War stories and romances: Whyte & Sarré, ESSE 2016

From ‘war stories and romances’
to research agenda: towards a model of ESP
didactics
Shona Whyte
Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, UMR 7320 BCL
Cédric Sarré
Université Paris Sorbonne, CeLiSo
Seminar 14: Teaching practices in ESP today 25 August 2016 1

From ‘war stories and
romances’
to research agenda:
towards a model of ESP
didactics
Shona Whyte
Cédric Sarré
ESSE 2016 Whyte & Sarré wp.me/p28EmH-vA 5
● Co-convenors of ESSE seminar on
teaching ESP (with Danica Milosevic,
Nis; Alessandra Molino, Turin)
● Co-chairs of ESP didactics SIG in
GERAS (French learned society for
study of English in specialised
contexts)
● Teaching and research interests in
language teacher education and
technology-mediated language teaching

Not “war stories
and romances”
Bowers, 1980; Johns &
Dudley-Evans, 1991; Master, 2005
6
It is undoubtedly true that not only
editors but also readers of journals
can find it exercising and on occasion
fruitless to wade through a series of
anecdotes about English teaching
through different approaches with
different resources in unrelated and
possibly esoteric contexts: war stories
and romances, tales of experience
and the unexpected, echoes in the
background of 'I did it my way.'
ESSE 2016 Whyte & Sarré wp.me/p28EmH-vA

Project reports (from practitioners)
Bowers, 1980
7
I firmly believe that a batch of authentic educational
studies in which the heterogeneity of the natural
learning context has been preserved and the actualities
of teaching and learning reported is likely, in the long
run, to be of greater value than a batch of
experimental studies where the variables have been
controlled but reliability and focus attained at the cost of
immediate relevance to authentic contexts

“Thick description” and a “methodological metalanguage”
Bowers, 1980
8
Anecdotes, then, as reports of comparable experiences in
teaching and learning - the successful and the unsuccessful -
are a valuable and necessary part of the literature of the
profession. But they are valuable only in so far as they are
comparable within the field of language teaching as a whole,
relatable to the particular learning contexts which are the
concern of the individual reader, and capable of being evaluated
as accurate and comprehensive statements of pedagogic
activities and the pedagogic results of those activities
Ryde, 1971; Geertz, 1973

Some preliminaries: Teaching ESP
English
● not other languages
● as a foreign/second language, not first or native language
specific purposes
● not general English
● not literary varieties, or for cultural enrichment
teaching
● not describing, characterising, analysing a language variety
● not learning, not using a variety, not acquiring it ‘in the wild’
12ESSE 2016 Whyte & Sarré wp.me/p28EmH-vA

Evaluation of teaching efficacy
Dudley-Evans, 2001
While not in any way rejecting
the need for theory and analysis in
ESP, I do feel that we are reaching
a stage where we need to consider
how effective the courses that are
developed from this research are.
Are we really delivering in the ESP
classroom?
Master, 2005
Despite 30 years of calls for
empirical research demonstrating
the efficacy of ESP, not a single
published study has appeared to
this end. All we really have [... are]
‘war stories and romances.’

Presentation outline
1. Academic disciplines relevant
to ESP teaching
2. Key terms in ESP didactics
3. A research agenda for ESP
teaching
Where should we
look for expertise
in testing ESP
teaching efficacy?

17
Experts?
Literary/cultural scholars
Linguists (language scientists)
Second language researchers
Applied linguists
Language educators
Content/disciplinary specialists
Institutional stakeholders

Literary/cultural studies
19
HUMANITIES
philosophy
history
classics
modern languages
Spanish
French
English
ENGLISH AS A
FOREIGN
LANGUAGE
English
ESP
“discourse community”

Linguistics
20
COGNITIVE
SCIENCE
neuroscience
anthropology
psychology
linguistics
phonology
syntax
English
second language
acquisition
acquisition
LSP

ESP and linguistics
Second language
research
● SLA generally
viewed as
applied
linguistics
● BUT sometimes
excludes applied
research
21
In addition to providing a forum for
investigators in the field of non-native
language learning, it seeks to promote
interdisciplinary research which links
acquisition studies to related non-applied
fields such as neurolinguistics,
psycholinguistics, theoretical linguistics,
bilingualism, and first language
developmental psycholinguistics. Note that
studies of foreign language teaching and
learning are outside the scope of Second
Language Research, unless they make a
substantial contribution to understanding
the process and nature of second
language acquisition.

Second language studies
22
SECOND
LANGUAGE
STUDIES
L2 phonology
second language
acquisition
L2 syntax
instructed SLA
LSP
pragmatics
L2 pedagogy &
assessment
Instructed SLA
ESP
Language for
specific purposes

Applied linguistics
24
APPLIED
LINGUISTICS
conversation
analysis
second language
acquisition
translation
instructed SLA
bilingualism
language pedagogy
discourse analysis
ESP
language for
specific purposes
negative connotations of
“applied”

Education
26
EDUCATION
education
policy
learning
sciences
educational
psychology
language
education
materials
development
syllabus
design
English
English language teaching
ESP
bilingual education
EFL
ESL
“CLIL”

28
PHYSICS
particle
physics
astrophysics English for Science
English
for
biology
English
for
Physics
ESP
Legal
English
Business
English
“task-based language
teaching”
Academic discipline

Institutional perspective
29
UNIVERSITY
College of
Business
College of
Engineering
College of Arts and
Social Sciences
College of
Sciences
ESP?
“English as a lingua
franca”

Current debate on scope, history, future of different fields
30
The place of ESP research among ...
Literary/cultural scholars
Linguists (language scientists)
Second language researchers
Applied linguists
Language educators
Content/disciplinary specialists
Institutional stakeholders
● Second language research
and second/foreign language
teaching (Spada, 2015;
VanPatten, 2015)
● Applied linguistics and
language teaching (CRELA,
2013; HoLLT, 2015)
● ESP research/teaching in
France (Braud et al, 2015a,
2015b)

Expertise for ESP practice and research
34
Specialisations/ESP orientation RECOGNISE
ESP
CONTRIBUTE to
ESP
“MATRIX
DISCIPLINE”
Literary/cultural scholars probably not no no
Linguists (language scientists) maybe yes no
Second language researchers probably yes yes
Applied linguists yes yes yes
Language educators yes yes maybe
Content/disciplinary specialists yes maybe probably not
Institutional stakeholders yes increasingly not clear
Kramsch, 2000

to ESP teaching
teaching
Terminological confusion is an
obstacle to interdisciplinary
collaboration

Didactics as a widely accepted concept?
→ Different national
realities, different
concepts, different
definitions of apparently
similar concepts
36

Didactics vs pedagogy
37

ESP as a widely accepted concept?
→ ESP as an
evolving concept +
national
specificities (eg,
French ASP)
38

Research in ESP teaching and learning
● A distancing and theorising process,
as it seeks to analyse the way ESP
teaching leads to learning
● Draws on several contributive
sciences
● Takes a broader perspective than
SLA, covering elements of both SLA
and foreign language education
→ This strand of ESP
research is not restricted to
pedagogy, but didactic by
nature
39

Towards a revised definition of ESP
ESP is the branch of English language
studies which concerns the language,
discourse and culture of English-language
professional communities and specialised social
groups, as well as the learning and teaching
of this object from a didactic perspective.
(Sarré & Whyte 2016 : 150, adapted from Petit 2002)
40

to ESP teaching
teaching
ESP in French higher education

The DidASP Special Interest Group
Objectives:
● To promote a research-based
approach to the study of ESP
learning and teaching in France
● To examine the transversal
nature of ESP learning and
teaching situations and isolate
both absolute and variable
characteristics of these
situations
42
An overview of ESP teaching and
research contexts:
● 16 talks, 15 speakers, 12
institutions
● 8 in science and engineering
● 5 in arts and humanities
● 3 on the ESP sector as a whole
● Mostly mainstream university
ESP courses, 1 technical
university (IUT)

DidASP: ESP learning/teaching situations
Absolute characteristics:
1. Interaction between language
and content knowledge
2. Goal-directedness
3. Needs analysis
4. Specific institutional
constraints
43
Variable characteristics:
1. Primacy of task completion
(over language accuracy)
2. Primacy of specific language
skills development
3. Use of authentic materials
4. Use of specific methods
5. Use of language certification
6. Limited teacher training in ESP
for non-research professionals

Sarré & Whyte 2016
asp.revues.org/4841DidASP: ESP didactics
Five key dimensions:
1. Analysis of learner needs
2. Domain or content areas for
ESP
3. Professional contexts
4. Language acquisition and
competences
5. Language teaching and
institutional constraints
44
Research in ESP teaching and
learning in French higher
education: developing the
construct of ESP didactics

A research agenda for DidASP
Two main sources:
1. Issues in the development of
ESP courses
2. Issues surrounding the
efficacy of ESP
methods/courses…
One principle:
inter-institutional collaborative
research projects
45
Two avenues currently explored:
1. Replication studies (eg,
dictogloss)
2. ESP learner corpus building

Efficacy of ESP?
Are we really delivering in the
ESP classroom?
Despite 30 years of calls for
empirical research demonstrating
the efficacy of ESP, not a single
published study has appeared to
this end
Dudley-Evans, 2001
Master, 2005
Instructional effects studies?
ESP - first issue per year
(5 articles)
15 years: 2001-2016

Move away from L1 linguistic studies to L2
instructional effects
47
ESP Journal Linguistic
focus
(L1)
Linguistic
focus
(L2)
Pedagogical
focus (L2)
Instructional
effects (L2)
2001(1) 3 1
2006(1) 1 1 1 2
2011(1) 2 1 1 1
2016(1) 1 2 2

Research in ESP teaching
49
Applied linguistics (not “linguistics applied;”
Widdowson, 2000)
Appliable linguistics (not “applicable;”
Halliday, 2006)
the business of applied
linguistics […] is to mediate
between linguistics and other
discourses and identify
where they might relevantly
interrelate.
treating a theory as a
problem-solving enterprise and
trying to develop a theoretical
approach, and a theoretical model
of language, which can be
brought to bear on everyday
activities and tasks. I call this an
"appliable" linguistics

From ‘war stories and
romances’
to research agenda:
towards a model of
ESP didactics
Seminar 14: Teaching practices in ESP today 25 August 2016
wp.me/p28EmH-vA
50

War stories and romances: Whyte & Sarré, ESSE 2016

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War stories and romances: Whyte & Sarré, ESSE 2016