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Distinguished Lecturers Series (Tokyo): "English for Specific Purposes: Exploring Concepts for EFL Environments"

by Dr. Judy Noguchi (Mukogawa Women's University, School of Pharmaceutical Science and Osaka University Graduate School of Engineering)

Seminar Overview

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is a multidisciplinary approach that offers promising possibilities for an EFL educational environment. ESP is often mistaken as simply being the drilling of technical terms and grammatical structures for science and technology majors or the teaching of business English. ESP actually can offer a viable approach for enabling tertiary-level or adult language learners to efficiently acquire a sufficient level of mastery in the communicative forms of language required for their professional or occupational needs. When presented as an approach to observing and classifying such linguistic needs, ESP can also help equip students with the tools necessary to continue their linguistic development outside the classroom.

In this seminar, we will start with a brief look at the history of ESP and then consider its definition, which can be elusive in that it seems to cover such a wide range of fields, areas, and approaches. This will be followed by discussion and consideration of needs analysis in ESP, course design, teacher- and learner-generated materials, and assessment. Concepts and practices useful for ESP teaching will be discussed, including genre analysis, task-based language teaching, the focus-on-form approach, the social construction of knowledge, critical discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics.

For hands-on work, participants will be asked to bring in written texts that they would like to use to create ESP teaching materials. Oral texts are acceptable but should be available as transcriptions (e.g., customer service telephone calls, service encounters, lectures, or conference presentations). The texts should not have been created for English teaching. They should be authentic texts written to fulfill a professional or occupational need, for example, research papers published in a scientific journal, company reports, operation manuals, or business letters. If possible, participants should bring in at least three examples of texts of the same type, e.g., three different business letters written for a similar purpose and audience but by different people.