English for specific purposes: a survey review of current materials

Abstract

One of the first steps in preparing a survey review is to look at the ‘best practice’ of recent years in ELT Journal. There I found a number of models that looked promising as templates for my own task. However, once all the books to be examined had arrived, it was clear that standard approaches based on a relatively small number of titles would have to be reassessed. Counting support materials such as teachers' books and workbooks, 59 volumes were in the frame, and students' books alone totalled 45. Free-standing DVDs and CD Roms are not included in this tally. Evidently, it was not going to be possible to unpick the minutiae of each one. Simply from the perspective of mass, Tribble's (2009) survey review of EAP materials seemed closest to my task. He received over 60 books, which he reduced to 27 by focusing down on materials for EAP writing skills. In quantitative terms then, the present review has considerable affinity with Tribble's, and it has been similarly necessary to be quite brief on individual volumes. (Detailed critiques can be found elsewhere, for instance in recent issues of Modern English Teacher (for example 2009: 18/1 and 18/2)). Conceptually, however, it needs to be different because Tribble was able convincingly to make a subselection of titles based on a generic skill, i.e. academic writing. Such an approach does not work for ESP: basing the review on a subset of the materials submitted would have entailed pulling out all the titles from the same professional area, such as Aviation, IT, Technology, or Medicine. The problem with this is that these titles are not in the same sense generic, and to choose only them would have resulted in a fragmented approach making it difficult to look at underlying design principles and overall perspectives on ESP. To put it simply, skill based does not equate with topic based. So I decided there was no alternative to examining all the materials received. This decision had a number of consequences, a key one of which was to enable reflection on such issues as the nature of ESP and ESP/EAP boundary definitions. This will be addressed more explicitly later in the review.

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