Language Teaching (2020), 1–11

doi:10.1017/S0261444820000300

FIRST PERSON SINGULAR

Is ESP a materials and teaching-led movement?

Helen Basturkmen
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Email: h.basturkmen@auckland.ac.nz

1. Introduction
My first encounter with English for specific purposes (ESP) teaching was in the late 1980s. I was asked
to lead a small team of teachers in designing a new English course for university students of art and
design. We had just a few weeks to devise a teaching plan and materials. ESP was famously described at
that time as ‘essentially a materials and teaching-led movement’ (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, p. 19)
and my initial encounter with ESP largely reflected this. However, I believe this description and some
other characterizations of ESP have persisted rather too long. In this paper, I seek to problematize a
view of ESP as essentially a practical movement and I argue that a characterization of ESP for the
present time needs to reflect a broader vision of endeavours and interests.
The characterization of ESP as materials and teaching-led was a fair description in the early days of
ESP. However, this characterization is not accurate for present time, especially if we consider the focus
of the bulk of recent ESP literature. In this paper, I take the position that ESP is intrinsically a theor-
etical as well as practical undertaking and that this has been the case since its inception. I will also
argue that the field could benefit from further explicit treatment of some of the theoretical bases
on which it draws. Ding (2019) argues that English for academic purposes (EAP) has had a lopsided
development as the literature has neglected the topics of teachers and teaching but produced a plethora
of linguistic analyses of specialist discourse. It is a critique that is true to an extent for ESP in general.
This paper critically examines the view of ESP as materials- and teaching-led. It firstly discusses
ways this view is tenable. It then problematizes this perspective and a related critique reported by
Bloor (1998, p. 61) that ESP was ‘all practice and no theory.’ I will argue that ESP teaching and mate-
rials reflect theoretical perspectives of teaching and learning, although these are often tacitly held
rather than explicitly stated. I will suggest that direct attention in the ESP literature to perspectives
about teaching and learning has been limited and that there is a need for more review and commen-
tary to be given to these topics. Furthermore, I will argue that studies of specialist discourse have
dominated the ESP literature and that ESP at present, at least as far as the literature is concerned,
is a field largely led by linguistic inquiry.

2. Arguments for the position

2.1 Conventional framing
How then can a view of ESP as materials- and teaching-led be explained? Part of the explanation lies in
the way ESP has conventionally been framed in definitions. Most definitions of ESP refer first and
foremost to ESP as the branch of English as a second language teaching that seeks to address students’
work or study-related needs but do not refer directly to ESP in terms of empirical or theoretical
research. Such definitions are often found in the introductory sections of published works and they
tend to have a comparatively strong influence on readers’ views of a field. Anthony (2019, p. 1), for
example, describes ESP as language teaching that ‘targets the current and/or future academic or occu-
pational needs learners, and focuses on the necessary language, genres and skills to address these
needs, and assists learners in meeting these needs.’ Hyon (2018, p. 4) describes ESP’s ‘core mission’
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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 2 Helen Basturkmen

as one of preparing students to use English in their target work and study contexts. Hyland and Wong
(2019, p. 2) describe ESP and EAP as ‘specialised English language teaching grounded in the social,
cognitive, and linguistic demands of target situations’ and Belcher (2009, p. 1) asserts that it is ‘com-
mitment to the goal of providing language instruction that addresses students’ own specific purposes’
that differentiates ESP from general English language teaching. I too in my writing have followed con-
ventions and framed ESP as needs-related teaching (Basturkmen, 2006; Basturkmen, 2010). These
characterizations of ESP as primarily a teaching endeavour focused on students’ target needs follow
a historical tradition. In the early days, ESP was largely seen as the teaching of grammar and vocabu-
lary of specialist registers, usually scientific and technical English (Paltridge, 2009). A view of ESP as
largely teaching-led is eminently tenable if one examines the kinds of definitions reported above.

2.2 Origins and the pragmatic tradition

ESP does not have a clear and indisputable point of origin (Swales, 1985). Rather it emerged during the
1960s and early 1970s (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998; Bell, 2016), generally as a response to the
increasing numbers of overseas students and professionals coming to study and work in
English-speaking countries. In these circumstances, the response was to develop courses and materials
to support learners with their work and study needs. Swales (1994, p. 201) reflected on the early devel-
opment of a key journal in this field, English for Specific Purposes. He commented on the pragmatic
tradition of the journal’s content, which he attributed to the situation typically faced by ESP practi-
tioners whose students were in the ‘tough and tight circumstances’ of having to function linguistically
in their work or study areas. In response, ESP practitioners set out to ‘deliver maximum assistance in
minimum time.’ EAP, as a distinct branch of ESP, emerged when greater numbers of non-English first
language background students began studying in English-medium universities. Jordan (2002) traces
the beginnings of EAP in Britain to the 1960s and reports that in the early days, EAP support for inter-
national students often took the form of short-duration, pre-sessional (pre-university) courses and
diagnostic language assessments. Histories of the early development of EAP in the UK (Jordan,
2002; Bell, 2016) track the development of EAP largely in terms of its role in teaching. As English lan-
guage teachers began to direct their attention to supporting the needs of international students study-
ing in English-medium universities, researchers (who often came from English language teaching
backgrounds) began to investigate academic language use and text types.
One of the very first monographs on ESP (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998) emphasized the practical
teaching-focused nature of ESP saying, ‘If ESP has sometimes moved away from trends in general ELT,
it has always retained its emphasis on practical outcomes … the main concerns of ESP have always
been, and remain, with needs analysis, text analysis, and preparing learners to communicate effectively
in the tasks prescribed by their study or work situation.’ Revealingly, this quotation continued with a
comment seemingly indicative of a perceived lack of theory, ‘We believe that a theory of ESP could be
outlined based on the specific nature of the texts that learners require knowledge of, or on the basis of
the needs-related nature of teaching’ (1998, p. 1). This would seem to suggest that from the writers’
perspective the field had not developed, even decades after it had emerged, a clear theoretical basis.

2.3 High visibility of teaching and materials

In some general English language teaching (ELT) situations, teachers may use high-quality published
course books and the additional resources these often include, such as web-based resources, and
self-study materials. However, as ESP courses are generally developed to meet the specific needs of
a particular group of learners, ESP teachers tend to spend a considerable part of their time developing
materials in-house to cater to those needs (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998; Basturkmen, 2010). In some
cases, teachers may draw on ESP published materials with titles such as English for healthcare, English
for Engineering or Academic speaking, that appear relevant. However, it is often the case, that although
the titles suggest the works will be relevant to their learners’ needs, closer inspection of the works
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 Language Teaching 3

reveals limited relevance. Published materials thus may have only a tangential relationship to the actual
NEEDS of the ESP learners in question. As needs analysis is one of the criterial features of ESP, this fact
cannot be ignored. Having conducted a careful analysis of the group of learners’ needs, the ESP teacher
or course developer is usually at pains to ensure that course content and materials directly address the
needs that have been identified. The work of ESP teachers is thus often heavily consumed with mater-
ial development since they tend to draw on published materials only very selectively, if at all (Belcher,
2009) and can only occasionally base an ESP course around a published coursebook in the same way
that may be possible in general ELT. The work of ESP teachers has been described as follows:

Like other educational endeavours, ESP assumes there are problems, or lacks, that education can
ameliorate, but unlike many other educational practices, ESP assumes that the problems are
unique to specific learners in specific contexts and thus can be carefully delineated and addressed
with tailored-to-fit instruction. ESP specialists are often needs assessors first and foremost,
then designers and implementers of specialised curricula in response to identified needs.
(Belcher, 2006, p. 135)

ESP teachers are often involved majorly in curriculum and materials development tasks as well as
teaching. For this reason, ESP may appear to be dominated by teaching and materials. I have argued,
however (Basturkmen, 2010), that a good deal of the work ESP teachers and course developers do can
go unnoticed by onlookers, that is, those not directly engaged in ESP course preparation. A good deal
of work is typically conducted by ESP course teachers even before teaching begins and materials
devised. The course design, syllabus and the materials are the icing on the cake in the sense that
they are the part of the course development that is the end stage, or final layer, of course development
and the part that is visible to those on those on the outside. I proposed a representation of ESP course
development. (An adapted version of this representation is in Figure 1.) The representation identifies
three levels of ESP course development that are interrelated with Level 1 acting as a precursor to Level
2, and Level 2 as a precursor to Level 3. The representation takes the form of a pyramid to convey the
view that a great deal of ESP course development is taken up with building the foundations (analysis of
needs and specialist discourse). Unsurprisingly, it is the top level (surface level) aspects of course,
materials design that are most readily noticed from the outside and this may lead to the perspective
that ESP is largely about teaching and materials. But this perspective is misguided. ESP teaching and
materials are grounded in major foundational work, namely, investigations of learning needs (Level 1)
and specialist discourse of the field of the learners (Level 2). The fact that ESP teachers often need to
devise their own unique course syllabuses and materials, and that it is these aspects of ESP that are the
highly visible ‘on the surface’ features, may erroneously lead to a view of ESP as concerned only with
practical outcomes and led by teaching and materials development.

2.4 Motivation for linguistic inquiry

Linguistic research in ESP is generally justified with reference to teaching and learning needs
(Flowerdew, 2013). Published linguistic research often ends with proposals for teaching/learning appli-
cations or implications. See, for example, the final implications statement from the article abstract
below. In it, the abbreviation RA refers to research article.

Implications of our findings are that visual moves go beyond textual considerations, they can
disrupt the RA’s chronological structure, and novice writers in the field would benefit from
understanding the crucial associations between visual representations, disciplinary knowledge,
and the rhetorical structure of RAs in this field.
(Moghaddasi, Graves, Graves, & Gutierrez, 2019, p. 50)

ESP can be described as teaching-led in the sense that researchers often refer to teaching and learning
concerns as the motivation for linguistic inquiries. This is not dissimilar to practice in applied
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 4 Helen Basturkmen

Figure 1. Representation of ESP course development (adapted from Basturkmen, 2010)

linguistics in general. In ESP, these concerns are usually to provide teachers, learners and materials
developers with language descriptions of specialist discourse, or to develop understanding of learner
needs (Mede, Koparan, & Atay, 2018; Bi, 2020).
3. Arguments against the position
Having discussed ways in which a view of ESP as a materials- and teaching-led movement is tenable, I
would now like to discuss ways in which this view cannot be supported. I will argue that there are
major caveats to a characterization of ESP as materials- and teaching-led and a related view of ESP
as all practice and no theory. I will argue that ESP is intrinsically a theoretical as well as practical
undertaking. I will, however, identify topics on which the field would benefit from more discussion
of theoretical ideas, namely topics related to teaching and learning ESP. There has been a marked dis-
parity between the abundance of linguistic research and related theory and the limited body of
research and theory of ESP teaching and learning. I will argue that ESP, far from being practice-led,
can in fact be characterized as led by linguistic description, at least as far as the literature is concerned.

3.1 Teaching practices reflect theoretical views

There is no doubt that ESP has a rich tradition of materials development. As described in Section 2.3,
ESP teachers often are not in the position of being able to select a published coursebook to use as the
mainstay of their teaching in the same way that some colleagues in general ELT may do. It may be the
case that there are no existing published materials for the kind of group or individual learner in ques-
tion, for example, a group of experienced physiotherapists or students of naval architecture. Or it may
be the case that there is good quality published material, such as titles in the Cambridge Professional
English Series that broadly targets a professional field such as nursing, or a study area, such as graduate
writing (Swales & Feak, 2011) but the materials may not be well aligned to the particular needs of the
learners in question as identified by needs analysis. Needs analysis is one of the key characteristics of
ESP teaching, and having identified the needs of their learners, ESP teachers are likely to draw only
selectively on published materials to the extent that they address their learners’ needs. Because of
this, ESP teaching has a long-established history of developing in-house materials either to supplement
the use of published material or as stand-alone sources of materials.
However, having a rich tradition of teaching and materials development does not imply that the
field is a practical one without a basis in ideas about teaching and learning. The ideas are often implicit
and ESP teachers and materials developers may not necessarily explicitly set out the ideas of teaching
and learning that underpin their materials or teaching plans. However, to refer to ESP as ‘all practice
and no theory’ is misleading. Studies in which I and a research collaborator interviewed ESP teachers
about the materials they devised brought to light the ideas they drew on and the rationales behind their
practices (Basturkmen, 2010; Basturkmen & Bocanegra-Valle, 2018), which they often related to the-
oretical ideas they had encountered in their masters courses in language teaching as well as at profes-
sional conferences. ESP materials thus generally reflect theoretical ideas. Such ideas can be inferred
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 Language Teaching 5

from an examination of the kinds of language presentations and activities included in materials and
teaching plans. An EAP lesson focusing on the purposes and schematic structure of design specifica-
tion reports in engineering may suggest a genre-based view of writing (Paltridge, 2012), and a series of
noticing and analysis activities in pragmatics-focused materials for nurse–patient interaction in an
English for Nursing course may suggest an explicit view of pragmatics learning, a view that the learners
should develop explicit knowledge (Basturkmen, 2018a) of pragmatic features.

3.2 A field led by linguistic inquiry

ESP has a well-developed literature on linguistic descriptions of specialized English. The preface to the
first edition of the ESP Journal (Mancill, Drobnic, & Romett, 1980, pp. 7–9), which later became the
journal English for Specific Purposes, set out a statement of aims for the journal. The statement high-
lighted that the field should conduct ‘careful and constant analyses of the English used in learners’
specific fields … to provide accurate descriptions of the linguistic features that characterize the target
language.’ Language description has even been referred to as ‘the’ focus of ESP (Bloor, 1998) and the
field’s literature includes reviews of the historical development of linguistic description (Swales, 2001;
Johns, 2012; Hyon, 2018). As indicated in Section 2.4, teaching and learning concerns are often given
as the rationale for linguistic analysis type studies. However, teaching implications or applications at
the end of studies can be brief and arguably the main contribution often lies in development of lin-
guistic description per se. To the great credit of the field, a large amount of research has now been
conducted to establish in-depth knowledge about language use in specialized domains, such as pro-
fessional, academic and research settings.
Linguistic inquiry is the most established area of research and discussion in ESP and few would
question the potential value of findings for teaching and learning ESP. An editorial from the
Journal of English for Academic Purposes highlighted the limited teaching-focused research saying:

There is a danger that theory and research is outrunning practice, or at least that there are too few
points of contact between them. What is actually going on in EAP classes around the world?
What innovative materials, tasks, course, and methods of assessment are being used? How can
we improve the practical aspects of our trade by making them better informed by theory and
research? EAP prides itself on its applied nature which means that EAP specialists are ‘practi-
tioners’ in the sense that we both research and teach. We would like this synergy to be more
clearly reflected in the journal. (Hamp-Lyons & Hyland, 2005, p. 3)

But even here, the centrality of (linguistic) theory and research appears as taken for granted and teaching
framed as ‘practice’ and ‘practical aspects of our trade’ rather than a potential topic of theoretical inquiry.
The journal recently launched the ‘researching EAP practice’ initiative to attract submissions that were
‘more grounded and practice-based’ than would usually be seen in research articles (Hu, 2018, p. A2).

3.3 Limited examination of teaching

Some literature on teaching and teachers has emerged. Topics include ESP teacher beliefs (Basturkmen
& Bocanegra-Valle, 2018), teacher development (Campion, 2016; Ding & Campion, 2016;
Basturkmen, 2017; Bocanegra-Valle & Basturkmen, 2019), teacher working conditions and identity
(Ding & Bruce, 2017; Tao & Gao, 2018; Ding, 2019), cooperation between ESP teachers and profes-
sional or disciplinary subject specialists (Li & Cargill, 2019; Northcote, 2019), and ways ESP teachers
work around limitations in their knowledge of target work domains or disciplines (Anthony, 2019).
Ding (2019, pp. 68–70) draws attention to the anomaly between the importance of EAP as a
fast-expanding area of teaching worldwide and the lack of importance accredited to EAP teachers
and teaching at ‘grass roots’ level, where EAP is often treated as a profitable support service and tea-
chers are marginalized. Ding highlights the limitations of the literature, arguing that ‘when the litera-
ture does appear’ it refers to teachers and teaching ‘latently and fleetingly’.
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 6 Helen Basturkmen

The ESP literature includes a wealth of case reports of teaching practices or innovations in local
settings. However, there has been limited discussion in general of ideas about teaching, or the kind
of metacommentary on ESP teaching that one might expect to see in a field that has often defined
as a largely teaching enterprise. Case reports provide rich, contextualized insights into individual
teaching efforts. They do not aim to examine, comment on or review teaching efforts across the
field, however. The limited attention may be partly due to the relative difficulty of collecting data con-
cerning teaching and learning compared to linguistic studies, which can often draw on existing texts as
data, or to the perception that linguistic inquiry is the heart of ESP.
There is little commentary literature concerning ESP teaching methodologies and teaching/learning
activities. To date, review, synthesis and metacommentary type works in ESP works have been very
largely on the topic of linguistic inquiry – see for example Swales (2001) and Johns (2012). A limited
number of review works have been on the topic of needs analysis – see for example, Serafini, Lake, and
Long (2015). Readers new to the field may indeed wonder what ESP teaching methodologies are used,
and what can be said about them beyond case reports of contextualized innovations. Although there is
no recognized one-size-fits-all type of approach to ESP teaching (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998) and
some methodologies developed in ESP are drawn on in general ELT, and vice versa (Robinson, 1991),
there are distinctive features that are more likely to be seen in ESP methodologies than elsewhere. Two
of these are outlined below to illustrate.

(a) ESP teaching often draws on or adopts the teaching/learning methodologies of the target dis-
cipline or professional domain (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998; Basturkmen, 2010). Various
professional domains (such as air safety, law, engineering and medicine) use case study meth-
odology in teaching subject content. ESP teachers working with students in such domains also
draw on case study methodology in teaching language. In a case study, students discuss a real-
life scenario and tasks based on the scenario, which requires them to apply and integrate their
knowledge, theory, skills and experience. This provides experience of teamwork and the case
may be written up as a report or presented orally. See, for example, the Helicopter Operations
Case (Shawcross, 2011).
(b) ESP teaching can include long, task-based projects requiring a high level of student engage-
ment. In a project, students often need to find resource materials themselves and although
the project may start in the classroom it may move out to the real world. Herbolich’s
(1979) Box Kites task was one of the first published examples of an ESP project
(Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998). Herbolich taught Technical Report Writing to engineering
students and the course included the topic of Manual Writing. Herbolich’s innovative response
was to devise a project in which pairs of students had to produce a tangible object (the kite,
which needed to be able to fly) and an accompanying technical manual to explain how the
kites were constructed and operated. For recent published examples of project work used in
an ESP course for dietitians, see Tsuda (2012).

Often innovative materials and methodologies have been created and the literature provides good illus-
trations of such innovations (Stoller & Robinson, 2018). However, abstract discussion of ideas about
teaching has been limited.

3.4 Limited examination of views of learning

If ESP were materials- and teaching-led, we might expect to see examination and discussion of views of
learning in the literature. Learning is after all the flip side of teaching. We opt for certain ways of
teaching, types of materials and teaching/learning activities that we believe best engender learning.
However, direct attention in ESP to topics concerning learning has been restricted, although
recently overviews of learning issues in academic purposes, specific purposes and workplace
contexts have appeared (Basturkmen, 2018b; Hafner, 2018; Lockwood, 2018). The editorial of the
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 Language Teaching 7

first edition of the ESP Journal clearly envisaged that teaching and learning were key topics for the
field. The editorial emphasized these topics alongside linguistic inquiry saying that the journal strived
to ensure that

The theories and practices of the field are based on sound assumptions concerning the nature of
language learning and linguistic features of specific varieties of English…. the nature of and pro-
cesses involved in language acquisition and language learning need to be explored as the basis on
which methodological decisions can be made. Refining what is known about these processes can
give rise to methodologies and techniques which can be evaluated as to their efficacy in terms of
the purposes of the learners. (Mancill et al., 1980, p. 9)

English for Specific Purposes journal continues to identify studies of second language acquisition in
specialized settings as a topic on which they welcome submissions.
Compared to the prevalence of corpus and genre-based linguistic studies there has been a modest
body of research into genre-based and corpus-based ESP instruction. See, for example, studies of
genre-based instruction (Hyon, 2002; Swales & Lindemann, 2002; Cheng, 2007, 2018; Kuteeva &
Negretti, 2016) and of corpus or concordance-based instruction (Karpenko-Seccombe, 2018;
Wong, 2019; Smith, 2020). Details on the high numbers of genre-based studies that have been pub-
lished in key ESP and EAP journals are given in Hyon (2018), a work that identifies genre learning as
a future issue for research. It should be noted, however, that Swales’ (1990) seminal work on genre
analysis in research and academic settings appeared decades ago and a multitude of genre analysis
linguistic studies followed.
There may be limited direct attention in ESP to the topic of learning but – as argued above – a view
of learning can be surmised from proposals for teaching/learning activities. One recurring feature of
reports on ESP and EAP linguistic research is to end the reports with proposals for teaching applica-
tions or implications. It is from such end-matter that a view of learning can often be inferred. Taking
Parkinson’s (2019) study of multimodal features of student texts as an example, the work ends with
proposals for learning activities to ‘raise students’ awareness of a genre’s rhetorical conventions
with regard to visual meaning’ and for ‘explicit classroom discussion’ about how to achieve coherence
between images (pp. 158–159). These proposals are suggestive of an explicit view of language learning,
that is, the idea that learners should develop awareness, or explicit knowledge, about multimodal fea-
tures. Specifics about the activities are not given but possibly the activities might involve inductive,
deductive or guided discovery type instructional activities. For a review of terms and research concern-
ing the role of deductive and inductive approaches and consciousness-raising tasks in language learn-
ing, see Ellis (2008). Possibly, teachers are perceived as already conversant with the role and features of
such activities and not in need of details.
Learning activities have tended to be alluded to only in passing and tacitly. As views of learning are
rarely unequivocally stated in ESP, they are not much contested or debated. Such discussion or debate
would more likely be generated if views were explicitly stated and writers in the field clearly took posi-
tions on their views of learning. The cumulative result of this limited discussion of how learners are
understood to learn specialist varieties of English remains curiously unexamined in ESP. Empirical
research in ESP has provided a substantial body of knowledge to address the question of what linguis-
tic features and genres characterize specialist varieties, but a limited body of knowledge to address the
question of how learners acquire these linguistic features and genres. Nor has there been much the-
oretical examination and discussion of ideas about teaching and learning. Other than case reports,
these topics have tended to be alluded to only in passing and tacitly.

4. Conclusion
John Swales provided the metaphor ‘species’ to describe ESP (Bloor, 1998).

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 8 Helen Basturkmen

ESP is not a young cuckoo determined to eliminate all other birds from the nest that it has infil-
trated; it is better seen as a recently-evolved species that best thrives in certain secluded and
restricted kinds of habitat. (Swales, 1985, p. 208, cited in Bloor, 1998, p. 47)

Over 30 years later it would appear that the species is now not only firmly established but also one that
has come to thrive in a multitude of habitats, with English for academic purposes, English for Business
Purposes as well as English for Professional and Occupational Purposes taught around the world in
higher education, school contexts, technical training and workplace settings. It is a species that has
a strong tradition of innovative teaching and materials design, which are usually reported as case
reports, and it is often the artefacts of teaching practice, such as course and materials designs, that
are highly visible and most noticeable at first sight. However, ESP is not a field that is ‘led’ by
teaching and materials. Rather, as I have argued here, it is a field led largely by linguistic inquiry.
Linguistic inquiry has served the field well and has resulted in the provision of up-to-date, relevant
language descriptions that can be imparted to learners of the various specialist varieties of English.
The field has provided the kinds of ‘careful and constant analyses of the English used in learners’ spe-
cific fields … (and) accurate descriptions of the linguistic features that characterize the target language’
alluded to by the editors of the first edition of the ESP Journal (Mancill et al., 1980, pp. 7–9).
It is somewhat paradoxical that a field with such a strong tradition of teaching and materials devel-
opment has had a relatively limited research and discussion literature concerning approaches to teach-
ing and learning. There has been a tendency to assume the advantages of, but not openly discuss, the
merits of an explicit view of language learning (that learners should acquire explicit knowledge of lin-
guistic features in academic or workplace discourses). There is debate and research in applied linguis-
tics concerning the functions of explicit and implicit knowledge, the interface between them and their
role in language learning and teaching (Ellis, 2008). Ideas about types of linguistic knowledge may be
relevant to developing understanding of ESP teaching and learning. Often learners bring to the ESP
class experience and ‘latent’ knowledge of language and communication practices in their disciplinary,
occupational or professional fields and the ESP teacher’s role may be ‘to develop a more conscious
awareness so that control is gained’ (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, p. 188).
I have argued in Section 2.1 that one explanation for the characterization of ESP as teaching and
materials-led derives from how ESP is typically framed as a teaching endeavour in conventional defi-
nitions. I wish here to suggest a definition of ESP for current times that frames ESP as a field con-
cerned with teaching but not entirely defined by teaching:

ESP is a theoretically and empirically based field of inquiry that aims to identify the linguistic fea-
tures of specialist English varieties, the nature of ESP teaching, and to understand how specialist
English can be acquired in instructed ESP and naturalistic contexts.

Naturalistic contexts could include situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Lave, 2019) and
English-medium instruction (Macaro, 2018; Pecorari & Malmström, 2018) type settings. In this def-
inition, teaching, or instructed ESP, is one component of ESP, and it is one that should be amenable to
theoretical and empirical inquiry and discussion.
This paper examined ways the characterization of ESP as teaching- and materials-led is tenable and
ways it is not. I argued that the characterization is tenable in the sense that the motivation for much of
the linguistic inquiry over the years has been tied to teaching and learning concerns. A perspective of
ESP as all practice and no theory is not tenable at all. Not only has ESP developed linguistic theories,
such as the ESP approach to genre theory (Swales, 1990; Hyon, 2018), but when we examine teaching
practices and materials we unearth implicit views of language teaching and learning. The latter is true
in general ELT as well as ESP teaching.
I have argued that the ESP literature has relatively neglected the topics of teaching and learning,
especially ideas concerning learning specialist language. Bloor once argued that ESP had been saved
from wandering down ‘blind allies’ (Bloor, 1998, p. 61) of second language acquisition (SLA). I
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 Language Teaching 9

would argue that we can usefully draw on some SLA constructs to analyse and discuss ESP teaching
and learning. ESP has typically provided concrete examples of case reports of innovative teaching and
materials in local settings and proposals for teaching applications. However, there has not been robust
discussion of ideas and theories concerning teaching and learning. It would be to the advantage of the
field to engage more in examining its teaching methodologies and proposals for teaching/learning
activities to explicate and discuss abstract understandings of teaching/learning processes.
ESP is a field led by a strong body of description of specialist texts and discourses brought into
being by decades of linguistic inquiry. From this ESP draws its strength and there is no reason why
ESP should not continue along this line of development. It is, however, a strength that could be sup-
plemented by a more developed literature about teaching and learning perspectives. ESP is a species
that could evolve further in this direction.

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Helen Basturkmen has worked for over 20 years at the University of Auckland, where she is the coordinator of the Applied
Linguistics and Language Teaching programme. She teaches postgraduate courses on discourse analysis and ESP and an
undergraduate course on developing second language literacy. She has written two books on English for Specific Purposes
(Routledge, 2006; Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and edited English for academic purposes in the Critical Concepts in
Linguistics Series (Routledge, 2015). Her research interests span the fields of education, professional discourse and language
teaching. Before taking up her position at the University of Auckland, she lived and worked for many years in the Middle East
as an ELT and ESP teacher and teacher educator.

Cite this article: Basturkmen, H. (2020). Is ESP a materials and teaching-led movement? Language Teaching 1–11. https://
doi.org/10.1017/S0261444820000300

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