Specificity in LSP

The defining feature of our field is the teaching and use of language for specific purposes. Not surprisingly, this has led to a debate over just how specific those purposes should be. The debate is longstanding, stirred initially by Hutchinson and Waters' classic 1980 article, 'ESP at the Crossroads' and reinvigorated most recently by Hyland (2002), who argues that the field has drifted away from specificity, becoming too generalized and diffuse. This paper lays out the arguments on both sides and then stakes out a position that draws from each of them. While agreeing with some of Hyland's criticisms of the 'wide-angle' position (for example, that generalized LSP can fail to appreciate the distinct linguistic and rhetorical features of specialized discourses), the paper criticizes his 'narrow-angle' position as well by pointing out that it can easily lead to a teacher-centered prescriptivism and to an overly rigid focus on certain forms and tasks at the expense of others. Furthermore, such an approach fails to prepare students for the unpredictable new forms of communication that await them in their professional careers. In general, a teachercentered approach, no matter how specific, is unlikely to have the pedagogical effectiveness of a student-centered approach, especially in heterogeneous classes. Specificity, it is argued, must ultimately be supplied by the student, not by the teacher, for it is the student more than the LSP teacher who is in the process of becoming an insider and whose interests are best served by becoming an astute analyst of the specialist discourse. The teacher's role should be that of facilitator, instructing students in analytic strategies, both rhetorical and textual. The paper concludes with a number of illustrations in how this can be done, drawing especially on work in genre study

Review Essay

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98420/1/j.1467-1770.1980.tb00159.x.pd

The Need for Professionally Oriented ESL Instruction in the United States

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90262/1/3586694.pd

Rethinking Genre from a Sociocognitive Perspective

This article argues for an activity-based theory of genre knowledge. Drawing on empirical findings from case study research emphasizing “insider knowledge” and on structuration theory, activity theory, and rhetorical studies, the authors propose five general principles for genre theory: (a) Genres are dynamic forms that mediate between the unique features of individual contexts and the features that recur across contexts; (b) genre knowledge is embedded in communicative activities of daily and professional life and is thus a form of “situated cognition”; (c) genre knowledge embraces both form and content, including a sense of rhetorical appropriateness; (d) the use of genres simultaneously constitutes and reproduces social structures; and (e) genre conventions signal a discourse community\u27s norms, epistemology, ideology, and social ontology. © 1993, SAGE PERIODICALS PRESS. All rights reserved

Technical writing and professional communication

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