Summary of Ann M. Johns and Donna Price-Machado’s article “English for Specific Purposes: tailoring courses to student needs – and to the outside world”
In their article “English for Specific Purposes: tailoring courses to student needs – and to the outside world”, Ann M. Johns and Donna Price-Machado state that “all good teaching is specific purpose in approach” (p. 43). They argue that teaching of English for Specific Purposes is based on the specific learning and language use needs of students as well as sociocultural contexts in which these students are going to use English. As a result, teaching English for Specific Purposes has several categories. Mainly, ESP is divided into such braches as English for Academic Purposes and English for Occupational Purposes.
However, to plan a specialized, often short-term, course, “in which certain content, skills, motivations, processes, and values are identified” (p. 45), a variety of factors must be considered. The first factor is stakeholders in the class or project. It is a must to know who the clients are and what their needs are. Another important factor is available teachers and how they are going to teach their students. The third factor is authenticity issues, since efforts are made to “achieve maximum linguistic, strategic, and situational authenticity” (p. 47) while designing curricula. As a result we have fifth factor – curricular decisions. The last factor is named “assessment” and concerns the way in which the knowledge of students should be checked.
Johns and Price-Machado claim that an essential part of preparing an ESP course is planning a curriculum that has also its features, which distinguish it from General English curriculum. The first feature is the assessment of students’ needs; the second one is the connection to content of occupations, disciplines, etc.; and the last feature is the identification and analysis of essential language and discourses.
Authors conclude the article with the fact there are lots of ESP programs to choose from (VESP, English for Business Programs, English for Academic Purposes etc.). Nevertheless, in future ESP may include much more study of workplace and community that would lead to “more sophisticated, learner-centered or team-oriented curricula” (p. 52).
References
Johns, A. M., & Price-Machado, D. (2001). English for Specific Purposes: tailoring courses to student needs – and to the outside world. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a Second Foreign Language (3rd ed.) (pp. 43-54). Stamford, CT: Thomson Learning.
