Esp Course Design
Stephen van Vlack Sookmyung Women’s University Graduate School of TESOL
English for Specific Purposes (ESP)
Spring 2006 Week 3 - ESP Chapters 2 and 3 & Ellis & Johnson (1994), PART ONE, pp. 3-39 - Answers 1. What are the four stages of ESP? The development of ESP as a specific approach in English Language Teaching (ELT) is the result of four basic stages. The approach which we now call ESP developed as a direct result of developments in these different areas listed below. In the same vein, ESP is reliant on using the same types of analysis. When developing and ultimately conducting in ESP course the designer needs to go through and make a thorough analysis using all these different considerations. Register Analysis The basic idea behind register analysis is something that we already talked about in class last week, namely, that in different situations people will shift into different registers. This is the basic idea and it is an idea which has been around since the 1960s. At the time researchers began to become more interested in social aspects of language and what they found was that a single individual in the course of a day would change the way they spoke many, many different times. In fact every time these test subjects entered a new situation their language would change to better suit the situation in which they now found themselves. Register analysis is a study of such changes. Now in the course of investigating is what researchers also found was that many of these changes were related to occupations or, in a more general sense, actions. It is important to remember that actions don’t occur individually but occur with groups so groups to a certain extent are defined by the actions they take or engage in together. An important indicator membership in any group would be the ability to shift your register into the group approved register. This means that different groups are going to use obviously different
vocabulary items, but are also going to need to
English for Specific Purposes (ESP)
Spring 2006 Week 3 - ESP Chapters 2 and 3 & Ellis & Johnson (1994), PART ONE, pp. 3-39 - Answers 1. What are the four stages of ESP? The development of ESP as a specific approach in English Language Teaching (ELT) is the result of four basic stages. The approach which we now call ESP developed as a direct result of developments in these different areas listed below. In the same vein, ESP is reliant on using the same types of analysis. When developing and ultimately conducting in ESP course the designer needs to go through and make a thorough analysis using all these different considerations. Register Analysis The basic idea behind register analysis is something that we already talked about in class last week, namely, that in different situations people will shift into different registers. This is the basic idea and it is an idea which has been around since the 1960s. At the time researchers began to become more interested in social aspects of language and what they found was that a single individual in the course of a day would change the way they spoke many, many different times. In fact every time these test subjects entered a new situation their language would change to better suit the situation in which they now found themselves. Register analysis is a study of such changes. Now in the course of investigating is what researchers also found was that many of these changes were related to occupations or, in a more general sense, actions. It is important to remember that actions don’t occur individually but occur with groups so groups to a certain extent are defined by the actions they take or engage in together. An important indicator membership in any group would be the ability to shift your register into the group approved register. This means that different groups are going to use obviously different
vocabulary items, but are also going to need to