Developing English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in Europe: mainstream approaches and complementary advances
Résumé
Teachers and scholars of English studies have long worked for would-be linguists who study the
language of the English-speaking peoples, their literatures and their cultures. Yet, over the last fifty
years or so, an increasing number of them have been facing an altogether different challenge:
teaching English to students of other disciplines such as law, engineering, business or technology.
The demand for training in English for non-English learners has been spurred by globalisation and
has generated numerous teaching solutions worldwide which generally come under the umbrella
name of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). This lecture examines the pedagogical, scientific and
institutional issues resulting from these evolutions while focusing on what is specifically at stake in
the development of ESP in Europe.
It first provides a historical overview of the advances pioneered by successive generations of British
and American colleagues to adapt English language teaching to the particular requirements of
professional or academic non-language learners, many of them in non English-speaking
environments. Since the 1960s, they have produced sophisticated procedures to identify learners’
needs (needs analysis, e.g., Hutchinson & Waters 1987), they have studied the types of discourse
that are to be taught (genre analysis, e.g., Swales 1990) and they have built a wide array of ESP
sub-branches such as English for Medical purposes, English for Legal Purposes, English for
Academic Purposes... (Paltridge & Starfield 2013).
The lecture then turns to the development of ESP in recent years, especially in the European and
French contexts. It shows that the generalisation of English language teaching in practically all
professional and academic domains increases the demand for skilled ESP practitioners when very
few are on offer. This evolution has serious long-term consequences, not only at the institutional
and pedagogical levels, but also at the epistemological level where ESP is scientifically studied and
researched.
The discrepancy between offer and demand in ESP teachers is particularly acute in France where
language teaching has become compulsory throughout higher education since the 1980s and where
English is overwhelmingly the students’ first choice. The lecture’s third part examines how French
researchers attempt to complement ESP approaches with alternative scientific and pedagogical
views in order to tackle the problems inherent in their institutional environment. The conclusion
suggests that these advances may be of wider interest for the world’s ESP community and for
English language specialists in general.
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