English For Specific Purpose

The concern to make language courses more relevant to learners’ needs led to emergence of the Langauges for Specicific Purposes (LSP) or ESP. The ESP approach to language teaching as ESP began as a response to a number of practical concerns:

The need to prepare growing numbers of non-English background students for study at American and British Universites from the 1950s.
The need to prepare materials to teach students who had already mastered general English, but now needed English for use in employment, such as non-English background doctors, nurses, engineers, and scientists.
The need for materials for people needing English for business purposes.
The need to teach immigrants the language needed to deal with job situations.

In contrast to students learning English for general purposes for whom mastery of the language for its own sake or in order to pass a general examination is the primary goal, the ESP student is usually studying English in order to carry out a particular role, such as flight attendant, mechanic, or doctor.

Rather than developing a course around an analysis of the language, an ESP aproach starts instead with an anlysis of the learner’s needs.

Different types of students have different language needs and what they are taught should be restricted to what they need.

The content of ESP course are thereby determined, in some or all of the following ways: (i) only those “basic skills” (understanding speech, speaking, reading, writing) are included which are required by the learner’s purposes: (ii) selection: only those items of vocabulary, patterns of grammar, functions of language are included which are required by the learner’s purposes; (iii) themes and topics: only those themes, topic and situations.

In ESP learner’s needs are often described in terms of performance, that is, in terms of what the learner will be able to do with the language at the end of a course of study. Whereas in a general English course the goal is usually an overall mastery of the language that can be tested on global language test, the goal of an ESP course is to prepare the learners to carry out a specific task or set of tasks.

The student of ESP is usually studying to perform a role. The measure of succcess for students learning English for hotel waiters, or the English for food technology, is whether they can perform convincingly as hotel waiters in English or whether they can act appropiately as food technologists in English. (Robinson ,1980)

In order to determine the learner’s needs as the starting point for developing ESP program, a number of approaches were suggested. That learners, teachers, and employers could be all be involved in determining learners’s needs. Information could be collected about the resources of the teaching institution, objectives, the methods of assessment used, and needs analysis should be an ongoing process throughout a course.

Information would also be needed about the different kinds of activities the learner would be using the language for (e.g, telephoning, interviewing), the language functions involved (e.g. explaining, requesting, complaining), the situations (e.g., face to face, in a work group) and which of the four language skills would be needed. Procedures suggested for conducting needs analysis included questionnaires, surveys, and interviews.