Keynote

Developments in English for SpecificPurposes Research

Brian Paltridge
University of Sydney
This paper reviews trends and developments in English for specific purposes (ESP) research.
Topics covered include genre, corpus studies, English as a lingua franca, advanced academic
literacies, identity, and ethnographic approaches to researching specific purposes languageuse. Issues in developing courses that meet learners’ needs are discussed. A proposal is madefor how this might be further investigated, drawing on the notions of imagined and possible
selves. Other suggestions are also made for future directions in ESP research.

A number of previous publications have looked at current and future directions
in English for specific purposes (ESP) research. This includes journal articles
such as Paltridge and Starfield’s (2014) review in the Revue Française deLinguistique Appliqué and book chapters in Belcher’s (2009) English for SpecificPurposes in Theory and Practice, Belcher et al.’s (2011) New Directions in English
for Specific Purposes Research and Paltridge and Starfield’s (2013) Handbook ofEnglish for Specific Purposes. Reviews on this topic have also been published by
Hewings (2002), Master (2005), and Paltridge and Starfield (2011). Trends
that have been identified in these publications include a focus on genre, the useof corpora to carry out studies of ESP language use and the use and place ofEnglish as a lingua franca in ESP settings. Further trends are the examination ofadvanced academic literacies, ESP and identity, and ethnographic approaches toresearching specific purposes language use. Other topics that have been discussed
include disciplinary language and ESP, needs analysis and ESP, and critical
discourse analysis and ESP (see Belcher, Johns, & Paltridge, 2011, for chapterson these topics).
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Genre and ESP

A key notion in ESP is genre which has a long history in the area, especially inthe field of academic writing. Paltridge (2013) discusses the development ofgenre in the field of ESP, discussing its early origins, its relation with discourse
analysis, and what came to be known as the Create a research space (CARS)
model in ESP genre studies. He also discusses the relation between genre andlanguage, multimodality, genre as social action (Miller, 1984) in ESP research,
the teaching and learning of specific purpose genres and future directions for
ESP genre studies. Paltridge (2014) traces the history of genre and genre-basedteaching in the area of second language academic writing through key work thathas been influential in its development from Swales’ (1981) paper on research
article introductions, Miller’s (1984) “Genre as social action” and the workof the Sydney School of genre studies starting with Martin’s (1984) “Genre,
register, and language” through to the present day where both the Sydney School
and Rhetorical Genre Studies (Artemeva & Freedman, 2008) are now having an
influence on ESP research into genre.

Ethnographic Perspectives on ESP

Ethnographic research is becoming more common in ESP research, both on
its own and in combination with other research approaches in order to gain abetter and more contextualised understanding of ESP language use. Handford
and Matous (2011), for example, describe a study of on-site interactions in
the international construction industry where they used corpus techniques toanalyse audio and video data and combined this with interviews, field notes
and expert informant insights to examine the language used by Japanese andCantonese speaking workers on a construction site in Hong Kong. They did
this by shadowing two Japanese engineers and recording their interactions, theninterviewing them and a number of other people on the construction site.
Chun’s (2015) classroom ethnography of an English for Academic Purposes(EAP) program in Canada is a further example of how ethnography can help
us understand what is going on in ESP classrooms and how we might wish tochange them. Chun observed the EAP class over a period of nine months, as well74

Developments in ESP Research, OnCUE Journal, 9(2), pages 73-85

as examined the textbook and other curriculum materials used by the teacher. He
also took fieldnotes of his classroom observations and the meetings he had with
the instructor. He carried out semi-structured interviews with the teacher andher students, collected students’ written assignments and photos the students
had taken of their literacy practices outside of the classroom, as well as took
his own photos of the classroom interiors. Chun considered the findings of his
study in relation to theoretical discussions of critical literacy and how these aretaken up in actual practice, including what counts as “critical” (and “uncritical”)
in EAP classrooms and why this matters. He then proposes what an alternative
EAP curriculum might look like based on the findings of his study.
More broadly, Paltridge and Starfield (2016) provide an overview of EAP
research that has taken an ethnographic perspective. They discuss the basic
characteristics of ethnographically-oriented research and research techniquesthat are typically drawn on in these kinds of studies. They then review examplesof ethnographically-oriented research that focuses on writing, speaking, reading
and listening, and the teaching and learning of EAP. The chapter concludes bymaking suggestions for future ethnographically-oriented research in the area of
EAP (see also Dressen Hammouda, 2013, for a discussion of ethnography in
ESP research).
Paltridge, Starfield, and Tardy’s (2016) book examines ethnographic
research into academic writing, more specifically. Their book focuses on a rangeof contexts including undergraduate education, postgraduate education, andscholarly publication as well as the teaching and learning of academic writing.
The book contains chapters on context and academic writing and an overview
of methodological issues to consider in carrying out ethnographically-oriented
academic writing research. This ethnographically-oriented work parallels what
Berkenkotter (2009) calls a context-based, rhetorically-oriented, “wide-angle”
approach to genre analysis that moves beyond solely text-based analysis to
explore factors that influence the creation and reception of genres in particularsocial, cultural and political settings. Indeed, as Devitt (2009) argues, the formsof genres are only meaningful within their social, cultural (and individual)
contexts. That is, forms in genres “take their meaning from who uses them, in
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what ways, with what motives and expectations” (p. 35). This view of writing
further aims to understand texts not just from an outsider perspective but,equally and importantly, from insiders’ perspectives as well (Donahue and Lillis,2014) in terms of “what writers do, why and in which contexts” (Lillis, 2013, p.
159).

ESP and English as a Lingua Franca

English is now well established as the lingua franca of worldwide communication.
It is the language of international business, international conferences,international education, the international communications network,
international popular music and international travellers. A Thai, for example,
asking directions in Malaysia will probably make his or her first attempts at
communication in English. Likewise, a Japanese company doing business withany part of Europe is most likely to conduct its dealings in English. It is thenative language of neither group of speakers, but it is the language they will most
likely use to bridge the gap. Nickerson (2013) discusses ESP and English as a
lingua franca, while Mauranen (2011) discusses English as the lingua franca of
the academic world. In her book English as a Lingua Franca in the International
University, Jenkins (2014) discusses English as a lingua franca in academic
settings and, in particular, the politics of academic English language policies.
An important area of the lingua franca use of English is in the area of business
English, where there has been a wide range of research conducted on this topic.
The 2005 special issue of English for Specific Purposes provides examples of thisresearch. Other examples of research in this area are in Nickerson’s (2013)
chapter on this topic.

ESP and Advanced Academic Literacies

In the area of advanced academic literacies, Paltridge, Starfield and Ravelli(Paltridge et al., 2012a, 2012b; Ravelli, Paltridge, & Starfield, 2014; Starfield etal., 2012, 2104) have examined doctoral writing in the visual and performing
arts. The aim of their study was to gain an understanding, not only of the kindsof texts these students needed to write, but why they write them as they do, so76Developments in ESP Research, OnCUE Journal, 9(2), pages 73-85

that they could better advise students of the choices available to them in theirarea of study, as well as the constraints they still need to take account of in theirwriting. The data they drew on for their study included a nation-wide surveyof universities (in Australia) which offered these degrees, the collection of
doctoral texts, supervisor questionnaires, as well as interviews with students andsupervisors. In addition, they examined university prospectuses, information
given to students in relation to their candidature, the published research into
visual arts PhD examination, in-house art school publications and discussion
papers on the topic of our study. They also attended roundtable discussions on
doctoral research in the visual and performing arts as well as attended students’
exhibition openings.
Lillis and Curry (2010) and Li (2006a, 2006b, 2007) are further examplesof advanced academic literacies research, in their case, the examination of theexperiences of multilingual scholars seeking to publish their work in English (seeFlowerdew, 2013, for an overview of research in this area). In their book Academic
Writing in a Global Context, Lillis and Curry (2010) employed text analysis,
interviews, observations, document analysis, analysis of written correspondence,and reviewers’ and editors’ comments to examine these experiences. Their later
book (Curry and Lillis, 2013) drew on this research to propose strategies thatmultilingual writers can adopt to enhance their chances of getting published aswell as how other people can support these writers in this endeavor. Li (2006b)
examined a computer science student’s research writing in Chinese and English,
while Li (2006a) examined issues faced by a physics student wanting to publish
in English. In her (2007) paper Li examined a chemistry student’s process logs,
drafts of his writing, email exchanges she had with the student, and interview
data to examine how he went about writing for publication and the engagement
he had with others as he did this.

Identity, Learner Needs and ESP

Identity (Norton & Toohey, 2011) and imagined communities (Anderson,
1991; Kanno & Norton, 2003) are also important research developments in ESP
research. Belcher and Lukkarila (2011) argue that teachers need to learn more
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about their learners’ imagined communities and “who they want to become”—
that is, their imagined identities—if they really want to help them achieve theirlong-term, rather than just their short-term, language learning goals. That is, weneed to put our learners, as they say, “front and center” in our needs analyses
so that we can help them become who they want to become through language.
Without this, they ask, “How can our teaching every really be called learnercentered?” and “Can we claim to be responsive to learners’ own purposes forlanguage learning if we are not aware of their sense of their own needs andgoals?” (p. 89). A focus on identity in ESP teaching and learning, thus, has animportant role to play in bringing about social change which is, for many, a goalof language learning.
Gathering data on each learner’s goals and imagined identities, as they point
out, may not always be practical, but there are things that teachers can do to tap
into learners’ perceptions of their (evolving) identities that may not require a
lot of time and effort. These may include language and literacy autobiographies,reflective journals about language use, reports on interviews with classmates
about their learning goals, and collaborative survey projects. This learner identity
data collection, they argue, “encourages us to rethink not only what we offer
learners in terms of content … but also how we offer that content – the degree
to which we support learners’ construction of a vision they have of themselves”(Belcher & Lukkarila, 2011, p. 90). It is not, of course, the case that the courses
we teach can address the future needs of all our students, but the feedback wegive students on their work and the discussions we have with them in class canbe better focussed if we know where each of our students are wanting to go, what
they want to do, and who they want to become through English.
One way in which this matter can also be explored is through the idea of
imagined and possible selves (Ryan & Irie, 2014; Henry, 2015); that is, who itis that our learners want to become or imagine they can be through English.
Dörnyei (2009) suggests we do this by examining learners’ views of their ideal L2
self, their ought-to L2 self, and how their L2 learning experiences relate to this(Dörnyei, 2009, 2010). He outlines these as:• The Ideal L2 Self; that is, who students would like “to be” in their second78

Developments in ESP Research, OnCUE Journal, 9(2), pages 73-85

language• The Ought-to L2 Self ; the attributes students believe they ought to possessin order to meet expectations and to avoid possible negative outcomes• The L2 Learning Experience; how students’ language learning experiences
relate to their ideal L2 self and their ought-to L2 self; that is, the impact of
the teacher, the curriculum, the peer group, and the students’ experienceof success in relation to their possible selves.
What we find from these investigations can then be drawn on to help learners
build a vision (Dörnyei & Kubanyiova, 2014) for who they want to be throughEnglish and how they might go about achieving this.
While studies of this kind have been carried out in the area of English
language teaching in general (e.g., Dörnyei et al., 2006; Ryan, 2009; Taguchi
et al., 2009), there has been less attention to this in the area of ESP. This
research can give us an inside view of the worlds in which our learners are bothparticipating and in which they wish to participate. It can also show us ways
in which we can help learners become central rather than peripheral membersof their desired academic, professional or other communities in a way that canmake their imagined communities more of a reality for them.

Conclusion

An interesting trend that can be seen from the work that has been referred to inthis paper is that much of it is qualitative in orientation (see Tardy, 2013, for areview on research methods often used by ESP researchers). Gollin-Kies (2014)
points to this trend in ESP research in her review of articles published between
2003 and 2012 in the journals English for Specific Purposes and the Journal of
English for Specific Purposes. The most common type of study she found was theanalysis of written discourse and a predominance of ethnographic methods. She
also saw an increase in the use of corpus techniques to analyse written discourse.
There were very few experimental studies, she found, and barely any large-scale
empirical studies in the years of publication she examined. This is perhaps likesome other but not all (see Benson, et al., 2009) journals in the field of English
language teaching such as TESOL Quarterly (Gollin-Kies, 2014; Paltridge &79Paltridge

Mahboob, 2014) where a similar trend can be seen.
Gollin-Kies (2014) suggests editors of ESP journals actively encourage morequantitative articles to counter this current imbalance. It could be, however,that this lack of quantitative research is not, as Gollin-Kies points out, the resultof a “strategy of exclusion” (p. 33), but rather that this is what ESP researchers
are mostly doing and the view of research (and reality) with which they are
predominantly working. In my view the call should be to authors to take on morelarge-scale empirical work which will bring a quantitative dimension back into
focus and provide a balance to the qualitative orientation which we currently
see in ESP research. Gollin-Kies also proposes more mixed methods studies
that draw on the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative orientations toresearch as well as more collaborative, larger scale mixed method research acrossinstitutions as a counter to focusing on just a single research perspective and thelimitations that working with each of these, on their own, entails. All of this canonly benefit future ESP research, in my view.

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Author bio

Brian Paltridge is Professor of TESOL at the University of Sydney. He has recently
completed a book on academic writing (with Sue Starfield and Christine Tardy) tobe published by Oxford University Press. He is a co-editor of TESOL Quarterly andeditor emeritus of English for Specific Purposes. brian.paltridge@sydney.edu.au
Received: January 24, 2015
Accepted: March 17, 201585