Ronel D. Cornella Prof. Rowena C.

Nuera
MEAL – I AL 115 Professor

Applying a genre approach to teaching English for Specific Purposes

(ESP)
Julia Hüttner & Ute Smit, University of Vienna, Austria

I. Objective/Rationale

The study, which was a product of a workshop, was aimed at, and

primarily attended by practicing teachers and teacher educators in the field of

ESP. Drawing on the potential of a corpus – based genre analysis of ESP texts as

cited by Hüttner, Smit & Mehlmauer – Larcher (2009). The study focuses on

presenting ways of developing up-to-date and customized ESP Teaching

materials.

The reason for such an explicit focus on ESP teaching is its rising

popularity in many types of schools and colleges. In Austria, for instance, ESP is

an obligatory subject for nearly 65% of all the students who attend vocational

upper-secondary schools and colleges with specializations ranging from

information technology to nursing. This situation poses a challenge to

European English teachers as they have to accomplish the difficult task of

teaching many ESPs, including unfamiliar or newly emerging genres, where

teaching materials are hard to come by or outdated.

In this context, Swales (1990:58) defined genre as a class of

communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative

purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent

discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale of the genre. This

rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and

constrains choice of content and style.

 By drawing attention to the importance of communicative purpose, the

audience as well as the setting in which any particular genre is used are viewed

as essential to the analysis of such genre. Thus, students should also be guided

towards an understanding of why particular texts are written rather than just

following a pre-set pattern. This focus on purpose is also the underlying factor

in the structural units used. For learners of a genre, such knowledge regarding

essential parts of any genre is indispensable.

II. Methods

The study, in its approach, the basis for any analysis of a genre is not

single instances or teacher intuition, but a corpus of electronically stored texts.

Given the availability of public domain texts online, the compilation of such

corpora is easily achieved for many ESP genres.

The procedure for corpus-based genre analysis in language teaching is
outlined in the table below.
(A) Selection of a genre and description of the teaching situation envisaged

(including the imagined group of learners)

(B) Description of the genre (communicative purpose/s + potential discourse

community)
(C) Collection of exemplary texts and compilation of the mini-corpus
(D) Description of the ‘moves’ on the basis of the texts included in the mini-

corpus
(E) Lexico-grammatical analysis: comparison of mini-corpus with reference

corpus with the help of WordSmith Tools

(F) Analysis of textualizations: connecting investigative steps (D) and (E)
(G) Interpretation of the results with reference to the teaching and learning

situation, developing teaching materials.

The investigative procedure of teaching-oriented corpus-based genre analysis

The application of this procedure was exemplified by drawing on

materials developed in two student projects (Jexenflicker 2003; Unterberger

2008). In this phase of the workshop, participants had the opportunity of

 actively carrying out some of the steps involved in a genre analysis of a mini-

corpus of authentic ESP texts.

The first project focused on Catwalk Reports, a genre familiar to those

working in the fashion industry and one that needs to be taught in colleges of

fashion and design. Given the clear specialization of this topic, there are only

few existing teaching materials in use on this topic and these are problematic as

far as achievable tasks and the relation of the texts presented to those used in

the fashion profession are concerned.

The second example of the study consisted of Company Profiles

(Jexenflicker 2003), defined as “… a communication vehicle through which the

company presents itself to potential customers, investors or the public in

general, i.e. anyone who for some reason or other is interested in what the

company does”. Participants of the workshop were asked to identify some of

the eight genre moves in several examples of Company Profiles.

The lexico-grammatical analysis of this genre focused on two aspects;

firstly, the keywords of the genre, i.e. those words found to be typical of the

genre by virtue of appearing more frequently in it than would be expected

through a comparison with a large, general language corpus. Such keyword

lists give information on the lexical profile of the genre and highlight those

items required in the production of such texts. Further essential information for

teachers can be obtained through the second aspect focused on in the lexico-

grammatical analysis, i.e. the concordances. These give information on “the

company a word keeps” (Firth 1957:11, 14), i.e. the collocations, compound or

typical phrases. Given time constraints, participants of the workshop were

given some lists of concordances taken from the corpus of Company Profiles

and asked to identify those that they would focus on in a teaching context.

III. Findings

On the first example, even though students are indeed required to

produce a catwalk report on a collection, the materials do not give much

 information in the way of what such report should look like and the texts

presented range from statements of opinion to interviews with designers, but

do not include a clear, up-to-date example of a catwalk report, or a description

of its communicative purpose. In comparison to Unterbeger’s findings on

purpose and moves of the genre, the workshop participants indentified the

problematic areas in the teaching materials and potential ways of improving it.

On the lexico-grammatical analysis, the ensuing discussion highlighted

the potential of information in materials development, especially of phrase

banks, activities on the use of semi-technical vocabulary , and the possibility for

teachers to evaluate existing teaching materials or to familiarize themselves

with new genres.

In sum, this workshop showed that focusing on the connection

between the communicative purposes of a genre and the textual realizations

allow ESP teachers to apply their professionalism as a language experts to

diverse, new and developing genres in preparation of teaching them to learners

of diverse professional and language competence backgrounds.

IV. Recommendation

No explicit recommendation was given yet it can be inferred that

applying a genre approach to teaching English for Specific Purposes would be

realized if teachers and the education community at large would focus of the

connection between the communicative purposes of a genre and the textual

realizations.

If the above discussion would then be realized, ESP teachers could

reach out and teach language to a diverse set of learners in a communicative

background.

V. What is the Pedagogical Implication of this Study in the Philippine Setting

Amidst cultural diversity and technological advancement, the lack of

proper approach to different professional disciplines is clearly observed among

 teachers and students. It may seem that ESP is needed to address the teachers

and students needs in a language competent environment.

The study’s primary pedagogical implications based on the preceding

discussion in the Philippine setting would mean an improvement of the

Philippine pedagogical setup.

 School administration would then formulate curriculum and

course outlines that would be genre appropriate. Subjects to be offered would

be geared towards a specific genre.

 Teachers who teach students in a certain genre must be

equipped with the skills and competence necessary to cater the language needs

of the students in relation of a professional discipline.

 Since teachers are the ones who have first hand exposure with

the students, they know the needs of their students; they would then provide

genre-appropriate instructional materials materials which must cater the

intellectual and affective interest of their students

 Teachers would then be knowledgeable with a specific set of

genre-related terms, phrases and concepts that would be useful in

communicative purposed in teaching the language.

 Instructional materials and activities given to the students

would then be genre appropriate that would spark their intellectual interest in

the language while having fun.

In conclusion, academic institutions and educators should be mindful

of the needs of the students as their strengths and weakness. It would be best to

follow approved curriculum that is catered to a specific genre. Students can find

interest in learning the language if they perceive it as practical and applicable in

their chosen field of discipline.