Abstract
The field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) emerged roughly fifty years ago in response to rising pressures on schools and educators to cater to the individual needs of their students and to keep up with the rapidly evolving field of theoretical linguistics. Although it developed out of ELT, Applied Linguistics in the subject of TESOL is now recognised as its own distinct discipline. This paper will cover the origins, evolution, and status quo of ESP, and then anticipate the future directions of this vital field. Text-first and context-first approaches to discourse structure analysis are compared, as well as the theoretical, analytic, and methodological developments of ESP, the roles of genre analysis, target language use situation analysis, and context in ESP, and the 'just-in-case' EAP and 'just-in-time' EOP approaches are discussed. The paper predicts that ESP will adopt a wide-angled epistemological stance to survey the (a) discursive, (b) generic, (c) social, and (d) organisational structures of specialised texts and discourses, as well as those of texts and discourses simplified for the popularisation of science, in a systematic and contextualised manner. Practitioners of ESP are likewise cautioned against the perils of spreading knowledge of ESP's powerful genres.
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Dr. G. Ramamurthy
Associate Professor in English, Usha Rama College of Engineering and Technology, Telaprolu, Andhra Pradesh.
Received: 11-11-2017, Accepted: 02-12-2017, Published Online: 08-12-2017