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World War in 1945 heralded an age of enormous
and unprecedented expansion in scientific, technical and economic
activity on an international scale. This expansion created a world unified
and dominated by two forces - technology and commerce - which in
their relentless progress soon generated a demand for an international
language. -
The effect was to create a whole new mass of people wanting to learn English, not for the pleasure or prestige of knowing the language, but because English was the key to the international currencies of technology and commerce.
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Operating on the basic principie that the English
of, say, Electrical Engineering constituted a specific register different from that of, say, Biology or of General English, the aim of the analysis was to identify the grammatical and lexical features of these registers. -
ESP was something that was unplanned and was only accelerated due to the oil crisis of the 70s
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In this decade, emphasis on student’s necessary skills resulted in the development of needs analyses.
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Whereas in the first stage of its development, ESP had focused on language at the sentence level, the second phase of development shifted
attention to the level above the sentence, as ESP became closely involved with the emerging field of discourse or rhetorical analysis. -
The language we speak and write varies considerably, and in a
number of different ways, from one context to another. In English Language teaching this gave rise to the view that there are important
differences between, the English of commerce and that of engineering. -
What it aimed to do was to take the existing knowledge and set it on a more scientific basis, by establishing procedures for relating language analysis more closely to learners' reasons for learning.
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The learner-centered approach grew stronger, and materials development productions tried to respond to this new trend.
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communication than just the surface features that
we read and hear. We need to distinguish, as Chomsky did with
regard to grammar, between performance and competence, that is
between what people actually do with the language and the range of
knowledge and abilities which enables them to do it (Hutchinson and
Waters, 1981). -
The principal idea behind the skills-centered approach is that underlying all language use there are common reasoning and interpreting processes, which, regardless of the surface forms, enable us to extract meaning from discourse.
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Importantly, this teaching method contemplates certain peculiarities and differences from the more common teaching methods. For instance, teacher-centered approaches follow behavioral concepts and apply them to learning. Therefore, teachers become experts who guide students and share knowledge with them. Notably, students there appear as empty vessels that are to be filled with knowledge.