My first encounter with English for specific purposes (ESP) teaching was in the late 1980s. I was asked to lead a small team of teachers in designing a new English course for university students of art and design. We had just a few weeks to devise a teaching plan and materials. ESP was famously described at that time as 'essentially a materials…

This paper identifies major strands of research interest in the ESP literature. Specifically, the review aims to highlight mainstay topics that have characterised research in this area as well as topics that are emerging in this field, or that have received rather limited research interest to date. Linguistic inquiry has been a major thrust of…

Teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) and for specific purposes (ESP) are demanding areas in which to work. Teaching in these areas typically includes a range of tasks, such as investigating learner needs and specialist discourse, developing courses and materials in addition to classroom teaching. Therefore, teachers face a range of tasks…

Outlines the procedures followed in the needs analysis (NA) project carried out in 1996 at the College of Petroleum and Engineering at Kuwait University. Focuses on the steps taken in the project and the rationale behind them. Offers an illustration of an NA project and to show the procedural steps involved. (Author/VWL)

Using a small corpus of classroom discourse from graduate business administration seminars, some language features of student-led discussion are identified, then considered in relation to syllabus content. The fruitfulness of a discourse-based approach to both description of formal spoken-language genres and to classroom methodology is discussed.…