From is early beginnings in the 1960s ESP has undergone three main phase of development. We shall describe of the five phase in greater detail in chapters, but it will provide a useful perspective to give a brief summary here. It should be point out first of all that ESP is not a monolithic universal phenomenon. ESP has developed at different speed at different countries.
1. The concept of special language: register analysis
Register analysis revealed that there was very little that was distinctive in the sentence grammar of scientific English beyond a tendency to favor particular forms such as the present simple tense, the passive voice and nominal compound.
2. Beyond the sentence: rhetorical or discourse analysis
Rhetorical or discourse analysis is attention shifted to understanding how sentence were combine in discourse to produce meaning. The concern of research therefore was to identify the organizational patterns are signaled.
3. Target situation analysis
Target situation analysis stage marked a certain coming of age for ESP. what had previously been done very much in a piecemeal way, was now systematised and learner need was apparently placed at the centre of the course design process.
4. Skill and strategies
The principal idea behind the skill-centered approach is that underlying all language use there are common reasoning and interpreting process, which regardless of the surface form, enable us to extract meaning from discourse. The focus should rather be on the underlying imperative strategies which enable the learner to cope with the surface form.
5. A learning centered approach
The importance and the implication of the distinction that we have made between language use and language learning will hopefully become clear as we process thought the following chapters.
