Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

English for Specific Purposes (ESP)

Spring 2006

Week 5 - ESP Chapters 6 and 7 & Flowerdew & Peacock (2001), pp. 8-24 - Answers

1. How are target needs and learning needs different? (ESP 6)

The main difference between target needs and learners needs are in the depth that they cover. Target needs are very much the surface needs or the surface representations of the needs of the students have. Learning needs of the other hand go deeper. They focus on what the learners will have to do to me to those target needs. How will they learn? How can they achieve their goals? These are the main questions that learning needs seek to answer. Going back to the beginning we see the target needs really focus on what the learners need, but they lack, and lastly what they want or what they feel they want. These are all extremely concrete areas which are assessed more or less fairly easily by simply surveying or observing what goes on in the classroom or outside the classroom if possible. The learning needs focus more on the cognitive basis which will support these target needs. For this reason learning needs are harder to develop and assess. This does not mean that we should not focus on them, in fact that forces us to focus on them even more to a certain extent do to their rather elusive nature.

2. How are necessities, lacks and wants balanced in the target needs? (ESP6)

Necessities lacks and wants are all part of the target needs of the learners and they are all different. That is, they have different focus. Sometimes they overlap nicely and all too often they seem to work at cross purposes, especially in the area of wants. Often what the students want is very different from what they actually need as perceived by the teacher and this can cause a great dilemma in the teaching process for the teacher and in the learning process for the students. Another thing particularly in ESP courses which makes this even more difficult are outside influences from employers are other people which have commissioned the teaching. Often what they want is not really amenable to the classroom. They request impossible results or ask for things which really don't relate to do what's going on in the learners work situations all this mismatch results in demotivation on the part of the students. So the big question is how we balance these.

The less than subtle difference between these two should not be lost to us as English teachers or learners in Korea. For us, often the necessity is an exam or barrage of exams which loom ahead for the students. This necessity though often has very little to do with real world needs simply because these are not very well constructed exams. I don`t think there is a single teacher of English in Korea who does not struggle with trying to maintain some sort of balance between necessities and needs, yet finding a balance is exactly what we need to do in order to help our students in the long run.

Necessities and lacks go together in a profoundly strong bond as opposed to the wants which are often different. What people need, the necessities, are often decided based on the lacks, or the points that the students do not have. Their relationship therefore is fairly easy to balance and to equate basically because they are opposite sides of the same coin. The big problem as mentioned above is how to balance and integrate the wants, which often are conflicting with the other two concerns. Hutchinson and Waters basically say that the best way of dealing with this is to constantly assess an update what is going on in the classroom. Try not to set very large or overgeneralized goals from the very onset because what happens in the classroom and what you later find out often forces you to change your original estimations. They argued that particularly in ESP the courses must be very dynamic and that the teacher as well as the students should concentrate be assessing what is going on the classroom and trying to match that to the reality of the world outside the classroom. This was seem to be the only way to balance in a meaningful way wants with necessities and lacks. Of course there may never be a perfect balance but by taking it more in a stepwise fashion instead of assessing these as a hard and fast situation in the beginning things can only be better. The basic idea is that we do not only continually assess the students progress, but we also need to continually assess the progress of what we are doing in the classroom as relates to all of these concerns.

3. What is it that learning needs seem to focus on? (ESP 6)

This seems to be a bit of a discrepancy in what we would expect learners needs to focus on and want Hutchinson and Waters mention in this chapter. In the chapter the authors basically address what seemed to be, for the most part, affective factors, with motivation being their main concern. But we would expect learners needs to be about would be mostly the cognitive processes of learning. For this reason, this section of this chapter is a little bit disappointing. Obviously motivation is extremely important and particularly in ESP courses because they focus on adults and adults have tremendous demands and needs in their language learning. Adults are often much more fragile in their language egos then younger learners. Therefore, it seems to a certain extent to be appropriate for the authors to be focusing on this, or to have our attention drawn to this, but my feeling is that this is not the right place or the right time to be doing it especially because I think that we could have learned a lot by focusing on the real learning needs of the students, cognitive needs rather than just affective ones. I did the authors need to study a little bit more about bilingualism and content-based teaching. Luckily for us we will be doing the latter soon.

4. What are the three main approaches to course design? (ESP7)

The three approaches the course design according to Hutchinson and Waters are language centered course design, skills centered course design, and learner centered course design. I think the names of each of these speak for themselves. In the language centered approach the idea is to try to bring, or to form direct correlations between the language taught in the classroom and the language of the subject area as it is used in the real world. This is basically what we talked about the beginning of this course in relation to genre and register analysis and it is certainly the oldest type of course design in the ESP approach. In the skills centered course design the emphasis is on the fact that there are certain skills and strategies which all learner's use in order to deal with language, particularly language discourse in specific situations. The skill centered course design focuses on the processes of how people actually go about developing the skills they need to succeed as learners. It focuses on what's actually going on underneath, with what's going on in the heads of the learners and how they're learning, or how they're learning to learn. This is done in response to the various situations that the learners are put into. In short, the situation feeds the learning as a group. The learner centered approach is slightly different from the skill centered approach in that it focuses not on the situations but on the individual learners and how the individuals will adapt to what is going on.

5. What are the chief problems with the language centered approach? (ESP7)

There are several problems with the language centered approach. The most striking of these is the criticism that the language centered approach is really just a surface level approach. Yes, it looks at the particular language of the situation, but it doesn't really focus on how the students will actually have to learn this language or how they might actually go about using it. It does not deal with the creation of the language in any fundamental way. This is a major problem. It is also very static, meaning that it really doesn't change very much. We know it is not the way that we should be running ESP classes. ESP classes are all about being able to change things quickly in response to the students reactions and needs, but a syllabus focusing on language forms really doesn't allow this to happen simply because we are only noticing the language forms and nothing else. That is the true danger of a surface level concern such as this. Not good!

6. What is the skilled based approach and what does it focus on? (ESP7)

As mentioned briefly above the skills centered approach, or skills centered focus in course design really looks toward the end. But this means it is best for course designers using a skilled centered approach to worry about the process yet they don't worry about the road or the trail that the individual student is going to take to get to the end, they are really only worry about the goals as the results. For example, if you are teaching a class of students who are studying medicine you will certainly have to set of certain goals for the students, things that they will need to get done by the end of the course, and rightfully so, but you don't necessarily have plan, or clear plan for getting get there. Of course there are activities and chains of activities that you have designed and will have the students do, but those will be designed for the entire class without really thinking at all about the individuals. So, the skills centered courses focuses on goals and the road that the students will take to get there, but only as a group and not his individuals. Such syllabi are often filled with chains which have focuses on skills or necessities for reaching major goals and these are often listed and charted together. We might, however, question the validity of such an approach in the face of individual learner differences. Not everyone learns the same, at the same pace, or the same things given a similar learning situation. Planning out in great detail goals and the realization of those goals on a general basis might be a waste of time to a certain extent. Yet we need to do this, for it is our only option. What I'm saying is that we need to be careful when we do this, and not get too caught up in it. It is but one concern amongst a slew of interlocking and interrelate concerns for us as teachers.

7. What are the main implications of a learning centered approach? (ESP7)

The main implications of a learning center approach are basically the ability of teachers to take what they have been doing in their course planning with a certain grain of salt. There is no such thing we will ever do in the classroom that is going to work for every single learner in the same way and we cannot expect to it to. Each learner has their own cognitive structure, their own preferences, their own wants, and their own histories. We cannot get to their heads directly, thus we really don't have access to a lot of the information that we might actually need to have access to in developing our courses. The best way of dealing with this fact, then, is to simply be very sensitive in the classroom and really try to keep tabs on how individuals are reacting to the plans you have put together, always being ready and willing to change what you have planned if there is good enough reason.

7. What are some of the different syllabus types?

On pages 85 to 88 Hutchinson and Waters give us a list of different syllabus types. This list includes the following syllabus types: topic syllabus, structural/situational syllabus, functional/notional syllabus, skills syllabus, situational syllabus, functional/task-based syllabus, discourse/skills syllabus, and skills and strategies. What these different types really are a different organizational means for designing syllabus. So for example a topic syllabus is obviously a syllabus that is based, or is organized along the concept of different topics. For example one chapter might be designed around the topic of environmental issues, while the next chapter might be designed around the topic of travel, the next food. I think we are all aware of these different types of syllabus designs. Some are, however, much more common than others. Rare, particularly the area of general English, are the discourse/skills syllabus and the skills syllabus.

This brings to the idea that a syllabus for ESP class is necessarily going to have to have a different focus or different organizational design than a syllabus for a general English course. In particular, since skills are so highly stressed in ESP, one will often find a lot more skills based syllabus than one would find in a general English course. This is important to note both for practical reasons and also because it tells us a little bit more about the very nature of ESP as a particular type of language learning and language teaching experience.

8. Why is EAP so necessary in today`s world?

On a global scale EAP is carried out just about everywhere. This is essentially due to the preeminence of American and British universities as well as the fact that English has become the international language of publication. People need everywhere need because the vast majority of textbooks are written in English. Even if the learners study in their home country, they still need to be able to deal with English in the form of reading. If they want to go to an English-speaking university program, and increasingly more non-English-speaking countries are offering courses in English only, anywhere in the world, they will have to have academic skills geared toward English. Also, since most publications are carried out in English, people need to be able to write textbooks, articles, and do presentations for their respective fields in English. EAP needs to prepare learners for all these purposes. EAP focuses on how the learners can acquire the knowledge they need while in school. It focuses on so-called general academic skills as well the particular aspects of studying one field as opposed to another.

9. What are some problems of the common core hypothesis?

The problem with the common core hypothesis is that the learning is still vacuous. There is no reason to push learners through basics when they can have more focused instruction from the very beginning which will give them the same basics but with more specific focus and more authentic/realistic material. The bottom line is that if the core is common English in general, then it must also be present and necessary in ESP as well. ESP can do the same thing better. Teaching the core means teaching English, but not skills in English and it is, therefore, of little value.

10. How does the idea of cultural differences effect EAP as a disciple?

This is simple. We are all aware that different cultures associate different ideas with education. Well, these ideas have an very strong effect on how education is carried out in different places. Things like the roles of teachers and students, intensity of study, number of hours in classroom, etc., all these are aspects of the academic culture of a place. The idea is that since different countries/cultures have different academic settings that those found in English peaking countries, part of what we need to do in EAP is prepare people for a different academic setting/culture

11. What do you think might be some of the neo-colonialist aspects of EAP?

The idea is that we need to be careful about how we present things to learners. English is a world language but that does not mean that English is better than other languages or cultures. Many speakers of English teach English as if it were the truth, but of course this is not right.