Part I ESP and Language

Skills

This section of the Handbook provides a state of the art look at the relationship
between ESP and the key areas of speaking, listening, reading, writing and vocab-
ulary. While for the purposes of this volume it has been necessary to separate these
into distinct chapters, it is important to acknowledge, as several of the authors in
the section do, that in the classroom, they are of course, less easily separable. ESP
pedagogies have tended to focus on identifying – often through needs analyses
– sets of transferable generic language and literacy skills that are seen to be appli-
cable in the majority of academic and workplace settings. More recent approaches
such as the “academic literacies” approach (Lea and Street 1998) understand that
“skills” are always located within specific contexts and communities and form
part of sets of social practices – that is, distinct ways of thinking, feeling, believing,
valuing, and acting – that also shape learner and teacher identities (Gee 1990;
Prior, this volume).
Not only do the chapters in this section trace the history of developments
in each of these areas, they also provide an extensive assessment of current
approaches to both research and pedagogy as well as outlining avenues for future
research. As more and more academic institutions in countries where English is
not the native language offer “English medium instruction,” there is renewed
interest in teaching and researching these five language skills within new and
diverse academic contexts. Not only learners but their teachers, too, become the
object of study.
Chapters in this section, therefore, also explore the implications of English as
a lingua franca (ELF) for both English for academic purposes (EAP) and English
for occupational purposes (EOP), raising questions about the usefulness of distinc-
tions between native and non-native speakers or even between English as a

The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes, First Edition.

Edited by Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield.
© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
32 ESP and Language Skills

second language (ESL) and English for specific purposes (ESP) that have been
dominant in ESP. These questions also remind us that learner identity is impli-
cated in all skills development, that learners come to any learning context with a
history, desires, needs and wants that will shape how they learn what is being
taught (Kanno and Norton 2003).
As several of the authors of these important chapters tell us, developments in
technology are impacting on research and pedagogy in exciting ways that are of
relevance for both teachers and researchers. Corpus linguistics, for example, is
central to studies of vocabulary and large corpora of academic lectures and other
oral communications are now available for analysis and the development of
authentic learning materials. As Christine Feak and Christine Goh point out, his-
torically research into written genres has tended to take precedence over studies
of oral communication in ESP, possibly because, as is the case with EAP, they have
been seen as more critical to success. Until fairly recently, as Feak reminds us,
there were also significant methodological barriers to collecting spoken data. It is
now possible to collect and code large amounts of spoken data using relatively
inexpensive yet powerful equipment. In all these skills areas learners are being
expected to engage with texts that are increasingly multimodal, and frequently
digital, increasing demands on both learners and teachers while suggesting inter-
esting research possibilities.
In Christine Feak’s chapter on speaking, she discusses the development of
speaking corpora such as the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
(MICASE), the British Academic Spoken English corpus (BASE), the English as a
Lingua Franca in Academic Settings corpus (ELFA), and the Vienna Oxford
International Corpus of English (VOICE) and the possibilities they afford for
deepening our understanding of speaking across contexts and in lingua franca
settings. The chapter reviews studies of speaking in academic settings, and in a
number of workplace and professional settings, some of which are fairly well
known and others of growing importance such as call centers and aviation (see
Moder, this volume). Our attention is also drawn to emerging areas of research
such as conference presentations and humor and we are asked to reflect on
taken for granted assumptions about native and non-native speakers’ speaking
needs and the extent to which ELF speakers want to achieve native speaker-like
competence.
Christine Goh’s up to date review of research on ESP listening examines the
construct of ESP listening and provides a detailed account of what is involved in
the development of listening skills and the metacognitive processes needed for
successful listening. She identifies a need for more research into listening in non-
academic contexts as most of the studies she reviews have been in EAP settings.
She clearly identifies areas for further research and provides recommendations for
teaching.
Alan Hirvela’s chapter provides a thorough review of ESP approaches to teach-
ing reading from the early days of ESP to the present day. While earlier approaches
may have focussed more on discrete reading skills, current approaches tend to
adopt more situated and integrated approaches. Clearly as he points out, reading
 ESP and Language Skills 33

and writing have had a reciprocal relationship from the early work of John Swales
(1981) on article introductions to more recent work on genre pedagogy as the
analysis of specialized texts is seen as key to students’ learning to ultimately
reproduce these genres. Although the focus in this chapter is on reading in aca-
demic contexts, the theoretical and pedagogical concerns noted would be appli-
cable to other contexts too.
Ken Hyland’s chapter pursues the notion that writing, like the other skills
discussed in this section, is not a generic transferable skill but is a literacy practice,
highly dependent on the specific social contexts in which particular texts are pro-
duced and received. He identifies three approaches to ESP writing research: genre
analysis, contextual studies which move beyond looking solely at rhetorical struc-
ture to more qualitative explorations of the environment in which texts are being
produced via, for example, methods such as observation, surveys, diaries, inter-
views and focus group discussions, and critical studies which focus on “how
social relations, identity, knowledge and power are constructed through written
(and spoken) texts” and how ideologies work to ensure that some texts have
greater social value than others.
In her chapter on vocabulary, Averil Coxhead, opens her discussion of this topic
by posing the apparently straightforward question “What vocabulary do ESP
learners need?” Beginning with an examination of definitions of specialized or
technical vocabulary and of different approaches to conceptualizing vocabulary
and ESP, she then moves beyond single words to lexical patterning in ESP, illus-
trating that, in fact, there are no simple answers to this question. She concludes
by looking at some of the challenges for bringing ESP research on vocabulary into
classrooms.

REFERENCES

Gee, J. P. (1990) Social Linguistics and academic literacies approach. Studies in

Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. London:
The Falmer Press.
Kanno, Y. and Norton, B. (2003) Imagined
communities and educational
possibilities: Introduction. Journal of
Language, Identity and Education 2:
241–49.
Lea, M. and Street, B. (1998) Student
writing in higher education: An
Higher Education 23: 157–72.
Swales, J. M. (1981) Aspects of article
Introductions. Aston ESP Research Reports
1. Birmingham, UK: Language Studies
Unit, University of Aston at
Birmingham. Republished University of
Michigan Press (2011).