Department of English Studies, Universita¨t Wien, Campus AAKH/Hof 8, Spitalgasse 2-4, A-1090 Vienna, Austria
attend vocational upper-secondary schools and colleges with specializations ranging from information
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +43 1 4277 42445.
E-mail addresses: julia.isabel.huettner@univie.ac.at (J. Hu¨ttner), ute.smit@univie.ac.at (U. Smit), barbara.mehlmauer-larcher@
univie.ac.at (B. Mehlmauer-Larcher).
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
System 37 (2009) 99–109
www.elsevier.com/locate/system0346-251X/$ - see front matter  2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Keywords: Genre-based teaching; Pre-service ESP teacher education; Corpus linguistics in teacher education; Genre analysis
1. Introduction
With increasing acceptance, English dominates most Western foreign-language curricula and prevails in the
context of teaching language for specific purposes. Evidence of this can be found, for instance, in the fact that
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is widely taught at tertiary level in mainland Europe and increasingly also
at secondary level. In Austria, for instance, ESP is an obligatory subject for nearly 65% of all students, whoReceived 28 January 2008; received in revised form 9 June 2008; accepted 21 June 2008
Abstract
One of the effects of the growing importance of global English in professional contexts has been the rise of ESP teaching
at all levels. Despite the concurrently increasing demand for ESP teachers, pre-service teacher education programmes in
Europe have so far largely neglected this important area. In order to address the professional needs of future ESP teachers,
a novel and coherent framework for mediating the findings of corpus linguistics and genre analysis has been developed.
The advantages of such a model of mediated corpus-based genre analysis lie in its flexibility of application to diverse
ESP settings and target groups, so empowering both student teachers and their future pupils to develop autonomous lan-
guage capabilities. Following this model, student teachers are familiarized with the potential of specialized corpora as a
source of information regarding specific genres, such as contracts of sale, sustainability reports or company profiles,
and as a tool in materials development.
This model of mediated corpus-based genre analysis, which will be presented and discussed in this paper, has been
implemented in an innovative teacher education project at the English Department of the University of Vienna. Feedback
from both student teachers and future employers underlines the positive effects of such a linguistics-informed approach to
teacher education.
 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.ESP teacher education at the interface of theory and practice:
Introducing a model of mediated corpus-based genre analysis
Julia Hu¨ttner *, Ute Smit, Barbara Mehlmauer-Larcherdoi:10.1016/j.system.2008.06.003

technology to nursing. This situation poses a challenge for European English teachers as they have to accom-
plish the difficult task of teaching many ESPs, including unfamiliar or newly emerging genres.1
From the perspective of teacher educators, the impossibility of predicting the genres that future ESP teach-
ers might be teaching in the next 40 years of their professional lives calls for an approach that goes well beyond
Department of the University of Vienna as part of the general pre-service teacher education programme.
education relies on sound theoretical background knowledge derived from various disciplines such as general
100 J. Hu¨ttner et al. / System 37 (2009) 99–109pedagogy, cognitive psychology and, in the case of foreign and second language teaching, ideas and concepts
derived from linguistics, applied linguistics, and second language learning research (Newby, 2003; Roberts,
1998).
2.2. Mediating between theory and practice
In order to fully address the challenges of developing ESP teacher education that is theory-informed and yet
relevant to teaching practice, we adopt Widdowson (2003, p. 23) model of mediation. Here, mediation is
offered by applied linguistics between relevant linguistic and pedagogic theories and the classroom realities.
In this model, theory and practice are considered interdependent and the task of applied linguistics is to for-
mulate principles which are of potential relevance for language teaching. As illustrated in Fig. 1, these prin-
1 New genres emerge due to the constant development in technology (e.g. homepages, facebooks, blogs) and the creation of new areas of
expertise (e.g. through increased interdisciplinarity), such as gender studies did a few years ago. Furthermore, developing areas of practiceWe argue that such a model is an ideal means of educating a new generation of ESP teachers who are suitably
confident and knowledgeable to incorporate relevant findings and methods from applied linguistics, especially
of genre analysis (GA) and corpus linguistics (CL), in their teaching practice.
2. Principles of pre-service ESP teacher education
2.1. The potential of teacher education
As the diversity of the field of ESP and the many disciplines and professional settings concerned do not
allow to prepare pre-service teacher students for all possible ‘S’s in ESP (Kaltenbo¨ck and Mehlmauer-Larcher,
2002), they require teacher education rather than a mere training approach. The concept of teacher training is
based on the assumption of clearly predefined competences and skills that student teachers need to develop in
order to deal with predictable problems and requirements. As such, teacher training may have its place in a
context where language teaching is mainly associated with procedural aspects of teaching, classroom manage-
ment, lesson planning, giving feedback or effective eliciting or questioning (Richards, 1998, p. xiv). However, it
falls short in terms of the manifold requirements of, for instance, ESP writing. Thus, training is mainly skills-
based whereas teacher education aims at the development of defined competences as well as a general capacity
to deal with settings and requirements that are not fully predictable. (Richards and Farrell, 2005; Tsui, 2003;
Widdowson, 1983, pp. 23–28).
Teacher education as opposed to mere teacher training provides for the understanding of abstract concepts
underlying practical techniques in order to enable student teachers to adapt to novel situations and apply their
knowledge in varying and changing teaching contexts. (Widdowson, 1990, p. 63) Therefore, a model of teachermere teacher training. In fact, ESP teacher education must enable the future practitioners to autonomously
analyse any ESP genre with a view to teaching it to learners who themselves are not necessarily familiar with
the conventions of their future discourse communities.
This paper argues for the incorporation of the principles of teacher education (rather than training) and
mediation between (applied) linguistic theory and teaching methodology as a basis for pre-service ESP teacher
education. As exemplification of the potential of theory-informed teacher education, we will present the ratio-
nale and the achievements of graduates of the TESP (Teaching ESP) Module introduced at the Englishlead to new genres such as advertorials or infomercials.