Visions On Esp

Visions on ESP

In the second half of the 20th century, learning a foreign language became a very important matter, due to the great advances in areas such as Science, and unification of the world economy. English was the most obvious choice because of the leadership role that the United States gained after the Second World War. So, from that point, people knew exactly why they were learning English, weather it was for business or resumй improvement. In opposition to other times, when people studied English because it was synonym of culture, i.e., the difference is that it was needed.

At the begging of this process, everyone was taught English the same way, altough a doctor, an engineer and a salesman need to know specific words in order to keep up with their jobs. So, ESP began to take shape as the learners were receiving texts about their area of interest. This would improve the learning process.

It is known that ESP had three previous phases of development, has a currying fourth and a fifth coming up. The first one focused on analyzing the registers of the grammatical and lexical features of EST. It was not very successful since it did not find any huge difference from General English. The second phase tried to discuss the discourse or rhetorical, and had a more linguistic character. The third phase analysis was targeted in the student need. This was called needs analysis. The current fourth stage of ESP is more concerned with the thinking process that exists below the language use. The projects of English teaching from this fourth phase rely on the skill and the capacity of thinking of the learner interconnected with its mother language and the general context of a determined situation. The emerging fifth period is about the language learning, instead of just its use, i.e., the learners should be able to think the language, not just speak it.

The student requirement for the language is considered.