Gatehouse and English for Specific Purposes

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1. Gatehouse provides a good overview of the origin of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in the second language setting. Does it continue a tradition of what could be called a communicative approach in your opinion? What do you think of the list of variable characteristics created by Gatehouse? Do you see potential problems in this list?
ESL seems to be a station on a trip that begins with notions (Wilkins), followed by Widdison’s CLT. This station makes benefits of the advancement in the field of linguistics or previous stations. Discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis and genre analysis were all beneficial to ESP. These issues initiate people like John Swales to begin saying English for Specific Purposes. From these sentences we can see the effect of CLT on ESP. ESP is finely tuned version of CLT toward certain areas such as, business English or academic English or medical English.
The lists of variables that Gatehouse presents are wide to include every thing. He would say for example that ESP is for adult but younger students can take it. In the other variable, basic knowledge is enough for language learners but beginner can join the classes of ESP. Moreover advanced learners are going to go to general English as they are using language instead of ESP. Therefore, Gatehouse was trying to classify ESP but for me he did not.

2. Gatehouse identifies three types of ESP. Do you see a clear distinction between the options associated with English as a Restricted Language and the options associated with English for Occupational Purposes? Do you agree with Gatehouse that English with Specific Topics is not a separate type of ESP?
Are there overlapping areas in content language acquisition and general language acquisition...

... middle of paper ...

...ledge with reading and that would strengthen both the skill and the content.

Language teaching with SIOP is going to be vivid and language learners will see the importance of reading as they use this skill and implement it in their courses instead of learning language purposelessly. The previous study may suffer some limitations or problems in its instrument or its participants or something else. A final word for me language learning in context is by far better than learning language out of context.

7. What did you learn from this week?
ESP may ease the way for language learners if it presents something that its learners are familiar with, however believing in that completely may get us as language teacher trapped as ESP does not cover language completely. The problem or problem with ESP is not always clear and is clearly distinctive from general English.

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