English for Specific Purposes

2 The development of extrasensory perception The best set schemes o mice and men Gang aft a-gley. (Robert Burns) From its early beginnings in the 1960s extrasensory perception has undergone three main physical bodys of development. It is now in a fourth phase with a fifth phase starting to emerge. We shall describe each of the quintette phases in greater detail in later chapters, but it testament provide a useful perspective to give a abbreviated summary here. It should be pointed out first of all that second sight is non a monolithic universal phenomenon.ESP has developed at different speeds in different countries, and examples of all the approaches we shall describe can be comprise operating(a) somewhere in the world at the present time. Our summary must(prenominal), therefore, be very habitual in its focus. It will be noticeable in the following overview that one area of activity has been particularly important in the development of ESP. This is the area usually known a s EST (English for Science and Technology). Swales (1985) in fact uses the development of EST to illustrate the development of ESP in general With one or two exceptionsEnglish for Science and Technology has ever set and continues to set the trend in theoretical discussion, in slipway of analysing delivery, and in the variety of actual teaching materials. We have not qualified our own illustrations to EST in this book, but we still need to acknowledge, as Swales does, the pre-eminent slur of EST in the ESP story. 1. The concept of special language charge compendium This degree took place mainly in the 1960s and early seventies and was associated in particular with the work of Peter Strevens (Haliiday, Mcintosh and Strevens, 1964), Jack Ewer (Ewer and Latorre, 1969) and derriere Swales (1971).Operating on the basic principle that the English of, say, Electrical Engineering constituted a specific point different from that of, say, Biology or of widely distributed English, t he aim of the compend was to identify the grammatical and lexical features of these registers Teaching materials so took these linguistic features as their curriculum A good example of such a syllabus is that of A Course in Basic scientific-English by Ewer and Latorre (1969) (see below p. 26). In fact, as Ewer and Latorres syllabus shows, egister analysis telled that there was very little that was distinctive in the sentence grammar of Scientific English beyond a tendency to favour particular forms such as the present simple tense, the passive voice and nominal compounds. It did not, for example, reveal any forms that were not found in General English. But we must be wary of making unfair criticism. Although there was an academic involvement in the nature of registers of English per se, the main motive behind register analyses such as Ewer and Latorres was the pedagogic one of making the ESP business line more relevant to learners needs.The aim was to produce a syllabus whic h gave high priority to the language forms students would meet in their Science studies and in turn would give low priority to forms they would not meet, Ewer and Hughes-Davies (1971), for example, compared the language of the texts their Science students had to read with the language of some widely used rail textbooks. They found that the school textbooks neglected some of the language forms commonly found in Science texts, for example, compound nouns, passives, conditionals, anomalous finites (i. e. mod-. verbs).Their conclusion was that the ESP course should, therefore, give precedence to these forms. 2. Beyond the sentence rhetorical or parley or analysis There were, as we shall see, serious flaws in the register analysis-based syllabus, but, as it happened, register analysis as a research role was rapidly overtaken by developments in the world of linguistics. Whereas in the first stage of its development, ESP had focussed on language at the sentence level, the southward pha se of development shifted attention to the level above the sentence, as ESP became closely involved with the emerging field of discourse or rhetorical analysis.The leading lights in this movement were Henry Widdowson in P