English for Specic Purposes 25 (2006) 109122

ENGLISH FOR
SPECIFIC
PURPOSES
www.elsevier.com/locate/esp

Sustainability and local knowledge: The case

of the Brazilian ESP Project 19802005
John Holmes

a,*

, Maria Antonieta Alba Celani

School of Education, University of Leeds, UK

Pontifcia Universidade Catolica, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Abstract
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Brazilian ESP Project, this paper discusses why it
has been able to sustain itself and develop over such a long period. The analysis focuses on two main
areas of decision-making which led to this success: the structure of the project itself and the ESP
methodology which was developed. Comparing the Brazilian experience with that of other projects,
the paper identies a number of decisions which determined the process-based nature of the project
structure. These were crucial in ensuring a exible and responsive administrative structure and
enabled participants to feel ownership of the project. With regard to the ESP methodology developed, the paper highlights the way that a Brazilian or Latin approach to the teaching of ESP was
developed. In both areas the importance of using a local knowledge approach to decision-making is
emphasised.
2005 The American University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: ESP methodology; Sustainability; Impact; Development projects; Local knowledge

1. Twenty-ve years after

In 2005, the Brazilian ESP Project held its anniversary National ESP Seminar. This
commemorated 25 years since the rst National Seminar of the Brazilian ESP Project
brought together for teachers of ESP from 23 Brazilian Universities. Since that event in
*
Corresponding author. Present address: TESOL, School of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT,
UK. Tel.: +44 0113 2334521 (o.), +44 01943875058 (home); fax: +44 01132334541.
E-mail address: j.l.holmes@education.leeds.ac.uk (J. Holmes).

0889-4906/$30.00 2005 The American University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.esp.2005.08.002

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the 1980s, a programme of regular national and regional seminars was begun and a
national resource centre, called CEPRIL, was established in Sao Paulo, under the aegis
of the Post-graduate Programme in Applied Linguistics (LAEL) of the Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC-SP). That the Brazilian ESP Project has been functioning ever
since is an impressive achievement in sustainability by any standards.
The project has never faltered; although some universities dropped out during the ensuing years, others entered and some re-entered and teams of ESP teachers from all over
Brazil have continued to meet regularly at National Seminars. In the 1980s the project
counted on the participation of the British Council and the British Overseas Development
Administration (ODA; now Department for International Development, or DfID) which
supplied funds for British ESP specialists (Key English Language Teaching specialists, or
KELTs) to work with the ESP teams over a period of almost 10 years. After this phase
some funding was set aside to enable visiting speakers from the UK to attend national
seminars, although this resource gradually dried up at the turn of the last century. At present, without any current outside funding, the Brazilian ESP Project is into its 25th year as
a project which is 100% Brazilian. Each year in October or September Brazilian ESP
teachers continue to meet at the annual national seminars, hosted in turn by dierent institutions, in dierent regions of the country and a vigorous journal, The ESPecialist, continues to publish articles of relevance to the ESP community in Brazil and elsewhere.
There is no consensus in identifying how the success of development projects can be
evaluated. (Coleman, 2002). Organisations that promote such projects, such as UNHCR
(United Nations High Commission for Refugees), UNDP (United Nations Development
Programme), OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and
DfID still nd it challenging to agree upon the denition of crucial terms such as outcome, output and impact. Other projects related to language in development have always proved dicult to evaluate due to the fact that initial aims often change when
faced with the reality of the local context (Hall, 1997). In the case of the Brazilian ESP
Project, we are perhaps able to sidestep these controversies by holding it up, simply by
the test of time, as a prime example of a successful and sustainable project. In this paper,
we would like to reect on this achievement and identify the decisions that ensured this
sustainability. Our main contention will be that the sustainability of this project came
from they way it developed methodologies based upon local knowledge rather than simply importing the universal approaches to ESP methodology and project design current
at the time.
2. The context of sustainability
In the 1970s and 1980s, the British Governments ODA established a series of KELT
projects in a number of developing countries. These KELT projects all had among their
goals that of sustainability. The aim was to establish a project with the input of UK
KELTs and then to train local counterparts who would take over and push the project
forward with purely local resources. Unfortunately, history shows that it is dicult to
determine how successful these projects were. Hall (1997) points out some of the constraints on determining success. The initial aims are often adapted to meet local reality
as the project gets underway, and funding agencies nd that their insistence on quantiable measures of outputs is not relevant to the projects work and often causes resentment. Coleman (1992) gives an insightful account of the successes and setbacks of an

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education project in an Indonesian context. He gives a good example of how, as the

project was implemented, the realities of the local situation soon caused changes to be
made to the original nature of the project. Its success, therefore, should ideally be measured in terms dierent from the originally established aims.
The Brazilian ESP Project was no exception to this, but given that it is still going strong,
it seems to have met the original criteria of sustainability and it seems timely to oer a brief
analysis of the ways that the project developed which made it so clearly sustainable.
Although projects in EFL or ESP on the scale of those of the 1970s and 1980s are much
rarer, the insights from the Brazilian experience may still be relevant and capable of
extrapolation to contexts such as those described by Pritchard and Nasr (2004) and Coleman (2002, 2004).
In this paper, we will examine the two most important aspects of the project where the
decisions taken in the 1980s seemed to be crucial in ensuring this sustainability. First, we
will look at the project design itself, and next the language teaching methodology which
was developed and disseminated throughout the institutions which have taken part in
the project. In analysing these two aspects we shall be referring to the role of local factors
within the general framework of global ESP methodology.
We shall structure our discussion as follows: (i) A brief overview of the context within
which the Brazilian ESP Project was developed. (ii) Crucial decisions in the shaping of the
project methodology. (iii) Three brief case studies to illustrate ways in which the project
developed. (iv) The development of the language teaching methodology used in the project. (v) Wrong decisions or failings in the project. (vi) Analysis of the reasons for
sustainability.
3. The initial context of the Brazilian ESP project
The Brazilian ESP Project has its roots in the late 1970s, when Maurice Broughton
came to the Applied Linguistics Post-graduate Programme (LAEL) as British Council
sponsored Visiting Lecturer at PUC-SP, after experience in an ESP project in Thailand.
He and Antonieta Celani, then head of LAEL at PUC-SP, carried out a nationwide needs
analysis and feasibility study in 1978. Like many other ESP projects operating in universities, the focus of this work was in the area of English for Academic Purposes and especially the skills of reading and writing.
By 1980 a number of KELT ESP projects in other parts of the world had already been
established and many had become well known through the published materials which were
produced. In these cases the publication of a range of locally written materials was regarded as one way of making the project sustainable, by building up a permanent resource
available for the ESP teachers and students in those countries. In the case of the Malaysia
project Skills for Learning (Cooper & Sinclair, 1979) and in Colombia the Reading and
Thinking in English series (e.g., Moore, 1980) represented the tangible achievement of one
of the major goals of the projects. The materials were intended to be used in ESP classes
based in dierent departments of dierent universities and so be generally valid. In discussing the principles behind Reading and Thinking Moore writes: We have attempted to
make texts and exercises interesting and relevant by choosing interdisciplinary topics or
themes of general academic interest and to include study skills useful in a variety of disciplines (in Swales, 1985, p. 157) These projects were widely considered to be examples of
good practice and were followed by a number of KELT projects at that time. Coleman

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(1992) account tells of a project in Indonesia which was initially conceived on similar lines
and provides a graphic account of how the initial aims changed with pressures from the
local context.
4. Project design: crucial decisions
The Brazilian ESP Project took a dierent path from that of other contemporary projects. The KELTs (chronologically: Tony Deyes, Mike Scott and John Holmes) arrived in
1980 and the main lines of the project were forged later in that year at a national seminar
at PUC-SP attended by all the local co-ordinators. As the KELTs entered into closer contact with the local teams, a number of decisions began to take shape. In retrospect, these
decisions established the aims and development parameters of the project and a specically
Brazilian ownership of the decision-making process. With the benet of hindsight we
might identify them as follows:








No central or national textbook would be produced.

No ready-made imported methodology would be used.
Materials production would be based on local resources.
No one-to-one counterparts would be identied or trained.
A centre of communications would be established.
The project would be open to the admission of other institutions and people.
There would be no anxiety to obtain central support at the Ministry of Education.
We will now examine these decisions and their consequences in more detail.

4.1. No central or national textbook would be produced

In the wake of the ESP projects in Colombia and Malaysia and other KELT projects
which centred around the production of textbooks, it was expected, both by the British
Council authorities and many of the Brazilian participants, that in a year or so a Brazilian
ESP textbook would be published, and would solve the problems of those who taught
ESP in the rst year of university education. In those days this rst year took the form
of a programme of general studies which included English as well as other basic topics
such as psychology and philosophy. Since all students had to take these courses there
was a need for suitable English materials at this level. This was probably where the need
was felt most urgently and most widely.
As the participants met and discussed their needs at national and regional meetings it
became clear that there was an immense variety of contexts and needs, and that it would
be impossible to prepare a single set of materials. Instead it would be necessary for individual teams to prepare their own materials and, where possible, share them. In this way,
the emphasis shifted to professional development of ESP teachers as course designers and
materials writers. The focus of the project had changed from product based to process.
4.2. No ready-made imported methodology would be used
At the time, ESP methodology was as rich and evolving as ever, and there were a number of paradigms on oer. Many ESP projects were still very much under the inuence of

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Munby (1978) and his advocacy of Needs Analysis for specifying objectives as a crucial
stage in course design. Another major inuence was that of discourse analysis and concepts of coherence and cohesion which were reected strongly in the materials produced
in Malaysia and Colombia.
However, early in the story there were two crucial factors which took the project away
from received methodologies. The rst was the fact that the main need of students at all
levels was reading comprehension of academic texts and that speaking and listening were
much less important. The second was that the language of the classroom would be principally Portuguese. This was mainly because of the reading focus of the classroom, but
also because of the short duration of the courses in the rst year programme; it was simply
impractical to raise the spoken and listening competence of the students in the period
available. Accordingly, a specically Brazilian or Latin methodology developed in response to local contexts. This is exemplied in the focus on reading strategies, where
the development of a standard exercise could become an accepted procedure (Scott, Carioni, & Zanatta, 1984). This could only take place in a context where cognate vocabulary
could be used as a valuable resource that Portuguese-speaking students would bring to
academic texts (Holmes, 1986b; Holmes & Ramos, 1993).
4.3. Materials production would be based on local resources
Since no single textbook would be published for the use of ESP teachers, the local ESP
teams would continue to feel an acute need for useful materials, including reading texts
such as articles from magazines or newspapers. It now seems hard to believe, but in those
pre-internet days it was extremely dicult for a university department in Brazil to nd,
and reproduce, authentic texts such as magazine or newspaper articles in English. For
the ESP reading course the topics had to be of interest to the students and accessible to
them in terms of ideas and background knowledge. This meant that exchanging and reusing materials was a cornerstone of the work of the project, and the resource centre that
was built up in Sao Paulo (see Section 4.5) became the heart of the project with its sta
playing a crucial role throughout.
At a local level, member institutions varied greatly in the resources that were available,
or that they managed to secure. Some ESP teams were able to nd a room in which to
store their materials and make them available to other colleagues but this depended on
a number of factors, including the status and energy of the local co-ordinator. It was gradually accepted that the local teams covered a wide range of resources and stages of development and this was one of the givens of the project. The dierent experiences of local
teams are illustrated in Section 4.
4.4. No one-to-one counterparts would be identied or trained
In many projects in the 1970s and 1980s the visiting consultants, such as the KELTs,
identied local counterparts who went through a course of training in order to take over
the role of the KELTs when their contract was over. This training usually consisted in an
MA in Applied Linguistics at a UK university (cf. Coleman, 1992). In practice the local
counterpart would nd on return that their UK qualication gave them a great deal of
prestige and an opportunity for promotion and the possibility of another scholarship to
fund a research degree. In addition, the status and privileges of the UK consultant were

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not enjoyed by the local counterpart, making the latters task a much more dicult one
than simply replacing the specialist. Smith (1995) gives an overview of these issues in
an East Asian context. Although the relationship between consultant and counterpart is
now much more exible, (Murni & Spencer, 1997) the traditional roles of consultant
and counterpart at that time were relatively xed. If we had maintained such a view of
consultant/counterpart then the project would not have survived the rst few years after
the departure of the KELTs.
In the case of the Brazilian project, each of the KELTs had a dierent role, and these
roles changed during the 1980s as the project developed in what could be called an organic
way. This meant that what was needed from the point of view of the project was not three
substitutes for the KELTs but a community of project participants all over Brazil who understood the project methodology and were committed to playing their part in its development.
Individual circumstances changed, people were promoted, went away to do a PhD, had children, retired, came out of retirement, succumbed to other priorities and then returned to
ESP. Over the years it was clear that a critical mass had been achieved so that on a national
level the project was well supported.
In-service input was accordingly essential to the development of the project. This at rst
took the form of study abroad: an MA course in Applied Linguistics with special emphasis
on ESP for certain key members such as regional project co-ordinators. However, the
main in-service education aspect probably came from attendance and participation at regional and national seminars and the short (3 month) diploma courses in ESP methodology oered at Lancaster and Aston Universities in the UK. The experience of the teachers
in going to the UK and working together, and also with colleagues from other countries,
was crucial in the process of team-building and identity-forming which characterised the
project. Subsequently, at regional and national seminars old friends who had met in the
UK would be glad to see each other and work together in workshops, or in delivering joint
papers.
To sum up this aspect, one-to-one counterparts were not needed because there was a
critical mass of active participants and an on-going programme of teacher development.
The numbers ensured that when individuals dropped out this would not seriously hamper
the work of the project as a whole. The teacher development strand ensured that new
teachers entered and became part of the project and all participants developed as professionals within it. Because of this wide spread of responsibility and participation the project
was able to survive the economic, political and social turbulences of the 1980s and 1990s
and move into the 21st century.
4.5. A centre of communications would be established
The existence of enthusiastic and knowledgeable ESP teachers throughout the country
would not have been sucient if there had been no central point of contact and exchange.
Given the existence of the resource centre at CEPRIL and the importance of the materials
there, this was a natural hub for the project. In addition, through the support of PUC-SP
and LAEL it was possible not only to develop the resource centre but also use it as a centre
for the training of undergraduate and postgraduate students who showed an interest in
carrying out research in the area. The setting up of the resource centre was put forward
as a research project which was funded by the State of Sao Paulo Research Foundation
(FAPESP) and by the Coordination for Higher Education Personnel Development

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115

(CAPES), local funding agencies that dealt with research and professional development
respectively, so that students receiving scholarships were able to sta the resource centre.
In this way a steady number of young people was initiated into the project and developed
an interest in ESP. Many of them pursued these interests at postgraduate level and did
MAs and PhDs in areas linked to ESP.
To follow from the last section, as well as there being this critical mass of local co-ordinators and participants, the resource centre also played a crucial part and, as it evolved,
embodied far more wisdom and experience than any one KELT. In addition, there were
a growing number of people, from undergraduates on scholarships to teachers studying
for MAs at LAEL and other departments, who made use of the centre and as the years
went by they also became interested in ESP and began to enter the project.
4.6. The project would be open to the admission of other institutions and people
The project began among the Federal Universities of Brazil, with the exception of PUCSP, which as a community university (comunitaria) was free of direct government control. This meant that PUC-SP enjoyed a certain measure of autonomy and exibility so
that the headquarters of the project could be established there. From the beginning,
though, other non-federal universities played a part, such as the Catholic Universities of
Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and Goiania, and a number of regional, state-funded universities also took part. This increased the numbers and the spread of experience.
In addition, quite early in the 1980s, interest came from the Federal Technical Schools
(ETFs) throughout Brazil. These were funded by central government and charged with
providing an education which would enable their teenage graduates to take up posts that
demanded technical expertise, in areas such as electronics, informatics, chemical engineering and so on. They were often linked to local industries of importance and the demand
from employers for the graduates was keen. The ETFs accordingly entered the project
and contributed usefully to its work throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999 the ETFs
became involved in tertiary education and were all renamed CEFETs. These new institutions are still very much part of the project and currently Rosinda Ramos is co-ordinating
a new project known as VITAE which is working with the secondary technical sector. This
continued development is exemplied in the articles on teacher education in a recent special volume (No. 25) of The ESPecialist (2004).
This variety and diversity of institutions within the project is one important factor
which has strengthened it and enabled it to promote a richer exchange of experience.
4.7. There would be no anxiety to obtain central support at the Ministry of Education
In the 1970s and 1980s most UK-nanced aid projects were set up as a result of a link
between the British Council/ODA and an interested government department, usually the
Ministry of Education, in the host country. In this way, a formal agreement could be
signed and the host country would provide a contribution in terms of stang, premises
or other local facilities which would testify to the commitment of the host government.
In evaluating the success of such projects, the contribution of the host government was
often taken into account by ODA and the British Council as a proof of local commitment.
In the case of Brazil, measuring local commitment was a complex process. Although
initially money came from the Federal Governments institutions for helping professional

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development, this money was not the only resource available. The bulk of nancial
contributions came from individual universities in the form of travel grants for attendance
at conferences or the resources necessary for hosting a national seminar. At the beginning
this caused problems as it was not clear to ODA how the Brazilian government could show
its commitment to the project. The answer to this was that a purely central commitment
was not relevant. What was important was that the project could demonstrate its relevance
at the level of each university in order to justify continued funding and support.
Finally, this broad-based support meant that the huge political changes that took place
in Brazil during the 1980s and 1990s the end of the military dictatorship, direct elections,
and changes of political leadership did not aect the project in the way it would have
done if only one key person at the top had been responsible.
5. Developing communities: two dimensions
In order to illustrate how the programme in macro-terms was sustainable, we will
look briey at two dierent dimensions in which the project developed and the way
that two dierent kinds of community developed. We shall rst consider the evolution
of local ESP teams by taking two examples which show dierent experiences. The second dimension shows the way that a community of researchers has developed within
the project. In this way, we hope to show how an individual participant was able to
take part at a local level as a member of the local team while at the same time taking
part as one of a group of teachers interested in carrying out and disseminating research
at a national level.
5.1. Local teams: Universidade Federal de Uberlandia (UFU) and Universidade Federal de
Pernambuco (UFPe)
Both these universities featured in the very rst seminars of the project and both had
strong teams of teachers who were willing to present papers at conferences and send materials to the resource centre in PUC-SP.
The team in UFU formed at the very beginning of the project and soon took an active
part. They participated in all the regional and national seminars; they also hosted a regional seminar in 1984. Three teachers from the ESP team went to Lancaster University
where they studied for a postgraduate diploma in ESP methodology.
The team gradually changed in composition over the years as the older members retired
and new members joined. Sometimes funding became scarce but the work of the team continued. One main feature, however, is that the original co-ordinator, Celia Assuncao
Figueiredo, continued to play a strong part in the team. Although she left the town at
intervals to study for her MA (in Sao Paulo) and her PhD (in Campinas) she always remained in touch with her ESP colleagues. To the present day the team continues to play
a strong part, they have a resource centre of materials, and a small team of teachers and
research students who make use of the facilities. At present in the pre-service teacher preparation curriculum at UFU there is a full semester introducing students to ESP.
The UFPe, in the regional centre of Recife, is one of the larger universities in the country, and a centre of excellence in its own right. It began as one of the strongest members of
the team. The central group of teachers, who shared the co-ordination among themselves
from one year to the next, took part in regional and national seminars and hosted a na-

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117

tional seminar in 1983. A number of team members, ve in all, went to Lancaster where
they studied for the ESP diploma.
In the mid-1990s the situation began to change. New laws were mooted which would
drastically prune the lecturers pension entitlements and many academics took the rst
opportunity to retire while the former, more generous scheme was still in place. In a space
of only a few years half the members of the department, including key members of the ESP
team, had taken retirement and the teaching of ESP devolved upon new teachers on short
contracts who had little idea of the work of the project and the methodology that had been
developed. The university ceased to play an active part in the project.
Later, Abuendia P. Peixoto Pinto, one of the teachers who had worked with the local
Escola Tecnica Federal joined the UFPe team and re-established the links with the National Project. Other members of the team joined and the UFPe is currently once again
an active participant in the project with an ESP component included in the Masters
Programme.
5.2. The research community
In 1980 the project did not consider carrying out research, and focussed on the development of a language teaching methodology and the production of materials. However, it
soon became clear that many of the participants were interested in research and that the
amount of new materials that were being used in ESP classrooms needed some empirical
evidence to show whether or not the new methodology was on the right track. A number
of workshops were held to look at research design and identify possible research topics. A
list of research topics was given as the appendix to Scott (1985) which was a report on the
research design workshops.
Research topics varied. On one hand research was carried out into specic techniques
that were used, such as cognate identication (Holmes & Ramos, 1993). One other aspect
that received attention was more linked to teacher development, promoting classroom research and reective practice. This has developed gradually is now a feature of all national
seminars. A collection of papers related specically to ESP teachers was edited by Celani
(1998) and a more recent collection edited by Ramos (2004).
These two dimensions show how an individual member of the project can develop: both
as a member of a local team, in spite of the vicissitudes that every university department
undergoes, and as a member of a wider group that shares a common interest, in this case,
research. The project provides a home for ESP teachers who wish to involve themselves at
dierent levels of commitment and with dierent specic interests.
6. Language teaching methodology
Using the term methodology as a coherent framework for making informed decisions
(Holmes, 2000), what we may call the project methodology outlined in Section 4, was one
aspect of the project design. Another equally important aspect of the framework for making decisions was the pedagogical methodology employed in the teaching of ESP and setting up the course design and materials writing.
What ESP methodology to adopt was another crucial decision which inuenced the
development and the sustainability of the project. On oer at the time were a wide variety
of approaches to ESP reading and writing, and this was especially important with regard

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to reading strategies. By the 1980s, the work of psycholinguists in stressing the importance
of appropriate reading strategies had resulted in a common belief that top-down
strategies were the key to the development of reading comprehension in a foreign language. Although this now seems a little extreme, it was an important reaction against
the previous hegemony of the word-by-word view of the reading process. It was also eminently suitable for EAP reading, in a context where Brazilian students brought knowledge
of cognate vocabulary which helped them in dealing with the 7080% of words in academic writing which have an origin in Greek or Latin. The fact that students could identify
words such as masticate and penultimate rather than chew or next to last meant that
there was an invaluable background for students to apply their reading strategies. Later
the books on reading from Nuttall (1984, 1st ed.; 1992, 2nd ed.) and Grellet (1981) helped
to reinforce the approach but the basic fact was that this approach worked in the classroom, usually quite impressively, especially in the early stages.
We can see in this process two major strands: universal solutions to problems that
occur worldwide, and also local solutions based on the Brazilian context. In the development of the project the contribution of local knowledge was fundamental. If we identify local knowledge following Canagarajah (2002) we nd that this was exactly the
view adopted by the project participants at all levels. Canagarajah contrasts local
knowledge with academic and received wisdom: The extra-institutional or vernacular
knowledge that practitioners develop, in contrast to that which is recognised on a scholarly, institutional or professional level (Canagarajah, 2002, p. 242). Another view from
the Kenyan writer, Ngugi, contrasts local and universal in geopolitical terms: What is
Western has become universal and what is Third World becomes local (Ngugi, 1993, p.
25). In the 1980s, there was a powerful feeling in many Brazilian universities that valued Brazilian solutions as opposed to those imported from other countries, and especially the USA. In political terms the local knowledge approach also received
widespread support.
Of course, local knowledge approaches can go to extremes, where each local team becomes more aware of dierences than similarities as compared to other teams. This dilemma was faced by the Brazilian ESP Project, where dierent university teams prepared
materials for use in their own programmes, but also considered the ways in which they
could be used by other ESP teams. This led to a concern that materials should be interchangeable so that it would be possible to slot in a unit from another programme and still
achieve a coherent course design. Thus, the publications of the project, and the workshops
held in regional and national seminars dealt with this aspect. For example, the topic of
exercise types for developing reading strategies was addressed by Scott (1981, 1985). Ways
of dealing with scientic text were proposed by Deyes (1982, 1985), and Holmes (1985)
addressed the issue of how to enable the resource centre to operate in order to facilitate
this exchange of materials.
In general, the ESP methodology which initially emerged proved appropriate and
attractive in its context. Based on what Hutchinson and Waters (1987) called a strategy-based approach it focussed on developing students applications of reading strategies
and also in a long-standing Brazilian tradition, the development of awareness which Scott
(1986) refers to using the Freirian term conscientizacao. (Paulo Freire was actually teaching in the Education department of PUC-SP at this time.) Since the early days there was a
gradual evolution and a movement towards other aspects of the reading process such as
text typology and grammar (Holmes, 1984) and critical reading (Scott, 1988). At a dier-

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ent level, the project also concerned itself with teacher development so that project participants would be able to continue their development as practitioners and professionals in
the wider sense. Thus, there were publications on The teacher as researcher (Holmes,
1986a) and Celani (1998) survey of how teachers developed as reective practitioners.
Looking back, we can see how the pedagogical aspect (as opposed to the logistical aspect) of the programme developed from what might be considered an initial quick x of
reading strategy-based methodology, to a gradual broadening out over the years as the
project responded to a variety of other needs and assumed a longer term view of self-sustaining teacher education and methodological evolution. The success of the quick x was
essential in getting the project o the ground; from then on the increasing acceptance of
the project was sustained by a developing and empowering methodology that enabled participants not just to cope with their classrooms, but develop as professionals in the widest
sense.
To summarise, we might identify one other reason for sustainability which could be valid for a wide range of contexts, and not just Brazilian ESP: the universal and the local
were both valued and both developed. On one hand, the participants wanted to know
what the latest developments were, in order not to be seen re-inventing the wheel, but
on the other hand, these methodological developments were tested in the classroom and
adapted to local needs. No-one was afraid to innovate or reluctant to develop specically
Brazilian solutions when necessary.
7. Wrong decisions and failings
During the development of the project, were there any decisions which we regretted or
omitted? Clearly we did not do anything that was fatally wrong, but it is relatively easy to
point to a number of omissions. At this point the authors use the pronoun we to refer
personally to our own experience. We can also point here to features which anyone
who wishes to set up a similar project could take into account to avoid making our
mistakes.
7.1. The lack of a base-line study
When the project was launched, the main source of data came from the fact-nding
investigation which Antonieta Celani and Maurice Broughton had conducted in 1978.
This data consisted essentially of interviews with local practitioners. Although more
information, such as a needs analysis of the potential ESP students, should have been
gathered, there were no resources for carrying out data gathering of this kind. Given
that needs analysis was very much in fashion at the time, this is something which could
have been achieved, perhaps by encouraging a PhD or research-based MA investigation. Later, when the project was evaluated, (Celani, Holmes, Ramos, & Scott, 1988)
there was considerable regret that the data could not be compared with previous information about the project.
The lack of base-line data is, unfortunately, a common feature of many projects of
this type. A glance through some of the projects included in the same volume as the
studies carried out by Alderson and Scott (1992) and Beretta (1992) will show that this
was a general aw in project development. Perhaps future generations of project designers will have learned from the experiences of the 1980s. Thanks to his experience in

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Brazil, Holmes (2004) was able to ensure when setting up an EAP project in Eritrea in
the 1990s that a base-line evaluation was carried out at the very beginning.
7.2. Excessive modesty
One important consequence of the ESP project is the way that it helped to move
the centre of academic endeavour in Brazil in the sense that Ngugi (1993) uses, by
creating new centres. In the early 1980s, Brazilian academics in general felt very much
as being on the periphery. They mostly went abroad for PhD study and often for
MA courses. When a visiting expert from the UK or the USA gave a talk in Brazil
special transport was organised by local universities so that busloads of students and
sta could attend and, hopefully, hear about the latest trends and the new buzzwords.
This is perhaps one reason why we were relatively hesitant in spreading the news about
the project beyond Brazil. We probably believed that what happened in Brazil was of little
interest to the wider world of ESP. And yet within Brazil there was considerable ferment.
There were literally dozens of Working Papers produced by CEPRIL and circulated
among the project teams. A new journal, The ESPecialist (still going strong in its 25th
year, with an international editorial board) was produced which initially reached an audience mainly within Brazil, while in 1988 the project evaluation document (Celani et al.)
was again circulated mainly within Brazil. There were a number of publications on the
international stage such as an article on cognates (Holmes & Ramos, 1993), on awareness
building (Holmes & Ramos, 1990) and the evaluation of the project (Alderson & Scott,
1992). Only the latter foregrounded the Brazilian ESP Project itself to the extent that it
might arouse the curiosity of an ESP professional outside Latin America.
When one compares the amount of published work relating to, for example, the Bangalore Project (Beretta, 1992; Tickoo, 1997) it is a pity that the Brazilians, usually so outgoing and happy to initiate communication, should have been so retiring.
8. Conclusion: a recipe for sustainability?
A nal stage in this reection is to oer insights which might be of use in planning other
projects or outlining the path ahead for the Brazilian ESP Project. In this, we have arrived
at a somewhat post hoc theoretical justication. Implicitly, we had used a fairly consistent
methodology based on local knowledge needs and approaches, especially in the early
stages. This immediately established the ownership of the project as specically Brazilian.
Later, as immediate problems were addressed, the more universal components of the
methodology were developed. In this way we avoided re-inventing the wheel, as we tried
to see the needs of the participants in the light of global ESP methodology as well as from
the Brazilian context.
Flowerdew (1990) comments on ESPs capacity for self-renewal and the way that practitioners have been able to synthesise approaches that vary widely according to the challenges of dierent contexts. The Brazilian ESP project is a good example of this. In any
project, the challenges are not faced once and for all; they do not go away, but re-emerge
continually. Recently, Pritchard and Nasr (2004) have described the setting up of a reading
programme in an Egyptian university for students of engineering, following a methodological tradition which in many respects is as old as ESP itself. This shows the versatility of

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121

the ESP approach, when it is sensitive to local contexts but mindful also of the universal
body of experience and knowledge which is available.
In retrospect, then, we can see that the decisions were not ad hoc, but reected rmly
held beliefs, lived experience, a knowledge of the discipline and an awareness of the local
context with its needs, resources and constraints. The result was, to use a word we had
never heard of in the 1980s, a synergy between local and universal approaches to ESP
methodology and project design. After 25 years there seems to be no reason why this synergy should not continue to be as productive and enriching as it has done in the past.
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John Holmes has lived and worked in Brazil, Angola, Eritrea and Kosova and now lectures in TESOL at the
University of Leeds. He has researched and published on the methodology of teaching EAP and the interface
between English and local languages and cultures.
Antonieta Celani is a senior gure in Brazilian applied linguistics and has been responsible for setting up and
developing the applied linguistics programme at the Pontifcia Universidade Catolica in Sao Paulo. Her publications are extensive and reect a long career of concern with teacher development and support.