluating essays, and so

on, vary considerably. The specification of any ‘common core’ may, in fact, be more elusive than we

think (eg. Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Blyler & Thralls, 1993; Candlin & Hyland, 1999).

The literate activities which we, as ESP practitioners, seek to identify and teach are situated in a

variety of cognitive, social, and cultural contexts such that the language and activities which occur are

indexically connected to the particular purposes and understandings of community members. We

obviously can, and often do, refer to textbooks, memos, or oral presentations as overarching genres, and

to skimming, scanning, or writing letters as universal academic or professional skills. But it is only when

we situate these genres and activities by referring to specific pragmatic contexts that they cease to be

displays of linguistic code or social behaviour and take on significance as discourse and as literate

practices. In other words, we may want to reserve the term ESP to refer to the ways we help students

discover how certain valued text forms and practices are socially constructed in response to the common

communicative purposes of particular social groups. This is what Ann Johns (1997) calls a ‘socioliterate’

approach to teaching, where we see the practices of ESP as raising students’ consciousness of the

connections between forms, purposes, and participant roles in specific social contexts.

The second part of the book turns to essentially pedagogic issues. Here the authors provide a

valuable overview of methods, materials and other practicalities of ESP teaching, offering a good

introduction to the major topics and some sensitive and sensible suggestions on classroom procedures and

practices. There is useful advice, for example, on how to set up cooperative teaching projects with client

disciplines, on producing and modifying materials, and on writing tests. The chapter on language issues

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will perhaps be somewhat disappointing for those interested in how the social practices of the professions

can be interpreted through grammatical, lexical, and discoursal choices. The ‘key forms’ are largely

presented as a series of ad hoc features, considered important because of their relative frequency rather

than as particular community-specific ways of accomplishing distinct purposes or reconstruing

experience, and I feel an opportunity has been missed here to outline a coherent semiotic framework (eg.

Martin & Veel, 1998). However, the chapters on materials production, skills development, classroom

practices, and assessment are well written, contain useful material, and will be extremely helpful to

teachers.

A major strength of this book is its careful integration of general theoretical issues and practical

application. Although the authors raise many important points, they refuse to let the text get bogged down

in controversy, dogma, or too much detail, preferring to provide readers with a broad vista of the field and

allowing them to reflect and follow up on aspects that interest them. For students this offers a refreshingly

straightforward account of important issues, developments, and practices in ESP. For teachers, the case

studies, sample published materials, and recommended readings, supplement the text and point outwards

to a variety of sources, encouraging alternative approaches and new ideas. While some readers may have

liked more in-depth discussion on certain topics, the scope of the work is extremely wide ranging and

there is plenty here both for the newcomer and for the practicing teacher seeking to update his or her

knowledge of developments in the field. Overall the book offers a comprehensive and much needed

profile of ESP. It is a coherent and stimulating sourcebook which raises the important conceptual and

research questions and addresses the major practical issues of the field in a very accessible way.

References

Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. (1995). Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication.

Blyler, N., & Thralls, C. (eds) (1993). Professional Communication: the social perspective. Newbury
Park, CA: Sage.
Candlin, C. N., & Hyland, K. (eds.) (1999). Writing: texts, processes and practices . London:
Longman.

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Johns, A. M. (1997). Text, role and context: developing academic literacies. Cambridge: CUP.

Martin, J. R., & Veel, R. (eds). (1998). Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives
on Discourses of Science. London: Routledge.

Ken Hyland is an assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong. He has taught and written

extensively on ESP and his book on writing in academic disciplines will be published by Longman in the

new year.