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John Lackrom, Larry Selinker, and Louis Trimble began to dominate the field. EST grammar and the authors’ rhetorical purposes in texts were central, a connection that continues to be the focus of much of the ESP discourse analysis. In addition, they wrote Grammar and Technical English.
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The most famous of the studies in this period is found in Tarone, which appeared in the first volume of what was then called The ESP Journal, established by Grace Burkhart at the American University in Washington, DC and was reprinted, with commentary, in Episodes in ESP.
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A second historical period in ESP is bounded by the work of Swales, whose seminal "Aspects of Article Introductions", first appeared in the United Kingdom.
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During this period, special issues of the journal were devoted to teacher training in 1983 in honor of Jack Ewer; in 1984 to Vocational ESP by JoAnn Crandall. In 1987, to interlanguage by Larry Selinker, and to the training of international teaching assistants in 1989 by Richard Young.
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During these early years of ESPJ publication appeared a considerable number of articles on needs assessment, the core of ESP practitioner work; though as West (1984) showed in her discussion of vocational ESL.
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He explored the problems that L2 speakers may have with distinguishing between objective statements of fact and author-marked observations in written texts.
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Jacobson concentrated upon the strategic rather than grammatical or discourse competence needs of students in a physics lab.
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Doushaq published a piece of stylistic errors made among Arab students of English for academic purposes (EAP).
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He classified essay examination prompts in research that has had broad implications for future work.
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ESP leaders were making an effort to expand the movement’s horizons. The editors of ESPJ , John Swales and Ann Johns expressed their concerns that ESP continued to be limited and was therefore considered irrelevant by most of the TESOL community.
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In World War II the central focus of ESP research was English for
science and technology (EST) in academic contexts. -
Tarantino used a face-to-face questionnaire interview to measure the macro and micro level needs of 53 EST researchers and students.
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Morrow contrasted the use of conjuncts in two genres: business news stories and academic journal articles.
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Braine examined students’ writing assignments in
two undergraduate courses in science and technology. -
The approach became recognized when it appeared in augmented form in Genre Analysis, initiating a research boom.
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Adamson employed a case study approach to 15 ESL
students, investigating both the effective and ineffective strategies that were applied to academic classrooms, concluding that English for academic purposes is best taught along with academic content. -
Tedick studied the impact of students’ subjective knowledge on their writing performance.
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Salager-Meyer’s contrasts between metaphors in French and Spanish Medical English research articles appeared in ESPJ.
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During this period, two new international journals appeared, both of which included research articles that might have been published in ESPJ.
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The Journal of Second Language Writing (JSLW ) was founded in by Ilona Leki and Tony Silva. Many of its early articles focussed on writing processes or student errors, topics that have not been central to ESP research.
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Responding to the overwhelming number of articles in ESPJ and elsewhere on academic texts, students, and contexts, Liz Hamp-Lyons and Ken Hyland established the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP).