This chapter reviews the history of English for specific purpose's (ESP) research in four sections: The Early Years (1962–1981), The Recent Past (1981–1990), The Modern Era (1990–2011), and The Future (2011 plus). In the years following World War II, the central focus of ESP research was English for science and technology (EST) in academic contexts. During the 1981–1990 period, special issues of the journal were devoted to teacher training, Vocational ESP, interlanguage, and training of international teaching assistants. In the modern period, new international journals, genre, and corpus studies took the center stage. The future of ESP may be summarized using four words: variety, in topics, methodologies, rhetorics, and writer's stance; context, as the locales for research become diversified, bring to the fore the specific contexts of classrooms, businesses, and online media; complexity, realized through methodological triangulation; and finally, critique, of the researcher's work and pedagogies and the researcher him/herself.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 113 citations exist upstream.