Investigating Specialist Discourse

Abstract

Chapter 2 focused on a key procedure in ESP course development, needs analysis. However, needs analysis itself does not provide information on specialist discourse and before teachers and course developers start planning the curriculum, they often need to obtain descriptions of discourse (communication and language use) identified in the needs analysis. This leads to the topic of the present chapter, investigations of specialist discourse. ESP curricula generally focus strongly on the description and illustration of communication and language use in the specialist field. Thus the language content of ESP courses is pivotal in ESP course design. Many courses are strongly focused on language content (as opposed to content of another nature, such as learning strategies). Many courses have as a major objective that the students will have better understanding of communication and language use in the specialist field or target discourse community by the end of the course. Moreover, such courses generally aim to offer realistic descriptions of discourse derived from empirical investigations of communication and language use in the community or specialist field. This chapter considers the importance of descriptions of specialist discourse in ESP. It discusses the circumstances in which teachers and course developers conduct their own investigations, and describes ways to do this. To this end, three approaches to the investigation of specialist discourse, ethnography, genre analysis and corpus analysis are introduced.