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English for Specific Purposes
Due to the development of the world’s economy during the 1960’s ESP emerged as an important discipline. -
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The register analysis phase
Register analysis of scientific and technical writing. Focus on teaching technical vocabulary of a specific field or profession and emphasis on the grammatical analysis of technical texts. -
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The rhetorical or discourse analysis phase
The attention shifted to sentence level to the level above the sentence: discourse and rhetorical analysis. In other words, stopped being interested in functional lexis, rather concentrate on why and how the sentences were formed and combined. -
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The target situation analysis
Discourse analysis gave no attention to the development of study skills. Therefore, skill-based courses started developing in order to address the learners’ specific language needs and purpose for learning it. Need analysis became a fundamental element. -
Genre analysis
Focus on studying the forms of particular discourse communities engage in, their communicative conventions and purposes, etc. -
Learning-centered approach
Teachers must look behind the target performance data to discover what processes/competences enable someone to perform, but more precisely not discovering the competence itself, but how someone acquires that competence. -
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Learner genre awareness
More emphasis on learner genre awareness, also continuous research on corpus studies. -
References
García, M. (1999) The development of ESP: Language description and its influence on pedagogical materials. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos, 1 (5), 205-228. Gonzalez, C. (2015). English for Specific Purposes:
Brief History and Definitions. Revista de Lenguas Modernas,1 (23), 379-386.