English for Specific Purposes: Core Principles and Practice

Posted on Oct 13, 2025 in Primary Education

What is English for Specific Purposes (ESP)?

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is a specialized field of English language teaching that aims to develop the specific skills of a learner in response to needs identified by various stakeholders (Abrar-ul-Hassan 2012, p. 4). This approach to teaching English focuses on specific linguistic features and skills, with all decisions based on the learner’s needs. Examples include Business English, English for Tourism, and English for Science and Technology.

Defining Attributes of ESP

  • Needs Analysis: It requires a prior analysis of the prospective learners’ communicative needs.
  • Responsive Curriculum: Contents, methods, and materials are designed in response to the specific skills learners need to acquire or improve.
  • Learner-Focused Goals: It centers on the learners’ reasons for taking the course, such as performance in studies or work.
  • Specialized Language: It involves the acquisition of specialized language (lexicon, grammar, etc.) and text types.

Areas of ESP

ESP has two main branches:

  • English for Academic Purposes (EAP): Focuses on study skills, such as writing dissertations or giving presentations.
  • English for Professional/Occupational Purposes (EPP/EOP): Focuses on skills necessary to carry out a profession or occupation, such as writing legal reports or using language specific to hotel staff.

ESP Pedagogy

Needs Analysis

Every decision regarding the design of an ESP course must be informed by a prior process of needs analysis (NA). NA seeks to provide answers to these three questions:

  1. How are the learners going to use the language?
  2. What are the specific skills they will need, and what is the target proficiency level they need to achieve?
  3. What types of genres for comprehension and production will they encounter?

Many different tools are used for NA, including questionnaires, interviews, diagnostic tests, samples of learners’ written/oral production, and previous research.

Course Design

  • Approaches: ESP does not espouse a particular teaching method, showing flexibility and eclecticism. However, three approaches have figured prominently over the years:
    • Language-centered approach: Focuses on specific language and genres.
    • Skills-centered approach: Focuses on the underlying skills and competencies necessary to comprehend and produce specific language/genres.
    • Learning-centered approach: Focuses on the learning process and the learners, not just the product.
  • Syllabus: The syllabus outlines the course content divided into manageable units with a temporal organization. It is based on the outcome of the NA but must remain flexible to allow for modifications in response to new realities and challenges that emerge during the course. NA is an ongoing process, not a one-time event before the course design.

Materials

There is a strong emphasis on using authentic materials, which are any materials not specifically prepared for language teaching purposes. Authenticity can be seen as a continuum:

  • Authentic: Not prepared for instructional purposes.
  • Semi-authentic: An authentic material that has been adapted for instructional purposes to reduce difficulty.
  • Pseudo-authentic: Materials developed for instructional purposes but following the template of authentic materials.

Guidelines for Materials

  • Adapt materials to the proficiency level of learners.
  • Ensure materials respond to the learners’ needs.
  • Emphasize creativity (production rather than repetition).
  • Simulate target situations.

Teachers

One of the problematic areas of ESP is the background of its teachers. The key question is: Who should teach an ESP course? A specialist in a given discipline or a language specialist? The ideal situation, where the ESP teacher has qualifications in both the target discipline and language education, is very rare. In practice, it is either language instructors (preferably with some knowledge of the target discipline) or discipline specialists (preferably with some knowledge of the target language).

Assessment

The goal of assessment in ESP is to check whether the course objectives have been met, meaning whether the learners have acquired the necessary skills. Ideally, assessment is carried out through a variety of methods implemented at different points in time. Assessment takes place at three levels:

  1. Measuring learners’ performance.
  2. Providing bidirectional feedback (learners to teachers and teachers to learners).
  3. Analyzing and responding to challenges and/or new needs that emerge during the course.

Description of ESP

  • Narrower Focus: ESP focuses on specific linguistic and communicative aspects rather than broader areas of knowledge.
  • Learner Needs: ESP aims to address the specific needs of learners in specific contexts of use.
  • Text Analysis: ESP focuses on the types of texts and language use that learners will encounter in specific study or work situations, not on general and decontextualized linguistic features.

ESP vs. General English

While General English (GE) can also be seen as addressing learner needs, ESP restricts this concept even further. The boundary is not always clear, but what distinguishes ESP from GE is not the existence of a need itself, but an awareness of its existence and its central role in the course. The foundation of ESP is the question: “Why does this learner need to learn English?” It is an approach where all decisions are based on the learner’s reasons for learning.

Common Misconceptions

  • ESP is not a matter of teaching specialized varieties/dialects of English.
  • ESP is not just about science words for scientists or hotel words for hotel staff.
  • ESP is not a specific teaching method that differs from those used in General English.

Summary of ESP Characteristics

In short, ESP is a type of English language teaching that is:

  • Designed to meet the specific needs of the learner.
  • Related in content to particular disciplines, occupations, and activities.
  • Centered on the language appropriate to those activities (syntax, lexis, discourse, semantics, etc.) and their typical genres.
  • Defined in contrast with General English, although the division is sometimes blurred.

Classification of ESP Areas

ESP can be classified in several ways:

  • A. By Purpose: English for Academic Purposes (EAP) vs. English for Professional Purposes (EPP) vs. English for Occupational Purposes (EOP).
    In workplace and professional contexts, EOP (also workplace language training) focuses on skills for a job, while EPP focuses on proficiency in a field of expertise (business, law, medicine).
  • B. By Location: Classroom-based vs. On-site workplace-based.
  • C. By Timing: Pre-experience ESP vs. During-experience ESP vs. Post-experience ESP.
  • D. By Specificity: English for General Academic/Professional/Occupational Purposes vs. English for Specific Academic/Professional/Occupational Purposes.

Specificity in EAP, EPP, and EOP

The distinction between general and specific purposes is crucial. For example, English for General Academic Purposes covers skills common to all disciplines:

  • Listening to lectures
  • Taking notes
  • Participating in class discussions, seminars, and tutorials
  • Reading textbooks, articles, and other material
  • Writing essays, examination answers, dissertations, and reports

In contrast, English for Specific Academic/Professional/Occupational Purposes acknowledges that the differences in skills and conventions across distinct disciplines (e.g., physics versus linguistics) may be greater than the similarities. Therefore, we need to be aware of the skills and language related to the demands of a particular discipline.

Origins and Development of ESP

ESP emerged as a response to three main trends:

  1. An increase in demand for courses on specific English after the Second World War, driven by global expansion in science, technology, and commerce.
  2. Developments in linguistics, which shifted focus from formal grammar rules to how language is used in real communication.
  3. Developments in educational psychology, which emphasized the central role of learners and their needs in the learning process.

Five Phases of Development

1. Register Analysis (1960s – early 1970s)

Led by figures like Peter Strevens and John Swales, this phase assumed that the English of Law is a different register than that of Biology. The main goal was to identify the grammatical and lexical features of each register to form the basis of course content. A register is a variety associated with a particular situation of use.

“We take the view that the difficulties which the students encounter arise not so much with a defective knowledge of the system of English, but from an unfamiliarity with English use…” – Allen & Widdowson (1974)

2. Rhetorical/Discourse Analysis

Pioneered by Henry Widdowson and Larry Selinker, this phase moved to the discourse level, examining how sentences are combined to produce meaning. Research focused on discovering the organizational patterns of texts and the linguistic means by which these patterns are signaled, assuming these patterns differed between fields.

3. Target Situation Analysis

This phase aimed to put existing knowledge on a more scientific basis. The concept of needs analysis emerged, proposing that syllabus design should be based on a detailed description of the learners’ needs in terms of communication purposes, situations, skills, and linguistic forms, as modeled by John Munby.

4. Skills and Strategies

This approach looked beyond surface linguistic forms to the thinking processes underlying language use. It argued that many reading and interpreting skills are universal, not language-specific. The focus was on teaching strategies like guessing word meanings from context and identifying text organization, with an emphasis on cognitive learning theories.

5. A Learning-Centered Approach

Proposed by Hutchinson and Waters, this approach critiqued previous phases for focusing on language use rather than language learning. It argued that simply describing what people do with language is not enough for someone to learn it. The focus shifted to the process of learning itself.

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)

English is the international language in academic and professional settings. This has led to different viewpoints: some see it as a neutral tool for knowledge exchange, while others argue its dominance leads to the loss of national rhetorical practices.

English as the Lingua Franca of Science

Over 90% of scientific publications are in English. This requires students and academics worldwide to learn not only academic English but also its associated practices and norms. The dominance of English is due to historical and political reasons, not intrinsic qualities of the language.

Consequences and Advantages

  • Consequences: The loss of other academic languages and practices, and difficulties for non-native English speakers to succeed. We may be missing important research from non-Anglophone regions.
  • Advantages: It facilitates the exchange of knowledge and collaboration, removing language as a barrier to accessing information. This has given rise to English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), referring to non-native varieties of English independent from native-speaker norms.

The Role of the ESP Teacher

While an ESP teacher has the same core responsibilities as any language instructor (teaching, assessing, etc.), their role differs in two practical ways:

  1. The demands are more comprehensive.
  2. The teacher’s background presents unique challenges.

Comprehensive Demands

The term ESP practitioner is often used because, besides teaching, they must also handle needs analysis, syllabus design, and the creation and adaptation of materials.

Teacher Background and Challenges

Most ESP teachers lack formal training in ESP, leading to several difficulties:

  • Lack of Tradition: ESP is a relatively new and rapidly changing field without a stable orthodoxy to serve as a guide.
  • New Domains of Knowledge: Teachers must often cope with subject matter they are not familiar with.
  • Change in Status: English teaching has shifted from a field of knowledge to a service industry for other disciplines, often leading to a lower status for ESP teachers within institutions.

New Domains of Knowledge

ESP practitioners, often with backgrounds in General English or philology, must understand the content of the texts and situations they teach. This raises several questions:

  • Does content need to be highly specialized? Not necessarily. Materials should be adapted to the teacher’s knowledge. A lot can be achieved with texts written for a more general audience.
  • Why is subject matter difficult for ESP teachers? Reasons include a lack of interdisciplinary training, being forced into the profession without choosing it, and a scarcity of formal training programs.
  • What knowledge is required? ESP teachers do not need to be subject experts. They need: (1) a positive attitude, (2) a basic knowledge of fundamental concepts, and (3) the ability to ask intelligent questions.

Negotiator and Coordinator Role

The changing status of English teaching requires ESP practitioners to act as negotiators.

  • With Colleagues: They must coordinate with subject specialists who may not see ESP as a priority, establishing clear guidelines and mutual support.
  • With Students: They must manage student expectations. Students might expect a physics class in English, but an ESP course focuses on language skills. For general ESP courses with students from diverse fields, teachers must adjust expectations and focus on common skills.

Sub-Technical and Technical Vocabulary

Vocabulary in ESP can be divided into four types:

  • Structural: e.g., are, this, however
  • General: e.g., table, run, dog
  • Sub-technical: e.g., engine, valve, budget
  • Technical: e.g., auricle, fissure, pragmatics

Sub-technical vocabulary lies between general and technical terms. These words are common in specialized texts, often shared with general English but acquiring a specialized meaning in context (e.g., the word ‘sentence’ in linguistics vs. law).

Technical vocabulary often requires less attention, as learners are usually familiar with these terms from their mother tongue, and they are often similar across languages (derived from Greek, Latin, or English). However, sub-technical vocabulary should feature prominently in lessons as it is common, crucial for understanding, and can be ambiguous.