What types of English course are you familiar with?

Which of the
characteristics listed in Table 1.1 do they reflect?

Task 1.1

Examples of English courses

Think about each of the characteristics of ESP and EGP courses listed in
Table 1.1. Give an example how each of these may occur in courses you are
familiar with. These characteristics are not absolute. Can you think of any
situations where the above would not apply?

Classification of ESP
ESP is usually classified into two main branches: English for academic
purposes (EAP) and English for occupational purposes (EOP). Within these
two main divisions there are many subdivisions and overlaps based on the
setting, level of experience and field of ESP.
Figure 1.1 presents a classification of EAP. EAP is primarily classified as
English for general academic purposes (EGAP) and English for specific
academic purposes (ESAP). In EGAP, the learners may come from a range of
specialisations. So, for example, students who will study medicine,
mathematics and history at university may be in the same English class. In
this case, materials that are of general academic interest are used. The
generally held belief of course designers and practitioners of EGAP is that
academic English comprises a range of general academic language abilities
that can be transferred to a range of different academic situations regardless
of the setting or subject area. In ESAP, the learners are from similar
backgrounds – for example, business. In this case, materials are directly
relevant to the learners’ intended area of study. This notion of specificity is a
central theme in ESP and is discussed in detail in later chapters. ESP courses
may also be classified by when they occur. For example, EAP courses may
be pre-sessional, occurring before the students engage in academic study.
These courses are often EGAP. Or they may be exam-oriented to train
students in the skills and strategies necessary to achieve university-entry
requirements, such as levels in IELTS or TOEFL. Foundation courses are a
unique type of EAP course that includes EAP and subject tuition and are
usually direct-entry programmes for entrance to a university. In this case,
students often need a lower admission English score than for their chosen
academic programme. They then complete a foundation course and are
guaranteed entry to their academic programme provided they pass the
foundation course. A further type of EAP course is the in-sessional course.
Such courses are designed to help students while they are studying and are
likely to be more specific. Each of these types of course is explored in more
detail in Part 2, with examples of courses in Part 3.

Figure 1.1 Classification of English for academic purposes (EAP)

Figure 1.2 illustrates a classification of EOP. As with EAP, specificity

also plays an important role in EOP. EOP courses can be general. A general
English for medical purposes course could be developed that includes the
essential features of medical discourse. There is a wealth of published
textbooks available in this area – for example, Glendinning and Howard’s
(2007) Professional English in use: Medicine. This makes it possible to
design a course without in-depth analysis of the participants’ communicative
needs. A course for a group with very specific needs – an example might be
English for triage nurses in the accident and emergency unit at a hospital –
would lie at the other end of the scale of specificity.

Figure 1.2 Classification of English for occupational purposes (EOP)

A further distinction in EOP is that of experience. Courses can occur

before students have any work experience. In pre-experience EOP, the
English course may be part of an undergraduate or graduate professional
degree such as business, law or medicine. In this respect, there is an overlap
between EOP and EAP. In EOP courses for learners with work experience,
the learners will be able to make much more of a contribution to the
identification of their communicative needs.
EOP is often classified by whether the area may be classed as
professional or vocational. For example, English for legal purposes would
be classified as professional, whereas English for tour guides would be
classed as vocational.

History of ESP
ESP is a relatively recent branch of English-language teaching (ELT). It
originated in the 1960s, driven by an accelerated world economy, itself
driven by the increase in the demand for oil and an overall increase in
international trade. There was a need to communicate on a global scale to
facilitate and participate in this economic surge. English became the language
of choice. This led to an increase in international students at universities in
English-speaking countries. ESP was a response to this need, and its aim was
to equip learners with a command of English in an efficient manner by basing
courses on what students actually needed rather than teaching the whole
language system.
The earliest ESP was in the area of science and technology. The approach
used for course design was labelled register analysis. It was sentence-based
and focused on the grammar and vocabulary of scientific texts. The materials
published in this early phase of ESP tended to follow a similar format,
beginning with a technical and rather dense reading passage followed by
manipulation-type grammar exercises and vocabulary exercises. An early
example of this is Herbert’s (1965) The structure of technical English.
While Herbert’s book was based on sound linguistic analysis, it focused on a
very restricted range of vocabulary and grammar. Another issue was that the
materials were very hard to teach because of the density of the passages and
the complexity of the tasks.
The 1970s saw a move towards rhetorical functions. This approach saw a
focus on functions such as comparison, definition and cause and effect. There
was also a move away from the sentence as the unit of language. Again, the
focus was mainly on science and technology, with an emphasis on how
grammar and vocabulary relate to the rhetorical purpose of texts. It is from
this background that ESP discourse analysis emerged in later years.
Examples of early work in this area come from Swales (1971) and Bates and
Dudley-Evans (1976–82). This work was sponsored by the British Council
and focused on the oil and petroleum industry in the Middle East.
The 1970s also saw the advent of needs-based ESP courses with Munby’s
(1978) Communicative syllabus design. Munby classified needs based on
interlocutors and situations in the learners’ target communicative situations.
This sounds quite logical, but Munby’s model of a Communicative Needs
Processor (CNP) based on his PhD is very complex, with a large number of
subcategories. The model sought to capture a wide range of contextual
influences – for example, by taking into account the status and background of
the speakers and the intended purpose of communication. However, the CNP
was not practical enough for application to the average ESP teaching course.
The 1980s saw a focus on study skills in EAP for the first time with the
University of Malaya project Skills for learning (1980). The approach
emphasised skills such as “getting to know the parts of a book”. These were
accompanied by the rationale for the skill. A similar approach was taken by
the Reading and thinking in English series published by Oxford University
Press, which shifted from a focus on functions, such as definition and
describing a process, and notions, such as time. The authors attempted to
focus on discourse, which examines the text beyond the sentence level.
The work of Hutchinson and Waters (1985) has had a significant impact on
ESP. Their work in the 1980s was characterised by an emphasis on the target
situation of the learners. This encompassed both immediate learning needs
and future needs. They proposed a ‘learning centred’ approach to ESP, which
they claim is based on “the principle that learning is totally determined by the
learner”. While giving voice to learner needs, this perspective has been
expanded in recent years to consider the context of the learning and the needs
of stakeholders involved in the ESP process. They also claimed that there
was no such thing as ESP language, which, again, has been contradicted in
recent years through corpus studies that have investigated patterns of
language in large-scale corpora (Handford, 2010).
The 1990s saw a diversification of research in ESP, with a wide range of
courses emerging. For example, there was more focus on vocational types of
ESP (Johns, 2013). A key scholar during this era was John Swales. Building
on previous work on rhetorical structure, Swales focused on identifying
genres with an emphasis on generic stages or moves within a given type of
text. Genre as the basis of course design remains very significant in current
research and practice in ESP. The attraction of this approach to course design
is that any text can be analysed for genre – that is, regular features and text
moves. By establishing a corpus of texts and analysing these with the help of
technology, regular features of texts can be identified and translated into an
ESP syllabus
The use of corpora of lexis or texts and computer technology has led to
corpus studies. Corpus studies use computer databases to identify lexical and
grammatical patterns found in large numbers of texts to inform ESP course
design. For instance, Lee and Swales (2006) developed a course for non-
native-speaker doctoral students based on existing and student generated
corpora.

The role of English