Ken Hyland*

University of East Anglia, UK

[email protected]

ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES: WHAT IS IT AND

WHERE IS IT TAKING US?

Abstract

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is teaching with the aim of assisting learners’
study or research in the particular variety of English they may need. It has emerged
from over 50 years of research and classroom practice and has become a major 202
influence in university and workplace classrooms in many parts of the world. The
basic idea behind ESP is that learners’ needs differ enormously according to future
academic or occupational goals, and this is why ESP has become so influential in
universities around the world in recent years. There is a growing awareness that
students have to take on new roles and engage with knowledge in new ways when
they enter university and, eventually the workplace. They find that they need to
write and read unfamiliar genres, and that communication practices are not uniform
across the subjects they encounter. Simply, the English they learnt at school rarely
prepares them for that which they need in Higher Education and in the world of
work. In this paper I sketch some of the major ideas and practices that have shaped
contemporary ESP and look at the main effects it is having on language teaching.

Key words

ESP, EAP, research, teaching, genre.

* Corresponding address: Ken Hyland, School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia,
Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK.

https://doi.org/10.18485/esptoday.2022.10.2.1 Vol. 10(2)(2022): 202-220

e-ISSN:2334-9050
 ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES: WHAT IS IT AND WHERE IS IT TAKING US?

1. INTRODUCTION
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) distinguishes itself from more general language
study through a focus on particular, purposeful uses of language, or what Cummins
(1982) refers to as ‘context-reduced’ language. This tends to be generally more
abstract and less dependent on the immediate setting for its coherence than
everyday language use. A commitment to language instruction that attends to
students’ specific purposes for learning English has given ESP a unique place in the
development of both theory and innovative practice in language instruction since
the term first emerged in the 1960s. With countless students and professionals
around the world now required to gain fluency in the conventions of their particular
communicative domain of English to steer their learning and promote their careers,
ESP has consolidated and expanded its role. It is now a major player in both research
and pedagogy in applied linguistics, with a large and growing contribution from
researchers around the world.
ESP has been widely adopted in many countries to better address the
communicative needs of learners as students increasingly find themselves having to
read, and often write, their subject papers in English. This presents challenges to
both teachers and students. For students, they encounter a variety of English very
different to that which they are familiar with from school, home or social media,
while teachers recognise that they have to go beyond teaching grammar to assist
203
students towards new professional or workplace literacies. ESP addresses these
issues by drawing from a variety of foundations and a commitment to research-
based language education. It takes the most useful, successful and relevant ideas
from other theories and practices and combines them into a coherent approach to
language education. In so doing it helps reveal the constraints of social contexts on
language use and provides ways for learners to gain control over these.
In this paper I want to try and give an overview of ESP to help us understand
it a little better. To do this I first sketch some of the ideas that have influenced it,
focusing on needs analysis, communicative teaching, ethnography, social
constructionism, and discourse analysis. I then go on to look at some of the effects
ESP is having on what we do in classrooms, arguing that it has encouraged teachers
to highlight discourse rather than language, to adopt a research orientation to their
work, to employ collaborative pedagogies, and to be aware of discourse variation.

2. WHAT ARE THE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF ESP?

ESP emerged in the early 1960s as a response to the increasing globalisation of
world markets and the growth of English as a commercial lingua franca to facilitate
this (e.g. Hutchinson & Waters, 1987). Early in its history, Peter Strevens (1977)
distinguished ESP in terms of: the primacy it gave to language-using purposes, the
need to align curricular content with learner goals, and the use of appropriate

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teaching methods. Language teachers found themselves teaching technical English

to non-native students and needing information about their discourses to do so. ESP
thus grew out of text-based counts of grammar features in written technical
documents, which quickly gave way to more explanatory models which sought to
connect technical lexico-grammar and authors’ rhetorical purposes. Since then, we
have seen a strong interest in different research and teaching perspectives and a
need to closely combine research and practice (Anthony, 2018; Hyland, 2006; Johns,
2013).
We have also witnessed, under the broad umbrella of ESP, an increasing
diversification of practice, and acronyms, so that the original Academic Purposes
and Occupational Purposes labels no longer accurately represent the field. This is
the natural outcome of following specificity, and Belcher points out that:

There are, and no doubt will be, as many types of ESP as there are specific
learner needs and target communities that learners wish to thrive in. (Belcher,
2009: 2)

Subtypes proliferate with the British Council 1 including Survival English for
immigrants and English for Hotel Management among the branches of ESP. There
are also hybrids such as English for Academic Legal Purposes and a strongly
emerging subfield of English for Research and Publication Purposes.
Reviewers of the field have attempted to identify the key areas of ESP (e.g. 204
Basturkmen, 2021; Belcher, 2009), with needs analysis, genre, corpus studies, and
specialised language skills and lexis all figuring prominently. Handbooks add
themes such as intercultural rhetoric, English as a Lingua Franca and critical
perspectives to these (Hyland & Shaw, 2016; Paltridge & Starfield, 2013). There
have also been studies of papers in the two flagship journals of the field, English for
Specific Purposes (ESPJ) and Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP) which
show a trend toward the analysis of written texts (Gollin-Kies, 2014; Swales &
Leeder, 2012). More recently, these surveys have been supplemented by
quantitative studies using bibliometric techniques. Hyland and Jiang (2021), for
example, tracked changes in ESP research through an analysis of all 3,500 papers on
the Social Science Citation Index since 1990 dealing with ESP topics. The results
indicate that classroom practices remain central to the discipline and that there has
been a consistent interest in specialised texts, particularly written texts, and in
higher education and business English, with a massive increase in attention devoted
to identity and to academic and workplace discourses.

1 ESP Teaching English. British Council and BBC https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/esp

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3. WHAT ARE THE MAIN INFLUENCES ON ESP?

ESP, in contrast to many approaches, can be characterised by its openness to the

methods and insights of other fields. Most centrally it depends on a better
understanding of what students’ target texts are like, so it is part of applied
linguistics, and particularly discourse analysis. ESP, then, can be seen as English
language teaching with a stronger descriptive foundation for pedagogic materials.
In the classroom it incorporates elements from Communicative Language Teaching,
Task-Based Language Teaching, Project-Based Learning (Richards & Rodgers, 2014)
and, more recently, corpus-oriented and text analytic methods (Hyland, 2012;
Reppen, 2013). Here, however, I want to briefly introduce five of the most salient
aspects of ESP: (i) needs analysis, (ii) genre analysis, (iii) communicative teaching
methods, (iv) ethnography, and (v) social constructionism. This is perhaps an
idiosyncratic list, but they are core ideas which define what ESP is, assisting teachers
to interpret how aspects of the real communicative world work and to translate
these understandings into practical classroom applications.

3.1. Needs analysis

While not unique to ESP, nor the sole driver of ESP research, needs analysis is a 205
defining element of its practices (e.g. Basturkmen, 2021; Upton, 2012). It is
conducted to establish the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of a course and is the first step in ESP
course design. Investigating the specific sets of skills, texts and language a particular
group of learners must acquire is central to ESP. It informs its curricula and
materials and is a crucial link between perception and practice, helping ESP to keep
its feet on the ground by softening any excesses of theory-building with practical
applications. Hyland (2006: 73) defined it like this:

Needs analysis refers to the techniques for collecting and assessing information
relevant to course design: it is the means of establishing the how and what of a
course. It is a continuous process since we modify our teaching as we come to
learn more about our students, and in this way it actually shades into evaluation
– the means of establishing the effectiveness of a course. Needs is actually an
umbrella term that embraces many aspects, incorporating learners’ goals and
backgrounds, their language proficiencies, their reasons for taking the course,
their teaching and learning preferences, and the situations they will need to
communicate in. Needs can involve what learners know, don’t know or want to
know, and can be collected and analysed in a variety of ways.

How we understand what must be analysed and the frameworks we use to describe
it have both changed over time. Early needs analyses focused on the lexical and
syntactic features of scientific and technical English texts. Interest then moved to the

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rhetorical macro-structure of specialist texts to describe scientific writing as

patterns of functional units (Trimble, 1985). In Europe this approach was informed
by functional-notional syllabuses and attempts to specify the competence levels
students needed to perform particular tasks (Munby, 1978). This interest in seeing
texts as part of their social contexts has continued through to the present. The use
of genre analysis pioneered by Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993), for instance, has
provided a useful tool for understanding how language is used in particular
academic and professional communities as required by learners.
Conducting a needs analysis is a complex process and Bocanegra-Valle (2016:
563) identifies six types of sub-analyses:

• Target situation analysis: what learners should know in target context

• Discourse analysis: description of the language used in the target context
• Present situation analysis: what learners can/can’t do now in relation to
target needs
• Learner factor analysis: a composite of preferred strategies, perceptions,
course expectations, etc.
• Teaching context analysis: resources, time, teacher skills and attitudes, etc.
• Task analysis: identification of tasks required in target context.

These analyses have become more diverse and, simultaneously, the concept of need
has been expanded beyond the linguistic skills and knowledge required to perform
in a target situation. On one hand, it has moved to include learner needs, or what the 206
learner must do in order to learn, incorporating both the learner’s starting point and
how they see their own needs (Hutchison & Waters, 1987). Most recently, the
question of ‘whose needs?’ has been asked, raising political questions about target
goals and the interests they serve. Do large corporations benefit more than the
individual student by focusing on target needs? Is accommodating to big business
or academic disciplines in the best interests of the student? The term rights analysis
has been introduced to refer to a framework for studying power relations in
classrooms and institutions and for helping teachers to reflect on their role to bring
about greater equality (Benesch, 2009). Clearly however, the imperative of need, to
understand learners, target contexts, discourses, and contexts, means that the
starting point for any ESP activity must be a strong research base.

3.2. Genre analysis

Genre analysis is probably the most important item in the ESP toolbox. The
importance of genre is underpinned by the fact that few people have explicit
knowledge of the rhetorical and formal features of the texts they use every day.
Genre analysis seeks to “make genre knowledge available to those outside the circle
of expert producers of the texts” (Shaw, 2016: 243).

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Genres, most simply, are abstract, socially recognised ways of using language
that we use to respond to repeated situations. In ESP, a fruitful line of research has
been to explore and identify the lexico-grammatical features and rhetorical patterns
which help characterise particular genres. This has helped to reveal how texts are
typically constructed and how they relate to their contexts of use through specific
social purposes, as well as providing valuable input for classroom teaching. Genre
analysis also helps show how texts are related to other texts, how they borrow from
and respond to other texts in a situation. Analyses of genres are therefore informed
by function and situation.
This idea draws on the concept of intertextuality (Bakhtin, 1986).
Intertextuality suggests that any instance of discourse is partly created from
previous discourses, and this helps us to see how texts cluster together to form sets,
and how they come to form particular social and cultural practices. Texts and their
related activities may be linked one after the other, as in a formal job application: an
– application – interview – offer – acceptance sequence, or more loosely as a
repertoire of options, say in the choice of a press advertisement, TV campaign, or
social media posts to announce a new product. Researchers and teachers have been
greatly assisted in recent years by being able to analyse text corpora to collect and
study representative samples of texts from a given context. Counting frequencies
shows what language and vocabulary features are important in a given genre while
collocational analyses show how writers in different professions or disciplines use
words in regular patterns. In this way more specific and accurate descriptions of
target texts can be made. 207
Genre analysis in ESP has been influenced by the pioneering work of Swales
(1990) and by Systemic Functional Linguistics (e.g. Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014).
Both see language as a system of choices which allow users to most effectively
express their intended meanings. This, of course, fits neatly with ESP’s aims to
explore and explain the academic and professional genres that will enhance
learners’ career opportunities. Genre analysis has thus become the principal means
by which ESP practitioners identify the features that distinguish the texts most
relevant to students (Cheng, 2021; Hyon, 2018; Tardy, 2017).
In the last few years, academic activity and communication are increasingly
mediated by digital technologies, which enable scholars to engage in new social
practices but with different affordances and challenges (Luzón & Pérez-Llantada,
2022). As a result, studies of blogs, 3-minute theses, wikis and other Web 2.0
applications are emerging which both describe these genres and how they are being
taught in classrooms (Nakamaru, 2012; Pérez-Llantada, 2021; Zou & Hyland, 2022).

3.3. Ethnography

In addition to close analyses of texts, a more recent research influence on ESP moves
away from an exclusive focus on texts and studies the activities that surround their

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use (e.g. Guillén-Galve & Bocanegra-Valle, 2021). Ethnography is a type of research

that explores contexts and tries to appreciate the participants’ perspectives on
writing, reading and using texts, drawing on the understandings of insiders
themselves – an approach known as an emic perspective. Members of discourse
communities and the physical settings in which they work become the main focus of
study, with detailed observations of behaviours together with interviews and the
analysis of texts (Paltridge, Starfield, & Tardy, 2016). Together, these methods
provide a fuller picture of what is happening, helping us to “understand our students
and our students to understand the nature of the University and of EAP” (Collins &
Holliday, 2022). This approach lends itself well to ESP research as it provides
insights into educational and workplace practices, offering descriptions from actual
investigations of people using texts.
Ethnography has been important in ESP in three main ways. First, it has begun
to provide valuable insights into target contexts, helping to identify what happens
in the production, distribution, and consumption of texts (Paltridge et al., 2016). So,
for example, this approach was used by Gollin (1999) to analyse a collaborative
writing project in a professional Australian workplace, and by Luo and Hyland
(2019) in their study of a Chinese scholar who spoke little English but had a
successful career publishing in international journals. Second, ethnographic
techniques have also been useful in exploring student practices, revealing how they
participate in their learning, engage with their teachers, and experience their
classrooms. One example is Starfield’s (2015) research into the experience of black 208
undergraduates in a formally whites-only university in South Africa. Third,
ethnography has been used to argue for appropriate pedagogic methods in contexts
where overseas students study in Anglo countries or where Anglo teachers and
curricula are employed in overseas settings. Holliday’s (1994) ethnographic study
of a large-scale English for academic purposes (EAP) project in Egypt, for instance,
underlines the need for sensitivity to local teaching models and expectations.
Dressen-Hammouda’s (2013) survey of articles in JEAP, ESPJ and Written
Communication showed the use of qualitative studies (not all ‘ethnographic’) had
increased, although only comprised 8.4% of papers in the 30 years to 2010.
However, despite the growing number of ethnographic studies, Cheng (2006)
argues that ESP research remains too focused on what people learn, rather than how
they learn it.

3.4. Communicative teaching practices

ESP recognises that the communicative demands on students in universities and

workplaces go far beyond control of linguistic error or ‘language proficiency’ (e.g
Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998). There is now a considerable body of research and
experience which emphasises the heightened, complex, and highly diverse nature of
communicative demands in these contexts (e.g. Bazerman & Paradis, 1991;

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Manchón, 2011). Students find that they need to write and read unfamiliar genres
and that communication practices reflect different, disciplinary or professionally-
oriented, ways of constructing knowledge and engaging in study (Nesi & Gardner,
2012). In other words, ESP does not see students’ writing difficulties as a linguistic
deficit which can be improved by remediation in a few language classes, but as their
attempts to acquire a new literacy and, more specifically, new discourse practices. In
the classroom, this shifts language teaching away from isolated written or spoken
texts towards contextualised communicative genres and an increasing
preoccupation with identifying strategies suitable for both native and non-native
speakers of the target language (Anthony, 2018; Hyland, 2006).
So ESP is driven by a stimulus similar to that behind Communicative Language
Teaching back in the 1970s: to make the language purposeful by relating it to
credible, real-world outcomes. As a result, it often relies on communicative methods
which use tasks involving the negotiation of meaning, which employ portfolios,
which use consciousness raising activities (such as comparison exercises) and those
which ask students to reflect on text choices. Stoller (2016: 578-582) identifies
several broad areas relevant to classroom materials and tasks in EAP classes:

• Authenticity: the use of materials not designed for the classroom vs those
adapted for student abilities
• Motivating tasks which supplement textbooks and engage students
• Materials and tasks that work together to scaffold students to achieve course 209
goals
• Relevant vocabulary for students’ needs and vocabulary-learning strategies

Genre approaches are widely used, and teachers seek to exploit relevant and
authentic texts through tasks which attempt to help students increase their
awareness of the purpose and linguistic features of these. More generally, providing
students with an explicit knowledge of target genres is seen as a means of helping
them gain access to valued genres, jobs and careers. The public and free availability
of online corpora make teacher-student collaborations around relevant genres
feasible and there are several sources which help guide students in their use (e.g.
Hyland, 2004; Reppen 2013). Genre approaches, in fact, also seem to offer the most
effective means for learners to both see relationships between texts and the contexts
in which they are commonly used, and to critique those contexts (Hyland, 2018). By
providing students with a rhetorical understanding of texts and a metalanguage to
analyse them, students can see that texts can be questioned, compared, and
deconstructed, so revealing the assumptions and ideologies that underlie them.
Teaching, therefore, involves a commitment to real communication, to learner
centeredness, and, where it is possible, a close connection with specialist subjects.
There has, as a result, been a focus on inductive, discovery-based learning, authentic
materials and an emphasis on a guided, analytical approach to teaching (e.g.
Anthony, 2018; Bell, 2022). Despite this, however, Bell (2022) has recently argued

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that classroom methods remain peripheral to discussions in ESP and deserve

greater prominence than they are currently given in the literature. Hyland (2018)
has also made similar comments and Hyland and Jiang’s (2021) analysis of the ESP
literature largely supports this view. While currirulum and assessment papers have
increased significantly since 1990, discussions of classroom practices seem to have
actually declined.

3.5. Social constructionist theory

Social constructivism is a theory which suggests that knowledge and social reality
are created through daily interactions between people, and particularly through
their routine discourse. Originating in the symbolic interactionism of Mead
(1934/2015) and developed within social psychology, it is now perhaps the
mainstream theoretical perspective in ESP today (Bazerman & Paradis, 1991;
Latour & Woolgar, 1986). Although not an explicit framework for shaping and
changing practice like, say, Legitimate Code Theory or Critical Realism (Ding &
Evans, 2022), social constructionism provides a theory of knowledge-building for
ESP. It underpins how the field understands discourse variation and its role in
recontextualizing and reproducing knowledge (Hyland, 2004).
Social constructivism takes a critical stance towards taken-for-granted
knowledge and, in opposition to positivism and empiricism in traditional science, 210
questions the idea of an objective reality. It says that everything we see and believe
is actually filtered through our theories and our language, sustained by social
processes, which are culturally and historically specific. We see and talk about the
world in different ways at different times and in different cultures and communities.
Discourse is therefore central to relationships, knowledge, and scientific facts as all
of these are rhetorically constructed by individuals acting as members of social
communities. The goal of ESP is therefore to discover how people use discourse to
create, sustain, and change these communities; how they signal their membership
of them; how they persuade others to accept their ideas; and so on. Stubbs succinctly
combines these issues into a single question:

The major intellectual puzzle in the social sciences is the relation between the
micro and the macro. How is it that routine everyday behavior, from moment to
moment, can create and maintain social institutions over long periods of time?
(Stubbs, 1996: 21)

Social construction, together with situated learning theory (Lave & Wenger,
1991) has thus become a central idea for many who work in ESP (e.g. Hyland, 2015a;
Johns, 2019). It sets a research agenda focused on revealing the genres and
communicative conventions that display membership of academic and professional
communities, and which create those communities. From this, ESP practitioners set

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a pedagogic agenda focused on employing this awareness of communicative

conventions to best help learners participate in such communities. The fact that
social constructionism makes truth relative to the discourses of social groups
sometimes draws criticism from those in the physical sciences, who prefer to see the
world as a tangible and observable thing which is knowable independently of the
language used to talk about it. This can sometimes make collaboration with the
sciences difficult. Barron (1992), for example, found that the ontological superiority
of science lecturers at Hong Kong University made them rigid when negotiating
learning tasks and assignments with ESP teachers and Hyland (2013b) found that
lecturers in science and engineering fields often treated student writing as
peripheral to knowing ‘facts’.
Nor do constructionists agree on precisely what the term community means,
despite its importance in this approach. Harris (1989), for example, argues we
should restrict the term to specific local groups to avoid the risk of representing
abstract groups (such as professions or disciplines) as static, abstract, and
deterministic. Discourse communities, however, are not monolithic and unitary
structures but the result of interactions between individuals with diverse
experiences, commitments, and influence. As a result, Porter (1992) understands a
community in terms of its forums or approved channels of discourse, and Swales
(1998) sees them as groups constituted by their typical genres, of how they get
things done, rather than existing through physical membership. For the most part,
recent research has sought to capture the explanatory authority of the concept by 211
replacing the idea of an overarching force that determines behaviour with that of
systems in which multiple beliefs and practices overlap and intersect.

4. WHAT ARE THE MAIN IMPACTS OF ESP ON TEACHING?

I now turn from some influences on ESP to offer a brief consideration of how ESP itself
influences classroom practices: where these influences have taken us. Basically, ESP
centres around a general acceptance that institutional practices and understandings
strongly influence the language and communicative behaviours of individuals. It also
stresses that it is important to identify these factors in designing teaching tasks and
materials to give students access to valued discourses and the means to see them
critically. I want to draw attention to four aspects of this characterization: (i) the study
of discourse rather than language, (ii) the role of teacher as researcher, (iii) the
importance of collaborative pedagogies and (iv) the centrality of language variation.

4.1. The study of discourse not (only) language

In the past ESP materials were often based solely on the lexical and grammatical
characteristics of scientific and business discourses in isolation from their social

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contexts. Today materials are more likely to acknowledge wider contexts, where
language and tasks are more closely related to the situations in which they are used.
These might include the use of English to negotiate problems on an international
building site (Handford & Matous, 2015), understand university tutorials (Coxhead
& Dang, 2019), or express a stance in academic blogs and three-minute theses (Zou
& Hyland, 2022). ESP practitioners now tend to address wider communicative skills
in their teaching. Central to ESP, then, is a focus on discourse rather than just
language and how communication is embedded in social practices and disciplinary
epistemologies.
To understand language and the functions it performs for people, we have to
appreciate how it is used within particular situations, so that identifying the
participants involved and the purposes they have in using the language are integral
to the construction of particular writing processes and written products. We need,
for instance, to understand the interpersonal conventions a sales manager might
observe when giving a client presentation or the knowledge a chemist assumes of
his or her audience when writing up a lab report. In the classroom, these concerns
translate into finding ways of preparing students to participate in a range of
activities and to see ESP as concerned with communicative practices rather than
more narrowly with specific aspects of language.

4.2. The teacher as researcher 212

ESP is, most centrally, research-based language education; a pedagogy for learners
with identifiable professional, academic, and occupational communicative needs.
This means that teachers can rarely be just consumers of the materials provided by
textbook publishers. The imperatives of specific English mean they must consider
the relevance of the studies they read in journals or the activities they find in set
textbooks to their own learners and, often, conduct their own research. Exploring
the texts or the target situations relevant to their students.
While ESP textbooks and so-called “English for General Academic Purposes”
or “English for General Business Purposes” courses are widespread, and may be
useful in some situations, there is a growing awareness that many of the skills,
language forms, and discourse structures these materials include are not easy to
transfer across situations (Hyland, 2016). In addition, many teachers are not only
becoming researchers of the genres and practices of target situations, but also of
their classrooms. Teachers have used qualitative techniques such as observations
and interviews to discover students’ reactions to assignments, the ways they learn,
and content instructors’ reactions to learners’ participation and performance (e.g.
Hyland, 2013a; Li & Casanave, 2012). This information then feeds back into the
design of ESP courses in the materials, tasks, and problems that are employed in the
classroom.

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4.3. Collaborative pedagogies

A third major impact is the distinctive methodological approach that ESP has
developed as a result of its view of specificity. ESP teachers must often work in
tandem with specialists in those fields it seeks to describe, explain, and teach.
English teachers bring an expertise in communicative practices to the subject skills
and knowledge of those working in particular target areas. As I have discussed
above, the idea that professional communities possess their own distinguishing
discoursal practices, genres, and communicative conventions is central to ESP.
Learners need to acquire a specific literacy competence together with the
knowledge and tradecraft of their professions, so subject knowledge becomes the
context for learning language. The topics, content, and practices of the profession
thus act as vehicles for teaching particular discourses and communicative skills. The
fact that the ESP practitioner is generally a novice in these areas means that
collaboration with both students and subject specialists is desirable, if not essential.
Students bring to their ESP classes some knowledge of their specialist fields
and the kinds of communication that go on in them, and this implicit communication
knowledge is important in a number of ways. First, it means that ESP teachers
should try and make use of the specialist expertise of their students to engage them
in relevant communicative activities. An imperative of ESP has always been a
reliance on tasks and materials that display authenticity, mimicking real-world texts
and purposes as far as possible, and learners themselves are among the best judges 213
of whether these are appropriate. Second, teachers can use the specialist knowledge
of their students in class as a learning resource. ESP tends to be strongly focused on
the idea of rhetorical consciousness-raising, helping students to become more
aware of the language and communicative practices in their fields. This means the
teacher seeks to assist learners to activate their implicit understandings and to build
on these, harnessing the methods of their fields to explore the ways that
communicative intentions are expressed.
Teachers also often need to collaborate with subject experts, and there are a
number of ways this can be done. First, the specialist can assist as an informant,
providing teachers, or students, with background and insights into the kinds of
practices that experts engage in and their understandings of the texts they use
(Johns, 1997). Alternatively, such collaboration can involve the specialist acting as a
consultant, assisting the ESP teacher to select authentic texts and tasks. Finally, and
more centrally, subject specialists sometimes collaborate directly with ESP teachers,
either in a team-teaching relationship or through a linked course which runs parallel
with the ESP course. This involves the ESP course supporting the content course
with the two teachers jointly planning tasks and coordinating instruction.
The literature reports mixed experiences of this kind of collaboration, with
some teachers describing ESP and subject teacher alliances as unrewarding. As
noted above, faculty teachers may tend to treat the English teachers as subservient
with the ESP course merely supporting the content course rather than being of equal

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importance to it (e.g. Barron, 1992; Turner, 2004). Others, however, report more
positive relationships (e.g. Arnó-Macià & Mancho-Barés, 2015). Hyland (2015b), for
instance, discusses how various degrees of cooperation with different faculties,
including co-teaching and co-assessment, helped invigorate the English curriculum
at Hong Kong University as well as providing valuable professional development
opportunities and gaining the teachers greater respect for their work.

4.4. The importance of discourse variation

Finally, as I have emphasised, ESP research strongly suggests that professional and
academic discourses represent a variety of specific literacies. While there may be a
“common core” of generic skills and linguistic forms which are transferable across
different settings and professions, this is likely to be very limited (Hyland, 2016).
The distinct practices, genres, and communicative conventions of each community
are directly related to the different purposes they have and their different ways of
seeing the world. As a result, investigating and teaching these inevitably takes us to
greater specificity in our classrooms. The idea of linguistic variation has been central
to ESP since its beginning and owes its origins to Michael Halliday’s work on register
in the 1970s, but it has gathered momentum as a result of a number of factors.
One reason has been a growing awareness of the complexities of community
literacies and the training that leads to professional membership. A large body of 214
survey research in the 1980s and early 1990s, for example, revealed the
considerable variation of discourses across the university (e.g. Horowitz, 1986).
This work shows that not only do different disciplines employ different genres but
that the structure of common genres, such as the experimental lab report, differed
completely across disciplines (Braine, 1995).
At the most obvious level, of variation is lexis, with disciplines having
completely different ways of talking about the world, so that students in different
subjects have to learn completely different vocabularies. Less obviously, a study of
an academic corpus of 4 million words showed that the so-called universal items in
Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List, actually have widely different frequencies
and preferred meanings in different fields (Hyland & Tse, 2007). So that

• ‘consist’ means ‘stay the same’ in social sciences and ‘composed of’ in the
sciences.
• ‘volume’ means book in applied linguistics and ‘quantity’ in biology.
• ‘abstract’ means ‘remove’ in engineering and ‘theoretical’ in social sciences.

So words which appear to be the same to students can have widely different
meanings across fields. Similarly, Ha and Hyland’s (2017) study of a 6-million-word
corpus from economics and finance identified 837 words which had a meaning
specific to those fields, although most of them also had a different general meaning too.

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 ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES: WHAT IS IT AND WHERE IS IT TAKING US?

More generally, we know that different disciplines value different kinds of

argument and set different writing tasks, so that analysing and synthesising multiple
sources are important in the humanities and social sciences while more activity-
based skills such as describing procedures, defining objects, and planning solutions
are required in science and technology fields. It is also the case that different fields
make use of different genres, so that in their large-scale corpus study of 30
disciplines in UK universities, Nesi and Gardner (2012) found 13 different “genre
families”, ranging from case studies through empathy writing to essays and reports.
These differ considerably in social purpose, genre structure and the networks they
form with other genres. Equally, in the workplace, the ability to communicate as an
insider is increasingly recognised as a marker of professional expertise. The
professional competency statements of nursing, law, and accountancy, for instance,
all refer to communicative abilities as central to these jobs, while caregivers,
therapists, doctors, and other professionals are also often judged by their ability to
gather and give information effectively.
This idea of different literacies is not just found in the genres professionals and
academics use or the tasks they perform but is supported by close textual analyses
of those genres. Successful communication depends on the projection of a shared
context, showing others that you are like them and can understand their
communicative needs and expectations. Communication, then, is effective only if
writers and speakers can draw on knowledge of prior texts to frame messages in
ways that readers and hearers recognise, expect and find persuasive. Their 171
215
messages must appeal to appropriate cultural and institutional relationships. This
directs us to the ways professional texts vary not only in their content but also in
different appeals to background knowledge, different means of persuasion, and
different ways of engaging with readers.
In sum, this research challenges the view that professional discourses are
differentiated only by specialist topics and vocabularies. It also undermines the idea
that there is a single ‘English’ that can be taught as a set of grammar rules and
technical skills usable across all situations of use. This helps teachers to see that if
students are having difficulties with the tasks they are asked to do at university,
these difficulties may not be due to proficiency or laziness. Their frustrations cannot
always be regarded as weaknesses easily corrected by additional grammar classes.
Instead, it encourages ESP teachers to find ways of integrating the teaching and
learning of language with the teaching and learning of disciplines and professions.

5. CONCLUSION
This overview has been necessarily selective, as limitations of space prevent a fuller
coverage of the theories that have influenced the growth of ESP and of the
contributions it has itself made to applied linguistics and language teaching.

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KEN HYLAND

There are, however, two clear ideas that emerge from this survey and which
might be seen as representing two basic principles of the field:

• First is the fact that ESP is founded on the idea that we use language as
members of social groups. This in turn means that it is concerned with
communication rather than language and with the ways texts are created and
used, rejecting an autonomous view of literacy to look at the practices of real
people communicating in real contexts.
• The second point is that ESP is unashamedly applied. The term applied,
however, does not mean lacking a theory. It means gathering strength by
drawing on those disciplines and ideas that offer the most for understanding
language use and classroom practice.

Not only is there an interdisciplinary research base at the heart of ESP, but this
results in a clear theoretical stance that distils down to three main commitments: to
linguistic analysis, to the principle of contextual relevance, and to the classroom
replication of community-specific communicative events.
It is clear that the same concerns which initially encouraged the pioneers to
turn to specialised English language teaching remain central to the field. An interest
in research-informed language instruction based on an understanding of specialised
discourses and the demands these make on users. But nothing remains static, and
216
ESP continually requires us to step into new domains and face new challenges.
Among these are finding ways to adequately marry textual and experiential methods
which allow us to better understand new domains of practice and explore unfamiliar
communicative worlds. In particular, the affordances of the internet, online
teaching, digital genres and automated feedback on learning will require our
attention, as will the growing demand for ESP by professional, technical, migrant
and blue-collar occupations. This will almost certainly require adding to our existing
toolkit of theories, methods and approaches, but there is no reason to suppose it will
mean abandoning those that have proven so useful in helping us thus far in building
plausible theories, detailed descriptions, relevant curricula and useful pedagogic
tasks.
[Paper submitted 22 Mar 2022]
[Revised version received 1 Apr 2022]
[Revised version accepted for publication 2 Apr 2022]

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KEN HYLAND is an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia. He was

previously a professor at University College London, the UEA and the university of
Hong Kong. He is best known for his research into writing and academic discourse, 220
having published 280 articles and 29 books on these topics with over 69,000
citations on Google Scholar. A collection of his work was published as The Essential
Hyland (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is the Editor of two book series with Bloomsbury
and Routledge, was founding co-editor of the Journal of English for Academic
Purposes and was co-editor of Applied Linguistics.

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