Language for Specific Purposes
An Overview of Language for Specific Purposes
Norris (2006, p. 577) states that the goals of most foreign 
language (FL) instruction in higher education within the United States 
are built around three main components: (a) the acquisition of the 
knowledge of language skills for general communication use; (b) 
exposing learners to other cultures and ideas; and (c) fostering an 
appreciation of differences in cultures and ways of thinking.An adequate career guidance, which always takes place 
either implicitly and/ or explicitly in an ESP course, will always take into 
account the harmonious conjunction of personal and social factors at 
the time of educating the personality of the students for the 
achievement of the conscious self-determination of their professional 
interests at the time of choosing a profession or consolidating their
motives of election.(Hutchinson & 
Waters, 1987, p. 8). Concepts such as students' needs and interests took 
relevance. That propitiated the elaboration of courses based on what 
was important for the student, tailored to his needs with the underlying 
idea that in such way motivation and performance of the student 
would improve. English for Specific Purposes is related, then, to applied 
linguistics and discourse analysis, pragmatics, socio-cognitive theory, 
communicative language teaching, the student-centered teaching 
trend, rhetoric and critical literacy. It is, by all means, a direct result of 
the world evolution in those fields of knowledge. The work -The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching,? These authors consider that 
the term specific is used to refer to the varieties of the language that is 
used in a professional activity. In 1975 the British Council, under the auspices of the Ministry 
of Foreign Affairs of Great Britain, made the first attempt of 
classification of ESP. Researcher Imola Katalin Nagy splits the history and 
development of the -ESP Movement? in four phases (2014, pp. 262-
272): a first phase, between the decades of the 1960s and the 1970s, in 
which ESP teaching focused on the sentence-level.According to Strevens, the essential characteristics of specific 
purpose instruction are that it:
Consist of [teaching] which is: designed to meet specified 
needs of the learner; related in content (i.e., in its themes and topics) 
to particular disciplines, occupations, and activities; centered on the 
language appropriate to those activities, in syntax, lexis, discourse,
semantics, etc; (1988, pp. 1-2)
In other words, LSP (or ESP) incorporates both linguistics and 
content area knowledge that is specific to a particular context based 
on the needs of the learners.Syllabuses can be synthetic or analytic (Long & Crookes, 
1993, pp. 11-12), grammatical, lexical, grammatical-lexical, situational, 
topic-based, notional, functional-notional, mixed or -multi-strand?,
procedural or process (Ur, 2002, pp. 178-179), based on goals and 
objectives, competencies, standards, tasks
and follow a 
comprehensive approach (Nunan, 1988, pp. 55- 65), among others. In more detail this definition means that the process of 
gathering information about the needs of a particular program or 
course requires that this information come from several different 
sources and perspectives (e.g., different stakeholders, such as 
potential or past learners, instructors, administrators, employers) and 
that this information should be gathered using a variety of
complementary methods (e.g., interviews, surveys, document analysis, 
focus groups).The 
historical reasons behind this trend have been well documented and 
are beyond the scope of this volume (for a more detailed account, 
see Hutchinson & Waters, 1987; Mackay & Mountford, 1978; Johns, 
2013), but nevertheless, this rise has placed considerable value on ESP 
as a field of study, and as such, the majority of research on LSP has 
been carried out in English learning contexts.ese characteristics 
become essential at the time of defining what a teaching based on 
English for Specific Purposes is and constitute the framework of 
reference for identifying it.
In other words, English for Specific Purposes refers to the 
teaching of this language with markedly utilitarian purposes, with the 
objective of attaining specific abilities of the language making use of 
real situations, so that students can use it in their future profession or 
understand issues related to their area of specialization. Narrower views of LSP believe that the curriculum should be focused upon a fixed and limited set of language uses and features (Hyland, 
2002; Johns & Dudley, 1980), fearing that a wider scope places LSP too 
close to general purposes curriculum and thus defeats the purpose of 
qualifying it at specific in the first place.The theoretical foundations 
that lay the ground for its significance, its history, its distinguishing 
features, its evolutionary developmental stages, its objectives, the roles 
of the practitioner, the stages for its teaching and the required 
elements for syllabus design are discussed in this article in order to 
contribute to its knowledge and later implementation in the teaching 
of English in specific contexts.Their theoretical and methodological contributions deal with 
the features and essential issues of ESP teaching, the definition of its 
categories, competence models and methodologies for teaching, 
exercises, tasks, techniques, methods and procedures, among others. A model that could be useful 
to implement, without excluding others which may be equally valid, is 
offered by Castillo, Corona, Macola and Pena (Corona & Terroux,
1997, pp. 25- 49), who argue and exemplify exhaustively the four 
stages of an operational model proposed by R. Mackay of Concordia 
University of Montreal, Canada.Likewise, in assessment terms, a study by Elias 
and Lockwood (2014) showed that while an LSP course assisted 
learners in gaining the skills to pass their interviews and secure 
employment, it lacked a connection to other tasks in the workplace 
and thus limited their ability to be successful at their jobs.Brown (1995, p. 36) defines 
needs analysis in the following way:
The systematic collection and analysis of all subjective and 
objective information necessary to define and validate defensible 
curriculum purposes that satisfy the language learning requirements of 
students within the context of particular institutions that influence the 
learning and teaching situation.M. Gotti (1991) abounds on the topic 
and points out the conditions for the language to be specific: 
emphasis on the user (didactic sphere), in the reality of reference 
(pragmatic-functional sphere) and in the specialized use of language 
(linguistic-professional sphere), (cited by Gratton, Francesco, 2009, p. 
14).They broadened the concept by adding 
more variable characteristics taking into consideration factors such as 
(a) in this approach teaching shares terms and abilities among the 
disciplines of study and the business activity and (b) its teaching must 
always reflect the underlying concepts and the activities of the 
discipline which is object of study.ESP as we know it today began in part as a reaction to the 
notion of TENOR as a way for curriculum developers to respond to the 
call for English education internationally in a way that was 
manageable and sensible for learners in EFL/ESL contexts (Abbot, 1981; 
Carver, 1983).Within ESP, several branches of study have emerged over 
the years, the best known and most frequently researched of these are 
English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Science and 
Technology (EST), and to a lesser extent, English for Occupational 
Purposes (EOP).It is commonplace in courses devised for professionals of 
engineering, tourism, health care, aviation, informatics and business 
contexts.