Specific and Specifiable Elements in ESP

The ESP course design begins with collecting data on students’ language needs and the
target situations of language usage. Need analysis in ESP often focuses on the skills learners
need to study or work effectively in their target environments. In analyzing needs, ESP
curriculum designers identify which micro skills from general pool of skills used across a range
of environments are important for a particular group of ESP learners.

Flowerdew and Peacock (2001a) report that skills-based approaches have been
particularly important in EAP and point to the fact that many learners in South America have
traditionally needed only a reading knowledge of English. Studies often focus on identifying the
skills needed for a particular workplace or study in a discipline.

Learners’ needs analysis is followed by the ESP syllabus design which can focus on
content, skills, and methods (Martin, 2000). The first stage includes analyzing students’ needs,
designing the course syllabus, selecting methodology and materials. The second stage is ESP
teaching. During the third stage the feedback from instructors, coordinators, and students is
collected in order to further modify or change the course design (Dudley-Evans, 2001;
Flowerdew & Peacock, 2001; Jordan, 1997, p. 57).
The element in English for Specific Purpose:

1. Language system (specifiable)

2. Language use (specific), Language use refers to the communicative meaning of language.
It can be compared to usage, which refers to the rules for making language, such as
English in medicine, English in fashion, English in Banking, and everyday conversation.
3. Language skills (specifiable) are a set of four skills (listening, speaking, reading,writing)
that allow an individual to comprehend and produce spoken language for proper and
effective interpersonal communication.
4. Content (specific), the ESP based on content emphasize a particular topic in language
instruction, advertising, publicity, press release for students of Journalism.so, for students
of Journalism such ESP course would include teaching English for interviewing, covering
sports events or breaking news.

Grammatical structures and core vocabulary

It it certain that grammar has important roles in some aspects of ESP learning. Hedge
(2000) points out that in general English teaching, there has been a revival of interest in grammar
in recent years and yet for many teachers, grammar has always been a key focus of their
instruction.
 In general, grammar can basically play in two parts in ESP learning: one is to enhance
comprehensible input and the other is to monitor effective output. To enhance comprehensible
input means that learners use grammar knowledge they have learnt to solve some puzzles in their
ESP reading comprehension. When the learners cannot understand the meaning of a complicated
sentence, they need to analyze the sentence structure and function, in order to comprehend the
sentence. To monitor effective output means monitoring the oral or written expression, because
many ESP learners would make some mistakes in the oral or written.

One early approach to ESP, Register Analysis, was concerned with identifying and
teaching the grammatical structures and vocabulary seen as of central importance in scientific
and technical writing. The approach was premised on the ideas that although scientific and
technical writing has the same grammar as general English, particular grammatical structures and
vocabulary items are used more frequently.

An EAP-oriented research project aimed to assess whether First-year students from a range of
disciplines in an Indonesian university had a sufficiently well-developed English vocabulary for
academic study purposes (Nurweni & Read, 1998). The study investigated how well the students
knew a set of core vocabulary items. It aimed to establish how many words the students
knew and their depth of knowledge of the words, such as their understand-ing of the range of
uses of the words. For example, teaching specialist vocabulary to medical students. The purpose
of ESP classes is to prepare the learners to communicate effectively in their target work setting
during their clinical practice abroad.

In ESP teaching, we may come across subject-specific vocabulary, which is non-core as

far as the language as a whole is concerned. ‘This is because it is not neutral in field and is
associated with a specialized topic.’(Carter, 1988:172) They are subject-specific core
vocabulary, for example, placebo and dialysis. Learners with specific or academic purposes may
need to acquire them in medical texts and lessons