GLENN M.

ISON
 The end of the Second World War in 1945
....Expanded the scientific, technical, and
economic activities internationally.
 Technology
 commerce
....that is English (because of the economic
power of the US)
....key to the international currencies of
technology and commerce...
 Business people wanted to sell their products
 Mechanics who wanted to read instruction
manuals
 Doctors who needed to keep up with latest
developments
 Students who used textbooks and journals in
English
 Western expertise into oil-rich countries
 English became big business and commercial
pressures began to exert an influence.
 The aim of linguistics before was to describe
grammar.
 Widdowson, 1978 revealed that attention is
to discover the ways by which language is
used in actual communication.
 Ewer and Latorre (1969), Swales (1971),
Selinker and Trimble (1976) on descriptions
of written scientific and technical English
 Noam Chomsky (1965)
 Competence and performance
 Hymes (1968) (1972)
 Social context
 Halliday (1976)
 Language functions
 Savignon (1976)
 Linguistic competence, textual competence,
functional competence
 Canale and Swain (1980)
 Grammatical, strategic, socio-cultural
competence
 Canale (1983)
 Grammatical, strategic, socio-cultural, and
discourse competence
 Widdowson (1983)
 Competence and capacity
 Taylor (1988)
 Instead of communicative competence, he
used communicative proficiency
 Bachman (1990)
 Grammatical competence, textual
competence, illocutionary competence, and
socio-linguistic competence
 Bachman and Palmer (1996)
 Grammatical knowledge, textual knowledge,
functional knowledge, and socio-linguistic
knowledge
 Byram (1997)
 Inter-cultural competence
 Okvir (2005)
 Language competence, pragmatic
competence, and socio-linguistic
competence
 Contribution of educational psychology
 Rodgers (1969) emphasized the central
importance of the learners and attitudes to
learning...
 Expansion of demand of English
 Developments in the field of linguistics
 Educational psychology
I keep six honest serving men.
They taught me all I knew.
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

...Rudyard Kipling
Determined by:

 Tradition
 Choice of textbook
 or ministerial decree
Major considerations...
Why do students need to learn?
Who is going to be involved in the process?
(teachers, sponsors, inspectors, others)
When/Where is the learning taking place?
What does the student need to learn? What
aspects of language will be needed?
Who are learning the language?

Engineers
Mathematicians
Technologists
Scientists
Architects
Businesspeople
Chef
Others
 Engineering Textbooks
 Humanities/Social Studies Texts
 Mathematics Texts, Books
 Technology Texts
 Technical-Vocational Texts
 Accounting, Business, Management Books
 Other Disciplines
Classical or traditional grammar
 Greek and Latin.
Structural linguistics

 1930, advent of structuralism

 associated with Bloomfield
 structural or ‘slot and filler’ form
Ewer and Latorre (1969)

 Simple Present Active

 Simple Present Passive
 Simple Present Active and Passive
 -ing forms
 Present Perfect; Present Continuous
 Infinitives
 Past Perfect; Conditionals
 Noam Chomsky, 1957
 Structural description is too superficial.
 It only describes the surface structure of
language.
 Could not explain relationships of meaning.
The target needs

          Before designing a course, students should know

why they are taking the course and how they will apply
that learning.
Also English language teachers should know what kind of
tasks and activities learners will be using English for
(Kandil, 2003).
Hutchinson, and Waters, 1987 suggested the following
questions as a start-point to uncover relevant information.
� Why is the language needed?
� How will the language be used?
� What will the content areas be?
� Who will the learners use the language with?
� When/Where will the language be used?
(Hutchinson, T. and Waters, A 1987, pp 59).
The learning needs

          The learning needs refer to the learners� language

difficulties, their learning objectives, their styles of learning etc
(Jolly.
and Bolitho.1998). It is the starting point or the route and answers
the question. To understand the learning needs we should find
answers for the following questions.
� Why are the learners taking the course?
� How do the learners learn?
� What resources are available?
� Who are the learners?
� When/Where will the course take place?
Authentic data analysis

          To have a comprehensive analysis I intend

to apply the three known language analysis
approaches . In the main, I will
adopt the framework suggested by Ellis and
Johnson 1994 (see appendix1).
In the next section I will demonstrate how this
framework was used to analyse extracts of the
engineers� work. Interestingly, these extracts
highlighted the present level of the
engineers� understanding of English and helped
in determining their weaknesses or areas for
development. Below is the
suggested framework:
Speaking
Listening
Reading
Writing
Thank you!