Communicating Science: ESP studies at the outset of the 21st Century

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is now a firmly established sub-discipline in Applied Linguistics with research in this area making an important contribution to teaching. Over the last four decades ESP research has seen a number of changes in focus from the early studies in Register Analysis in the 1960’s, through work in Rhetorical Analysis in the 1980’s, to Genre Analysis, the current dominant paradigm. Each of these approaches had its own methodology. The early work on register used needs analyses as a basis of syllabus design; the New Rhetoricians drew on insights from other disciplines as well as Applied Linguistics. The Genre Analysts examine not only representative texts of a particular disciplinary community, but also the physical situation in which they are produced. Analysis, therefore, has become more ethnographic and genre is conceived as a dynamic phenomenon, subject to change and adaptation by the participants, in accordance with the social purposes that the academic context demands. The notion of discourse community has thus become central to an understanding of how genres are framed. With the advent and refinement of computer-based corpora it is possible nowadays to relate the quantitative data that emerge form concordance analysis to discourse features of texts. The impact of new technologies has also led to the creation of new genres, such as e-mail, postings on electronic lists or e-logs (see, for example, Nancy Lea Eik-Nes’s contribution to this volume), which call for research and pedagogical responses. Two other areas, namely critical approaches to research and discourse (Benesch; Canagarajah), and cultural differences (Ostler; SalagerMeyer, Alcaraz Ariza, and Pabón Berbesí) are having an increasing influence on the development of ESP studies. We must recall at this point that ESP, as Dudley-Evans and St John note, has traditionally been divided into two main areas: English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Occupational Purposes (EOP). While EAP is concerned with the language taught in specific disciplines (e.g. biology, psychology, linguistics), EOP refers to English that is not for academic but for professional purposes, that is, the language taught in administration, law, business or medicine. We may thus distinguish between studying the language and discourse of, for example, medi-