The ESP Journal最新文献

One of the major concerns of ESP research has been the linguistic analyses of scientific and technological texts. Likewise, one of the major practical pedagogical concerns within ESP has been how to teach nonnative speakers to be able to read such texts. In both of these endeavors there has been a tension within the literature about which vantage point to take. Overtly, especially within the grammatical-rhetorical tradition where assumptions have been clearly explicated, the vantage point is that of the intentions of the author. However, this vantage point does not allow for the optimal analyses of texts and does not even correspond to what practitioners of grammatical-rhetorical analysis have done in practice. When we analyze or read a text, we do not restrict ourselves to what the author intended us to see. We make use of what is available within the text, which is sometimes more and sometimes less than what the author intended.

Most ESP instruction at the tertiary level has a narrow communicative focus. This study attempts to answer questions about what happens when ESP- trained academics broaden their goals and attempt reading for wider audiences. The participants read popular scientific readings (av. 516 words), answered comprehension questions and recorded the time required to complete the readings. Results showed that participant comprehension increased considerably; however, reading speed did not consistently increase, since some readers adjusted their speeds to improve comprehension. Conclusions are drawn about the implications of these results and suggestions are made for encouraging extensive reading and participant self-evaluation.

This paper presents an application of the theory of comprehension-based teaching to materials development in the English for Special Purposes context. The program described here, called English for Economists, was developed for Egyptian economists participating in a joint research project with Americans. It was designed to build on students' existing reading skills and their background knowledge of economics in order to improve their listening comprehension and writing skills through exercises which provided them with comprehensible input for acquisition.

Essential elements of the program were the utilization of materials derived from the research projects in which the students were engaged and a lesson format which focused on development of the receptive skills. Features which contributed most to program success are evaluated and the applicability of this approach to other ESP contexts is discussed.

Variability in the grammatical profile of finite verbs, a feature which has been demonstrated across different genres of science writing, is here examined within one genre, reporting of research work in Master of Science theses. For this purpose, a sample of 20 theses in biology, chemistry, and physics was divided into five rhetorical sections (introduction, review, methods, results, discussion), and the use of finite verbs in each section, for each of three fields, was analyzed with respect to voice, tense, aspect, and modality. A number of significant differences emerged and were related to the changing content and communicative purpose of the discourse. The main findings include the following. Active verbs exceed passives in all rhetorical sections of the text except in methods, where passive verbs predominate. The present tense exceeds the past except in methods, and its frequency is very high in the introduction. There is uniformly little use of perfective and progressive aspects. The occurrence of modals is highest in the discussion and lowest in methods. Physics shows an interesting difference from biology and chemistry; there is no predominance of passive verbs in the methods section of physics theses, reflecting the more theoretical nature of research in that field.