ESP after thirty years: an overview of the position of ESP in the 1990s

Abstract

In the view of many ESP practitioners and thinkers, the year 1962 has increasingly been considered the year which marks the birth of ESP, the son of ELT (see.for example, Swales 1985: 1-3). The year 1992 could mark the thirtieth birthday of ESP which is a good opportunity to reconsider the sttus of ESP, which is arquably now. The article of Barber (1962) 'Some measurable characteristics of modern scientific prose?  indicated clearly the  birth of ESP. On the basis of these considerations, the principal aim of this paper is to take a fresh look at ESP and its status in terms of its current issues and recent drawbacks.

Although there has been a common agreement among ESP practitioners, applied linguists, etc. that ESP should not be separated from ELT (Mackay and Mountford 1978 and Widdonwson 1983: 83, for instance), the real and actual conditions of ESP demonstrate that it has started to distant itself from ELT. In fact, the recent circum­ stances of ESP show celarly that there have been some general trends which are ESP bound and perhaps have nothing to do with ELT.