EDITORIAL - PROGRESS OF ESP THEORY

Abstract

From the onset of ESP teaching approach to English as a foreign language, it has been established as thoroughly pragmatic. Its theoretical foundations were laid by Hutchinson and Waters in 1987, in now canonical book, English for Specific Purposes. In it, they abstracted the distinguishing meaning of ESP as related to teaching general English, and its essential principles of needs analysis, syllabus and material design, testing. In 1998, in another seminal book, Developments in English for Specific Purposes: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach, Tony Dudley-Evans and Maggie Jo St John, observed that it is “significant that so much of the writing has concentrated on the procedures of ESP and on relating course design to learners’ specific needs rather than on theoretical matters.” To this day, there has not appeared a publication that would be perceived as all encompassing regarding the theory of ESP, as those two.