What is ESP

Name: Agus Setiaji NPM: 20098100504

1. What is ESP? it as the teaching of English used in academic studies or the teaching

of English for vocational or professional purposes. Absolute Characteristics 1. ESP is defined to meet specific needs of the learners 2. ESP makes use of underlying methodology and activities of the discipline it serves 3. ESP is centered on the language appropriate to these activities in terms of grammar, lexis, register, study skills, discourse and genre.

English for Specific Purposes ESP (English for Specific Purposes) has been referred to as "applied ELT" as the content and aims of any course are determined by the needs of a specific group of learners. ESP is often divided into EAP (English for Academic Purposes) and EOP (English for Occupational Purposes). Further sub-divisions of EOP are sometimes made into business English, professional English (e.g. English for doctors, lawyers) and vocational English (e.g. English for tourism, nursing, aviation, bricklaying). You will find special sections for Business English and English for Academic Purposes elsewhere on this website. According to Dudley-Evans (2001) the absolute characteristics of ESP are: • • •

ESP is designed to meet the specific needs of the learners. ESP makes use of the underlying methodology and activities of the specialism it serves. It is centred not only on the language (grammar, lexis, register), but also the skills, discourses and genres appropriate to those activities.

ESP practitioners are also becoming increasingly involved in intercultural communication and the development of intercultural competence. For Dudley-Evans (2001) the defining characteristic of ESP is that teaching and materials are based on the results of a needs analysis. The key questions are: • • •

What do students need to do with English? Which of the skills do they need to master and how well? Which genres do they need to master either for comprehension or production purposes?

Traditionally ESP courses were typically designed for intermediate or advanced adult learners. Nowadays many students can start to learn academic or vocational English at an earlier age and at a lower level of proficiency. ESP has become increasingly important as: •

There has been an increase in vocational training and learning throughout the world.

Name: Agus Setiaji NPM: 20098100504

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With the spread of globalisation has come the increasing use of English as the language of international communication. More and more people are using English in a growing number of occupational contexts. Students are starting to learn and therefore master general English at a younger age, and so move on to ESP at an earlier age.

An increasing number of learners are taught in English medium schools using approaches such as CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). In some English speaking countries governments are launching initiatives to help economic migrants obtain the practical English skills necessary to function in the workplace. For example, the new ESOL for Work Qualifications in the UK are designed to help employers and employees access courses which offer them the functional language skills demanded across a variety of employment sectors. Content includes topics such as customer care and health and safety. Some teachers are afraid of making the transition from teaching general English to teaching ESP. There is also the danger that the novice ESP teacher will only use materials that they feel comfortable with and will not stretch their learners. Bell (2002) argues that the depth of knowledge of a subject matter that a teacher requires depends on a number of variables which include: • • •

How much do the learners know about their specialism? Are the students pre-experience or post-experience learners? How specific and detailed are the language, skills and genres that the learners need to learn?

Although you perhaps don't need to be an expert in a specialist area, you do need to have some awareness and feel for a particular vocational area. Bell (2002) advocates the three Cs for helping teachers to improve their knowledge and skills in a particular area of ESP. • •

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Curiosity The teacher should be interested in the subject area and want to learn more. Collaboration Teachers should seek out subject specialists, show them their work and ask for their feedback. Confidence Confidence will grow as teachers explore the new subject matter, engage with subject specialists and learn from their learners.

Harding (2007) stresses that the general skills that a general English teacher uses e.g. being communicative, using authentic materials and analysing English in a practical way are also applicable to ESP. He also suggests that teachers should: • •

Think about what is needed and don't just follow an off-the-shelf course or course book. Understand the nature of their students' subject area.

Name: Agus Setiaji NPM: 20098100504

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Work out their language needs in relation to their specialism. Use contexts, texts, situations from their subject area. Use authentic materials. Make the tasks as authentic as possible. Motivate the students with variety, relevance and fun. Take the classroom into the real world and bring the real world into the classroom.

Like it or not, the days of the EFL generalist teacher may be numbered, so it might just be time to explore the possibility of working in ESP! 2. Why ESP needed an English Teacher? The purpose of an ESP course is to enable

learners to function adequately in a target situation. That is, the situation in which the learners will use the language they are learning, then the ESP course design process should proceed by first identifying the target situation and then carrying out a rigorous analysis of the linguistic features of that situation. The identified features will form the syllabus of the ESP course. This process is usually known as needs analysis, and to understand of it, we needs English teacher. 3. What do you know about the development of ESP? in ESP there are fifth phase

development . 1. The concept of special language: register analysis. It 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 simple tense, the passive voice and nominal compound. The main motive behind register analyses was the pedagogic one of making the ESP course more relevant to learners needs. In their science studies and in turn would give low priority to forms they wouldn’t meet. 2. Beyond the sentence: rhetorical or discourse. Register analysis had focused on

sentence grammar, not attention shifted to understanding how sentences were combined in discourse to produce meaning. 3. Target situation analysis. Given that the purpose of an ESP course is to enable

learners to function adequately in a target situation, in which learners will use the language they are learning. 4. Skill and strategies. The principal behind the skill centre 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. 5. A learning centre approach. It should have become clear that in its subsequent development, however, scant attention has been paid to the last of these

Name: Agus Setiaji NPM: 20098100504 forces-learning. All of the stages out lined so far have been fundamentally flawed, in that they are all based on descriptions of language use.

4. Explains based on your opinion about the tree of English Language Teaching!

The tree represents some of the common divisions that are made in ELT. The topmost branches of the tree show the level at which that this may conveniently be divided into two main types of ESP academic study or for work. It’s focus on the learners need. The whole analysis derives from an initial identified need on the part of the learner language teaching is to learn an English Language and for communication. There are three branches in ELT: 1. English as mother tongue(Inggris). 2. English as a second language ( Malaysia, Filiphina, India, ect) 3. English as foreign language (Indonesia). In EFL divide into:

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General English is usually studied for exam purposes, in elementary school, primary school, high school and adult tertiary.

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English for specific purposes: this is of course not a clear –cut distinction. People can work and study simultaneously; it is also likely that in many cases that language learnt for immediate use in a study environment will be used later when the student takes up, or returns to a job.

5. Principle ESP Course Design Principle I - Teaching and learning materials should reflect the needs as perceived by the discourse community. Swales (1990) examines the concept of discourse community and points out that with the exception of advanced students already familiar with the subject material, most academic classes do not represent a discourse community. Thus one aim of a course is to enable the learners to form a discourse community and the role of the course developer is to identify the processes and input that will help the learners achieve their goals. Principle 2 - Teaching and learning materials need to be based on a

Name: Agus Setiaji NPM: 20098100504 knowledge of what is regarded as effective written communication in the discourse community. Once again the views of the informants of the accountancy profession were used as a basis for developing an understanding of what characterizes effective written communication in the discourse community Principle 3 - Teaching and learning materials need to reflect the communicative purposes for which the discourse community produces written texts. In the analysis of the corpus a set of communicative purposes were identified. Principle 4 - The forms and functions that characterize the internal linguistic structure of the texts need to be made explicit in the course materials.

Principle 5 - The course materials need to go beyond making the language explicit but provide a means by which learners can engage in a process of reconstruction Principle 6 - Teaching and learning materials need to engage the learners in a process of developing skills for evaluating their own writing and becoming independent learners in the workplace. Principle 7- The methodology and content of the teaching and learning materials need to be sensitive to learners’ previous learning experience