ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

Influences:

Needs Analysis

Defines: specific sets of skills, texts, linguistic forms, communicative practices.

Learner needs

What the learner must do in order to learn.

Focused on: lexical and syntactic features of texts

Rights analysis

Refers to a framework for studying power relations in classrooms and institutions.

Ethnography

Gives a participant-oriented description of individuals' cultural practices.

Focuses on a holistic explanation of communicative behavior.

Helps to identify the discursive practices.

Useful in exploring student practices.

Used to argue for pedagogic appropriacy.

Critical perspectives

Develop:

a growing sense in ESP to make discourses.

a critical awareness of how language works to support institutional hierarchies and inequalities.

Contrastive Rhetoric

Influenced the study of academic and professional cultures.

Assume that such differences may influence how students write in English.

Social Constructionist Theory

The mainstream theoretical perspective.

Knowledge and social reality are created through daily interactions.

Discourse Analysis

Involved attention to features of texts and their rhetorical purposes.

Influenced by Systemic Functional Linguistics.

Practices of particular social groups.

Specific communicative needs.

Goals:

Discover how people use discourse to create, sustain, and change social communities.

Allow learners to have language skills on order to carry out a role.

Meet specific needs of learners.

Focuses on: