Developments in English for specific purposes: a multi-disciplinary approach; Tony Dudley-Evans and Maggie-Jo St John. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 301 pp PDF

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Hyland, K. (1999). English for Specific Purposes 19(3): 297-300 DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES: A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACH Tony Dudley-Evans and Maggie-Jo St John. Cambridge: CUP, 1998, 301 pp. Reviewed by Ken Hyland English for Specific Purposes is perhaps the most vibrant and inn...

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Hyland, K. (1999). English for Specific Purposes 19(3): 297-300

DEVELOPMENTS IN ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES: A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACH Tony Dudley-Evans and Maggie-Jo St John. Cambridge: CUP, 1998, 301 pp.

Reviewed by Ken Hyland

English for Specific Purposes is perhaps the most vibrant and innovative arena of language teaching and research today, and this volume is an excellent introduction to many of its key aspects. The authors have taken on a demanding task in trying to set out what is now an enormous body of knowledge, set of practices, and gaggle of contested perspectives, but the book succeeds in providing a fair and comprehensive overview of ESP as it is today. It is a practical guide, rather than a theoretical treatise, but it highlights many of the central elements of the field and identifies the key issues of current relevance, providing a useful resource for students taking courses in ESP and for teachers wishing to learn more about this area of practice. Tony Dudley-Evans and Maggie Jo St John are well known in the field for their practical, classroom-oriented approach to ESP issues and for the accessible style with which they convey their enthusiasm for their subject. This book is a good illustration of their typical approach, with a strong emphasis on clarity and practicality. The book is written in a user-friendly style that will appeal to students and other newcomers to the field. Each chapter begins with a statement of aims and concludes with a summary and an annotated list of recommended reading. The chapters also include a useful range of activities to orientate readers to the ideas discussed, encourage them to reflect on their own situation, or to engage with the material directly through completing tasks, with feedback given at the back of the book. The book also includes a helpful 30 pages of extracts of exercises from a range of textbooks. These illustrate different approaches to exploiting skill development and language points, and serve as a source of the reader tasks noted above. The book contains eleven chapters and roughly divides into two main sections. In the first four chapters the authors attempt to establish what ESP is and what it does, situating it within conceptual,

historical, academic, and professional contexts. The remaining chapters offer a comprehensive survey of practical issues for the classroom teacher, ranging from needs assessment through skills and language issues, to course design, materials development, and assessment. For me the first section is in many ways the most interesting part of the book as here the authors raise a number of issues central to the field, such as the part played by theory in ESP, the varied roles of the practitioner, and the notion of specificity. English for Specific Purposes is often regarded as a purely pragmatic enterprise, an atheoretical, methodologically-driven set of practices concerned exclusively with practical outcomes. This, of course, is nonsense, as Dudley-Evans and St John suggest. No pedagogic practice can operate independently of a view of language, learners, and learning, and ESP has demonstrated a clear theoretical stance on these issues through a longstanding commitment to linguistic analysis, contextual relevance, and the pedagogic replication of community-specific communicative events. A development of the paradigm shift to communicative language learning in the 1970s, ESP has helped mature and refine this concern by drawing on the theoretical positions that have seemed most likely to offer the best advantages for practice. These have principally been cross-cultural issues, social constructivism, and discourse analysis strongly influenced by Systemic Functional Linguistics. By basing pedagogical decisions on these sources of analyses it has constantly sought to interpret how some particular aspects of the real communicative world works, and to translate these understandings into practical classroom applications. In keeping with their practical orientation, Dudley-Evans and St John characterize ESP as a distinctive methodological approach which emphasizes specific learner needs and a set of teaching patterns that recognize the learner’s subject-matter expertise. This definition therefore also stresses both the research-base of the field in terms of the need to identify the language features, skills, and genres of the target groups to be taught, and the various roles required of the ESP practitioner in this endeavour. Research has always played a strong part in ESP teaching and the teacher’s role as either a consumer of this research, or as a user of its techniques of analyzing target events, texts, and contexts of use, cannot be overemphasized. While they do not discuss what these research skills amount to, Dudley-Evans and St John implicitly indicate the multi-faceted and complex nature of ‘needs’ by pointing to a key feature of

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ESP: the importance of raising both teachers’ and learners’ awareness of the rhetorical and social practices of the disciplinary and professional communities in which they operate. A more problematic feature of the discussion in this section however is the view taken towards the notion of specificity. The chapters on English for Academic Purposes (chapter three) and English for Business Purposes (chapters four) both distinguish between general and specific versions, with the former concerned with generic skills or language that may be useful across a range of disciplines, professions, or purposes. While such courses obviously exist, and may even be in demand, I am unsure if we should refer to them as ESP.

There is enough research emerging now to demonstrate that the ways different

communities go about their business of conducting tutorials, producing reports, evaluating essays, and so on, vary considerably. The specification of any ‘common core’ may, in fact, be more elusive than we think (eg. Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Blyler & Thralls, 1993; Candlin & Hyland, 1999). The literate activities which we, as ESP practitioners, seek to identify and teach are situated in a variety of cognitive, social, and cultural contexts such that the language and activities which occur are indexically connected to the particular purposes and understandings of community members.

We

obviously can, and often do, refer to textbooks, memos, or oral presentations as overarching genres, and to skimming, scanning, or writing letters as universal academic or professional skills. But it is only when we situate these genres and activities by referring to specific pragmatic contexts that they cease to be displays of linguistic code or social behaviour and take on significance as discourse and as literate practices. In other words, we may want to reserve the term ESP to refer to the ways we help students discover how certain valued text forms and practices are socially constructed in response to the common communicative purposes of particular social groups. This is what Ann Johns (1997) calls a ‘socioliterate’ approach to teaching, where we see the practices of ESP as raising students’ consciousness of the connections between forms, purposes, and participant roles in specific social contexts. The second part of the book turns to essentially pedagogic issues. Here the authors provide a valuable overview of methods, materials and other practicalities of ESP teaching, offering a good introduction to the major topics and some sensitive and sensible suggestions on classroom procedures and practices. There is useful advice, for example, on how to set up cooperative teaching projects with client disciplines, on producing and modifying materials, and on writing tests. The chapter on language issues 3

will perhaps be somewhat disappointing for those interested in how the social practices of the professions can be interpreted through grammatical, lexical, and discoursal choices. The ‘key forms’ are largely presented as a series of ad hoc features, considered important because of their relative frequency rather than as particular community-specific ways of accomplishing distinct purposes or reconstruing experience, and I feel an opportunity has been missed here to outline a coherent semiotic framework (eg. Martin & Veel, 1998). However, the chapters on materials production, skills development, classroom practices, and assessment are well written, contain useful material, and will be extremely helpful to teachers. A major strength of this book is its careful integration of general theoretical issues and practical application. Although the authors raise many important points, they refuse to let the text get bogged down in controversy, dogma, or too much detail, preferring to provide readers with a broad vista of the field and allowing them to reflect and follow up on aspects that interest them. For students this offers a refreshingly straightforward account of important issues, developments, and practices in ESP. For teachers, the case studies, sample published materials, and recommended readings, supplement the text and point outwards to a variety of sources, encouraging alternative approaches and new ideas. While some readers may have liked more in-depth discussion on certain topics, the scope of the work is extremely wide ranging and there is plenty here both for the newcomer and for the practicing teacher seeking to update his or her knowledge of developments in the field. Overall the book offers a comprehensive and much needed profile of ESP. It is a coherent and stimulating sourcebook which raises the important conceptual and research questions and addresses the major practical issues of the field in a very accessible way.

References

Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. (1995). Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Blyler, N., & Thralls, C. (eds) (1993). Professional Communication: the social perspective. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Candlin, C. N., & Hyland, K. (eds.) (1999). Writing: texts, processes and practices . London: Longman. 4

Johns, A. M. (1997). Text, role and context: developing academic literacies. Cambridge: CUP. Martin, J. R., & Veel, R. (eds). (1998). Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science. London: Routledge.

Ken Hyland is an assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong. He has taught and written extensively on ESP and his book on writing in academic disciplines will be published by Longman in the new year.

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