Since its inception in the
1960s, ESP has experienced
three main stages of
development.
Now it is in a fourth phase
with a fifth phase that begins
to emerge.
Swales de hecho usa el desarrollo de EST
para ilustrar el desarrollo de ESP en general:
The concept of special language:
analysis of records.
In fact, as Ewer and Latorre's curriculum shows, the analysis of
records revealed that there was very little that was distinctive
in the grammar of scientific English sentences beyond a
tendency to favor particular forms such as simple present
tense, the passive voice and the nominal compounds.
Although there was an academic interest in the nature
of English records despite, the main reason behind the
analysis of records such as Ewer and Latorre was the
pedagogical of making the ESP course more relevant to
the needs of the students.
The objective was to produce a curriculum that gave
high priority to the forms of language that students
would find in their science studies and, in turn, would
give low priority to the forms they would not fulfill.
Beyond prayer: rhetorical or discourse analysis.
While, in the first stage of its development, ESP
had focused on language at the level of the
sentence, the second phase of development
shifted attention to the level above the sentence,
since ESP was closely involved in the field
Emerging discourse or rhetorical analysis.
he analysis of records had focused on
the grammar of sentences, but now the
focus was on understanding how
sentences were combined in the
discourse to produce meaning
What is the ESP?
As in stage I, in this approach there was a
more or less implicit assumption that the
rhetorical patterns of the text organization
differed significantly between the
specialized areas of use: the rhetorical
structure of the scientific texts was
considered different from that of the texts
commercial, for example.
Since the purpose of an ESP course is to allow
students to function properly in an objective
situation, that is, the situation in which students
will use the language they are learning, then the
design process of the ESP course should proceed by
first identifying the objective situation and then
carry out a rigorous analysis of the linguistic
characteristics of that situation.
The most complete explanation of the analysis of the objective
situation is the system established by John Munby in
Communicative Syllabus Design.
The analysis stage of the objective situation marked a certain age of majority for ESP.
Skills and strategies.
We noticed that in the first two stages of
the development of ESP all the analysis
had been of the superficial forms of
language.
Most of the work in the area of
skills and strategies, however,
has been done near the ground
in schemes such as the National
ESP Project in Brazil and the ESP
Project of the University of
Malaya.
The main idea behind the skills-centered approach
is that, underlying all use of language, there are
common processes of reasoning and interpretation
that, regardless of surface forms, allow us to extract
the meaning of speech.
An approach focused on learning.
In sketching the origins of ESP,
we identify three forces, which
we could characterize as need,
new ideas about language and
new ideas about learning.
A truly valid approach to ESP
should be based on an
understanding of language
learning processes.
It is expected that the importance and implications
of the distinction we have made between language
use and language learning will be clarified as we
move forward in the following chapters.