The ESP reading problem

With the growth of English as the lingua franca of work and study, many non-English speakers find themselves needing to attain some level of proficiency in English in order to function in jobs or courses. However, they may have limited time to devote to language learning, and little interest in knowing English outside the work or study context. Responding to these circumstances, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) curriculum designers have attempted to reduce the time frame of learning through domain targeting. They attempt to identify and teach the lexis, syntax, functions and discourse patterns most commonly used in a domain (for chemistry students, test tubes, passive voice, clarification requests and laboratory reports). This approach has given waiters, tour guides and airline pilots enough English to function in their domains after relatively short periods in the classroom. But it runs into complications when the specific purpose is to read extended texts in a professional or academic domain.

It now seems clear that the cross-domain generalities of English (pronoun system, verb tenses, basic vocabulary, etc.) can be introduced and practised within a subset of the language. Simple reading tasks such as understanding signs and instructions can be undertaken knowing only the English used in a particular job or profession. But does this hold true for reading longer texts? Consider the position of the learner who knows the grammar of English and the technical terms of a domain: text analysis shows that these terms are typically rather few (Flowerdew, 1993c), roughly 5% of tokens (Nation, 1990).