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立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
Chapter 1 Introduction
The teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has been generally regarded as an identifiable activity in English Language Teaching (ELT). The distinctness of ESP could be attributed to the consensus that ESP teachers are required to bring about practical outcomes for learners with specific professional backgrounds in limited course time (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, p. 1). Most ESP teachers, assumedly equipped with training in teaching General Purpose English (GPE), are thus positioned in difficult situations, where they do not possess the subject knowledge in fields which their students specialize in (Wu & Badger, 2009). This knowledge gap not only intrinsically changes the status of ESP practitioners from “primary knower” to “language consultant” in the perspective of language teaching methodology, but also implies that practitioners need assistance in designing courses under such circumstance (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, pp. 13-16). Arranging language content, a central process in course design and material management, is of primary concern for ESP practitioners (Hyland, 2002, pp. 393-394).
To deal with actual content with limited subject knowledge, we can consult Dudley-Evans and St John’s (1998) classification of carrier content and real content (p.
11). Carrier content refers to language items that carry context related to a specific subject; for example, the word germinate in a course on life cycle of a plant. In
comparison, real content denotes language that performs certain communicative function in the context. For example, the bolded preposition as and morphemes s in the sentence As the plant germinates, the seed swells are language of describing process, which is the real focus of this biology course. It is also noted that real content does not entail technical knowledge as carrier content does (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, p. 11).
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Furthermore, we can observe that the real content comes as multiple lexical units formed with relatively general lexeme1 like the preposition as and the morphemes s. For ESP practitioners, real content is the real focus for instruction (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, pp. 11, 16) and it is an issue of practicality as for how to sort out real content from ESP materials with efficiency. To resolve this issue, collaboration2 between ESP
practitioners and subject teachers has been proposed as an ideal and feasible solution for content management as well as course development (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, pp.
15-16).
Although studies on collaborative teaching report successful outcomes (Dudley-Evans, 2001), some researchers have expressed qualified agreement on the efficiency of collaboration. Belcher (2006) has indicated that modest resources provided by institutions and reluctance of teachers to cooperate with each other can obstruct collaboration (p. 140). The reluctance, according to Barron (2003), can be attributed to the inherent and incompatible diversity of collaborators’ respective
1 According to Crystal’s (2003) definition, lexemes refer to minimal distinctive units for discerning meanings. Either occurring as grammatical variants such as –s, -ing, and –ed in walks, walking, and walked, or appearing as multiple lexical units to express complete meanings, like kick the bucket (= “die”),
lexemes differ from words in that the term word treats language items based on orthography, not semantic unit (pp. 265-266).
2 Collaboration, when viewed in the aspect of the degree of relative involvement between language teachers and subject teachers, is further categorized into co-operation, collaboration, and team-teaching (Dudley-Evans, 2001, pp. 226-228; Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998, pp. 42-47). The process of collaboration, according to Barron (2003), is suggested to be administered under the methodology of
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philosophy of knowledge from different fields (p. 297). Motivated by these difficulties in collaborative teaching between ESP practitioners and subject teachers, this thesis considers the feasibility of another solution that can manage ESP content with minimum human interference. Corpus research, famed for its objective and automatic approach to text analysis, is thus put under contemplation to locate real content from ESP texts. The present thesis aims to prove that application of corpus method, in addition to
collaboration, is an effective and practical approach to identify content that doesn’t involve subject knowledge for ESP practitioners.
Having observed that real content involves multiple lexical units composed by general lexis3, the next chapter will narrow down the scope of research focus to the level of word to review how words, specifically common ones4, are conceptualized in the ESP field and from the perspective of corpus linguistics. Based on understanding of nature of words, the rest of Chapter 2 continues by introducing corpus techniques to extract words of interest as well as multiple lexical units. Chapter 2 ends with proposing research questions which are framed for achieving the objective of this project. Chapter 3 gives report on methodology along with its induced research design that encompasses the process of creating a corpus for exploration, extracting common words of interest, and identifying multiple lexical units. Chapter 4 demonstrates results on both extracted words and identified multiple lexical units, which in turn signify the efficacy of corpus approach to locate real content for ESP instruction. Finally, Chapter 5 concludes the
3 The term lexis is used as an umbrella term to refer to the vocabulary of a language (Crystal, 2003, p. 268).
In the present thesis, lexis includes morphemes, words, and multiple lexical units. Lexis differs from lexeme in that the former does not considers the semantic aspect but the latter does.
4 Common words and general words are used interchangeably in this thesis.
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國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
present study with implication of research results on ESP pedagogy; other issues for prospect research will also be addressed.