English for Specific Purposes 33 (2014) 1–3

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English for Specific Purposes

journalhomepage:www.elsevier.com/locate/esp

Guest editorial

ESP research in Asia

English is rapidly spreading across Asia as it is in many other parts of the world. For example, some scholars estimate that the number of
English learners in China is now around 400 million, approximately one third of China’s population ( Bolton & Graddol, 2012; see also Wei &
Su, 2012). The status of English in Asian societies is also changing, with some businesses in Japan, for example, requiring all their meetings,
telephone calls, and e-mail communication to be carried out solely in English (Botting, 2010). Another striking example of the changing status of
English in Asia is that of English medium lectures (EMLs) in Korea. As of 2010, all classes at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology and 93 per cent of classes at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) are reported to be conducted in English
only (see Cho, 2012; Kang, 2012).

These trends and changes have raised interesting questions about the impact of English as a ‘lingua franca’ in professional and academic
communication in Asia. They have also attracted ESP researchers and teachers in Asia to look at the educa-tional, economic, and social issues
important to ESP research and practice. As a result, new publication outlets have emerged. One example is the Asian ESP Journal, which was
created in 2005 and has now published eight volumes listing nearly 150 articles. Another example is the Taiwan International ESP Journal,
which was established in 2008 as the official journal of the newly created Taiwan ESP Association (TESPA). More recently, in 2010, the journal
China ESP Research was launched with a mission to publish academic papers on different aspects of ESP in the Chinese context. With the
creation of new Asian ESP groups and societies, there are also a growing number of ESP-related conferences and workshops being organized.
One of the largest is the International Conference on ESP in Asia which has been held each year since 2010 in the cities of Chongqing, Ningbo,
Xi’an, and Hong Kong, with the next to be held jointly with the 2nd International Conference of the Chinese Asso-ciation for ESP in Shanghai in
2013. Taiwan has also held annual ESP conferences since the early 2000s. The ESP-sig groups of the Japan Association for College English
Teachers (JACET) are some of the most active in organizing seminars and work-shops dating back to the late 1990s. These are, of course, just
some of the activities we notice as evidence of the enthusiasm ESP creates among researchers and practitioners in Asia.

Research devoted to addressing ESP issues in Asia has also been reflected in this journal. For example, recent volumes of this journal have
featured articles about novice and expert lawyers’ writing of the barrister’s opinion genre in Hong Kong (Hafner, 2013), the macro-and micro-
textual distinctiveness of Korean participants’ use of English during earnings calls (Cho & Yoon, 2013), graph-writing strategies of English
learners in health science and medicine in Taiwan (Yang, 2012), Japanese-Hong Kongese on-site interactions in English in the construction
industry (Handford & Matous, 2011), and ESP teachers’ strategies for dealing with unpredicted problems in subject knowledge in English
classes (Wu & Badger, 2009), among many other similar examples.

Consistent with the research energies devoted to ESP research in Asia, this special issue presents original ESP research carried out in Asia.
The four articles featured here provide snapshots of the diversity of current research into the learning, teaching, and application of English for
specific purposes in Asia. The articles deal with a range of English for specific pur-poses: English for business purposes, English for legal
purposes, and English for academic purposes. The authors adopt dif-ferent research methods, including questionnaires and surveys, interviews,
class observations, and corpus-driven analyses. The papers also reflect different theoretical perspectives—cognitive sociolinguistics and
conceptual metaphor theory, sys-temic functional linguistics, reading research, teacher cognition research, and program evaluation research.
Furthermore, the articles show the perspectives of multiple Asian countries and regions, i.e., China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Iran.

In the first paper, Sun and Jiang use the Wmatrix corpus tool to compare how metaphors function as discursive and cog-nitive strategies in
the mission statements of Chinese and US companies. Adopting a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective, they focus on three conventional
conceptual metaphors in business discourse: BRANDS ARE PEOPLE, BUSINESS IS COOPERATION, and BUSINESS IS COMPETITION.
They argue that the source domains of these conceptual metaphors differ significantly in the mission statements of the Chinese and US
companies. As a result, the underlying corporate identities and ideologies may have been constructed differently, at least as seen through the
mission statements. Chinese corporations,

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2 Guest editorial / English for Specific Purposes 33 (2014) 1–3

the authors note, tend to describe themselves as competition-oriented energetic leaders, while US corporations seem to be projecting themselves
more frequently as collaboration-oriented, ethical, and responsible community members.
Sun and Jiang’s paper is in the tradition of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) research (Jenkins, 2000). The concept of ELF is today
commonly accepted around the world, and it is often associated with the communicative situations in Kachru’s, (1985) expanding circle, of
which China is a part. Indeed, ELF was the underlying theme in the special issue on ESP research in Europe published in this journal in 2010.
We are pleased to see the discussion continued in this issue, albeit in a different geographical setting. The main concern of Jenkins (2007) and
others regarding ELF is the lack of accurate descriptions of ELF varieties, and we are glad to note that Sun and Jiang’s research on corporate
mission statements has added to this line of research. Their description of the metaphorical domains in mission statements—a genre of ‘writing
to do business’—can pro-vide ESP teachers and students with a better understanding of the discursive and sociolinguistic strategies that one can
use in ELF settings to not only communicate one’s messages, but also to create identities. For example, ESP teachers and learners can benefit
from a better awareness of the overused metaphorical domains in the mission statements and the consequences of these metaphorical domains in
creating certain unexpected, and even undesirable, corporate identities.

In the second paper, Cheng and Cheng also use corpus linguistics techniques to study language use, but they adopt a dif-ferent approach from
that of Sun and Jiang. In their study, Cheng and Cheng use N-gram analysis and Key-Word-In-Context (KWIC) concordance line observations to
investigate the way in which epistemic modality is employed in civil judgments to construct legal facts and to indicate legal probability. They
compare how different types of epistemic modality are used in Hong Kong, which is a common law jurisdiction, and in Scotland, which is a
mixed jurisdiction. They examine how the ori-entation of epistemic modality (implicit/explicit and subjective/objective) and the value of
epistemic modality (high, med-ian, or low) may differ in these two settings. Their findings suggest that both subjective epistemic modality and
objective epistemic modality are employed in adjudications, and the value distribution of epistemic modality indicates that the bal-ance of
probability is adopted in Hong Kong and in Scotland. Perhaps surprisingly, the authors reveal few differences in the uses of epistemic modality
in the two jurisdictions, despite the fact that one is largely composed of non-native speakers. The legal system in Hong Kong has strong roots in
the UK legal system, and it appears as though the (non-native) judges in Hong Kong show an understanding of the subtleties of epistemic
modality at a similar level to their Scottish counterparts which is perhaps above and beyond many native speakers of English outside of the legal
profession. These findings raise some inter-esting questions about the English training received by practicing judges in Hong Kong. The authors
also discuss other ped-agogical implications. They suggest, for example, that ESP practitioners, especially teachers and students of legal English,
can pay special attention to the formal, semantic, and pragmatic dimensions of different types of modality and to how these dimensions interact
with the orientation and value of various types of modality if they would like to use English in legal settings effectively.

Compared with the first two papers in this special issue, the third and fourth papers focus distinctly on ESP pedagogical practices and
concerns. In the third paper, Atai and Fatahi-Majd describe a situation in Iran, where EAP reading comprehen-sion courses are taught by two
groups of teachers with different specializations—ELT instructors and subject teachers. In this context, the authors set out to explore the actual
classroom practices and cognitions within and across these two groups of teachers. The authors observed three ELT instructors and three subject
teachers teaching discipline-based EAP reading courses at a university of medical sciences in Iran for eight sessions. In addition to completing
observation checklists and field notes, they conducted semi-structured interviews with the teachers to explore the underpinning conceptualization
of EAP reading and EAP reading instruction by these teachers. The findings from their study point to considerable inconsis-tencies among the
subject teachers. One subject teacher mainly asked detailed comprehension check questions, another was primarily concerned about checking
and discussing the meaning of technical terms in texts, and the third teacher focused on accurate Farsi translation of texts. The authors also
noticed some discrepancies across these two groups of teachers with respect to their EAP reading instruction practices and the beliefs behind
these practices.

The situation described in Atai and Fatahi-Majd’s study will be familiar to many ESP practitioners and English language program
administrators working in an Asian context. In recent years, specialist departments in some Asian institutions have begun rejecting traditional
English programs in favor of narrowly focused ESP courses taught by their own subject teachers. This practice is in part due to limitations in the
number of foundation English courses that can be offered, but there is also a common view among subject teachers that English teachers are
unqualified to teach narrowly scoped classes due to their lack of subject specialist knowledge. Atai and Fatahi-Majd’s results show that, while
the concerns of subject teachers may be partially justified, simply replacing an ELT teacher with a subject teacher may not be the answer. Rather,
the authors suggest that both groups can benefit greatly from a carefully planned EAP teacher training program. They also point out the benefits
of greater communication between the two groups. These suggestions will resonate with ESP researchers and prac-titioners in Asia and
elsewhere.

In the final paper of the issue, Tsou and Chen look beyond a single course and delve into the evaluation of an entire ESP program. In their
paper, they first describe an ESP program evaluation framework that combines the Hutchinson and Waters (1987) framework of ESP program
evaluation and the FL evaluation framework proposed by Watanabe, Norris, & Gonzalez-Lloret, 2009. They also update this combined
framework by incorporating recent findings on ESP learning and teaching. Next, they use this updated ESP framework to evaluate an ESP
program in Taiwan. Specifically, the authors investigate how their framework can help administrators understand course evaluation, learner
assessment, stakeholders’
concerns, and teacher participation and empowerment. They also study the extent to which
the framework can help uncover details of how key ESP considerations, such as authenticity, learner autonomy,
and learner transfer, play out in ESP teaching and learning in
 Guest editorial / English for Specific Purposes 33 (2014) 1–3 3

the real world. At the same time, they attempt to discover potential problems in the framework that might make it difficult to implement in a
practical program evaluation process. For example, after applying the framework to a working ESP program, they notice that the framework
might have contained too many items, making it difficult to measure all of them adequately. The authors also suggest that multiple data-
collection methods be used to collect program evaluation data and that post-program assessment data be collected with careful planning.

Given the importance of ESP program evaluation, we believe that the comprehensive framework of ESP program evalu-ation synthesized by
the authors and the insights they develop after using the framework to evaluate a real-world program will be useful to ESP researchers and
practitioners in Asia and elsewhere. Their paper is rich with details about the ESP pro-gram and the courses in it, and we believe it can also be a
valuable reference source for readers in Asia and elsewhere to understand how ESP teaching occurs from a programmatic perspective in a
concrete Asian context.
This special issue involves the hard work of many people. We would like to first thank Brian Paltridge, ESPj emeritus edi-tor, and Sue
Starfield, the current co-editor of ESPj, for initiating the project and for inviting the two of us to serve as co-guest editors. We are also grateful to
the many anonymous reviewers and to Sue Starfield and Nigel Harwood, the co-editors of ESPj, who provided their valuable comments and
extensive feedback on the short-listed papers as well as on the four papers that appear in this issue. We would also like to thank the many authors
who submitted initial proposals and the authors of the four papers who worked tirelessly with us to bring this project to fruition.

As we mentioned earlier, we recognize that ESP research is becoming an increasingly vibrant line of research in Asia, and we hope to add to
the ESP research activities and energies in Asia through this special-topic issue on ESP research.

References

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Hafner, C. A. (2013). The discursive construction of professional expertise: Appeals to authority in barrister’s opinions. English for Specific Purposes, 32, 131–143.

Handford, M., & Matous, P. (2011). Lexicogrammar in the international construction industry: A corpus-based case study of Japanese-Hong Kongese on- site interactions in
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Wu, H., & Badger, R. G. (2009). In a strange and uncharted land: ESP teachers’ strategies for dealing with unpredicted problems in subject knowledge during class. English for
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An Cheng
Department of English, Oklahoma State University, 205 Morrill Hall, Stillwater, OK 74078, United States
Tel.: +1 405 744 9474; fax: +1 405 744 6326.
E-mail address: an.cheng@okstate.edu
Laurence Anthony
Center for English Language Education in Science and Engineering (CELESE), Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University,
3-4-1 Okubo, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan
E-mail address: anthony0122@gmail.com

Available online 13 August 2013