NAMA : NOKTA EFRIYANTI

KELAS : PBI 5B

ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

 DEFINITION OF ESP (English For Specific Purposes)

Our concern in this section is to arrive at a workable definition of ESP. but
rather than give a straight answer now to the question ‘What is ESP?’, we would
prefer to let it gradually emerge as we work through the section. English for Specific
Purposes, or ESP, is the methodology of teaching English for professionals in various
fields, focusing on types of expressions, vocabulary, standard and formal structures
that will be used most of all in a specific field, etc. The most common ESP is
Business English; there are also e.g. English for law, English for medical purposes,
English for tourism, English for science purposes, etc.

1. The origins of ESP

As with most developments in human activity, ESP was not a planned and
coherent movement, but rather a phenomenon that grew out of a number of
converging trends. These trends have operated in variety of ways around the world,
but we can identifity there main reasons common to the emergence of all ESP.
A. The Demands of a Brave New World
The end of the Second World War in 1945 heralded an age of enormous and
unprecedented expansion in scientific, technical and economic activity on an
international scale. This expansion created a world unified and dominated by two
forces (technology and commerce) which in their relentless progress soon
generated a demand for an international language. For various reasons, most
notably the economic power of the United States in the post-war world, this role
fell to English. English was the key to the international currencies of technology
and commerce and it became the accepted international language of technology
and commerce. Then it created a new generation of learners who knew
specifically why they were learning a language. For the example the doctors who
needed to keep up with developments in their field. The development was
accelerated by the OIL Crises of the early 1970s, which resulted in a massive flow
 of funds and Western expertise into the oil-rich countries. Time and money
constraints created a need for cost-effective courses with clearly defined goals.
English now became subject to the wishes, needs and demands of people other
than language teachers

B. A Revolution in linguistics
At the same time as the use of English which was growing up for specific
needs, it also influenced the study of language itself. In the past, the purpose of
Linguistics was only for the usage of the language which is well known as
grammar. However, as the time goes by the early studies began to find out that the
usage of language grammatically is actually different from the real life usage, one
of the example is the way we speak and write the language.
It can be explained that in the real life there are some differences of the usage
of language in some parts of life e.g engineering, hospital, and more. Then it
developed that if the use of language varies from one situation to another, it
should be possible to decide the features of specific situations and make these
features as basis for learning the language. Since then, especially in the late 60’s
and 70’s, the research were developed into the varieties of language. In
conclusion, by analyzing linguistic characteristics of the specialist area of
language study, particular group of learners could be identified. This is as the
principle of ESP that “Tell me what you need English for and I will tell you the
English that you need”.

C. Focus on the Learner

The developments in educational psychology contribute to the rise of ESP, by
emphasizing the central importance of the learners and their attitudes to learning.
Learners were seen to have different needs and interest, which would have an
important influence on their motivation to learn and therefore on the effectiveness
of their learning. This lent support to the development of courses in which
relevance to the learners need and interest was paramount. The assumption
underlying this approach was that the clear relevance of the English course to their
needs would improve the learners’ motivation and thereby make learning better
and faster. The growth of ESP was brought about by a combination of three
importance factors. The expansion of demands for English to suit particular needs
 and developments in the fields of linguistics and educational psychology. All three
factors seemed to point towards the need for increased specialization in language
learning.

2. The Development Of ESP

A. The concept of special language: 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.

B. Beyond the sentence : Rhetorical or 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

C. 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.

D. 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.

E. 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.

F. ESP : Approach not product

The tree represents some of the common divisions that are made in ELT. The
topmost branches of the tree show the level at which individual ESP courses occur.
The branches just below this level indicate that these may conveniently be divided
into two main types of ESP differentiated according to whether the learner requires
English for academic study (EAP: English for Academic Purposes) or for
work/training (EOP /EVP /VESL: English for Occupational Purposes/English for
Vocational Purposes/Vocational English as a Second Language).This is of course not
a clear-cut distinction: people can work and study simultaneously; it is also likely-
that in many cases the language learnt' /for immediate use in a study environment will
be used later Where the Student takes up, or returns to, a job.
At the next: level down it is possible to distinguish ESP courses by the general nature
of the learners' specialism. Three large categories are usually identified here: EST
(English for Science and Technology), EBE (English for Business and Economics)
and ESS (English for the Social Sciences). This last is not common, probably because
it is not thought
The analogy of a tree can help us to get a bit closer to a definition of ESP not so much
by showing what ESP is, but rather by showing what ESP isn’t.
a. ESP is not a matter of teaching ''specialized varieties'' of English because the fact
that language is used for a specific purpose. There are some features which can
identified as ''typical'' of a particular context of use, and which , so, the learners is
more perhaps to meet in the target situation. But these differences should not be
allowed to obscure the far larger area of common ground that underlies all English
use, and indeed, all language use.
b. ESP is not just a matter of science words and grammar for scientist, so on. When
we look at the tree, there's actually much hidden from view inside and beneath the
tree although we know the leaves and the branches. They are supported by a
complex underlying structure. The point is we need much more communication
than just the surface features of what we read and hear and also we need to
distinguish between performance and competence in relation to what people
actually do with the language and the range of knowledge and abilities which can
enables them to do it (Hutchinson and Waters, 1981).
c. ESP is not different in kind from any other form of language teaching. It based on
the principles of effective and efficient learning. Even though the content of the
learning is different, the processes of learning should be any different for the ESP
learner than for the general English learner.