The ESP Journal, Vol. 2, pp. 45-48, 1983 0272-2380/83/010045-0453.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in the USA. Copyright © 1983 The American University

Two Core Skil ls for ESP Teachers

I should like to make my comments from the perspective of an ESP- teacher trainer who is involved with training inservice teachers. This means my concerns are with already qualified teachers who are already teaching in tertiary, upper-secondary or vocational institutions in any of about forty countries around the world.

Jack Ewer's work has long been a help and a stimulus, and his article is full of ideas and practices which speak to the work in which I am involved and reveal Ewer's practical, sympathetic approach to the problems and needs of ESP teachers. It is easy to be in agreement with the major part of what Ewer says. Like him, for example, I find that the ability to analyse the language of a specific purpose discipline is a crucial ability for ESP teachers. It gives them a confidence and purposefulness that finds ways through the often bewildering variety of uses of English with which they are faced. In these brief comments I should like to select some areas of comparison with Ewer's practices, in the spirit of exchanging ideas on the range of training approaches currently obtaining.

Work with inservice teachers who already see themselves as ESP teachers (whatever that may mean for them) gives a special perspective on the job of training. Inservice teachers of ESP acknowledge some fa- miliarity with an SP area. This may be reluctant, partial or even unfounded, but it does lead to an acceptance of the English of engineering or economics or tourism as within their role as a teacher. The teachers then articulate two strongly held desires: first, to understand the language of their SPs more efficiently, and second to know how to put it over to students. Most have an aware perception of the centrality of classroom practices to a teacher. To some extent then, Ewer's "attitudinal" problem is partly overcome, and it becomes possible to conflate his five problem areas into two and to recast the two as core skills which a training course needs to develop. An inservice ESP training course can then be seen as a means of developing two professional methodological skills:

(1) the skill of selecting what to teach; (2) the skill of devising and implementing methods of encouraging

learning. Fundamentally, this is not different from many other teacher-training courses. What relates the core skills to ESP is the elaboration of a particular set of interrelated abilities which together help to develop ESP compe- tencies. Given in list form, the ESP teacher needs to be able to:

1. Analyse SP language and situations 2. Evaluate textbooks and other resources 3. Evaluate learner attainment 4. Devise performance objectives for learners 5. Design or interpret syllabuses 6. Design or interpret schemes for work 7. Devise teaching and learning strategies 8. Devise individual but interrelated teaching/learning sessions

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9. Produce materials 10. Organise and teach teaching/learning sessions 11. Assess achievement of objectives

It will be observed that these are classroom-orientated abilities based on a perception of what ESP teachers have to do, and that many of them overlap with general language-teaching abilities. I do not find that "the teaching of EST-ESP operates as an entirely different system" (my italics) from that of general language teaching. Much seems to me to be common. I agree with Ewer that what is different is the degree of political and economic pressure on teachers to tailor their teaching to a specified end. For this reason, inservice training may give priority to developing abilities 1, 2, 4, 7, 9 and 10. These abilities then form the basis for the particular meanings given to the others. The abilities I have enumerated are those most directly related to the twin core skills of language analysis/selection and of devising teaching/learning approaches to that language.

While the above targets provide priorities for our inservice training course, I find myself in complete agreement with Ewer's stress on the importance of allowing time for participant "doing" in group work or seminar session, rather than forming a course on the basis of lectures alone. It is, for one thing, a vital means of enabling participants to exchange their considerable experience and to learn from each other. Our course is therefore run on a one-third input, two-thirds workshop basis. "Input" may mean lecture, but may also mean demonstration, visual presentation, doing and analysing an exercise, or other activities. "Workshop" means group application of ideas in analysis, problem solving, materials creation, microteaching and other tasks. We have found that it is not valid to assume participants can see the applications of ideas to teaching; they have to practice applications to realise the implications of ideas. Because of this finding, the major part of the course is spent on materials assessment and creation and on microteaching, as these have been found to be the most effective routes to deeper theoretical understandings of language and of teaching. It also seems important that an ESP course should practice what it preaches, and utilise an analysis of the language of an ESP class- room. From such an analysis it is possible to help participants develop skilfulness in choosing effective classroom English, or in matching gesture and meaning, or in setting group tasks. Recent work by Willis (1981) and Hughes (1981) is a valuable basis from which trainers can start. I have found that participants' ability to handle lesson content in a way appropriate to their adult learners is greatly enhanced by concentration on the English of teaching ESP, and on the English of being a student in English. A stress on how to cope with learners is, as Ewer suggests, a great help to an ESP teacher, who may feel intimidated by being of the same age or younger than his learners. It gives something of the confidence necessary to be flexible and willing to attempt new approaches.

Our ESP inservice training course is able to focus on the professional core skills of language analysis/selection and devising teaching/learning approaches partly because it is separate from but integrated with a more

Responses to "Teacher Training for EST" 47

general EFL course. This aims to help participants develop their under- standing of language through inputs and workshops on linguistics, socio- linguistics and phonology. In addition, participants can choose an option which concentrates on language variation, the organisation of EFL teaching or on classroom approaches. The reinforcement between different areas of study helps participants gradually develop understandings. I very much agree with Ewer that developing new perspectives on language and teaching takes time, and is helped by cyclical and cumulative returns to basic themes, preferably utilising changes of point of view at each return. The constantly varying workshop tasks are another means by which we also attempt to do similar things in different ways.

The need to create tasks which facilitate application of ideas is extremely challenging, sometimes even daunting. As Ewer suggests, one needs "reasonably short and manageable tasks" and, for our participants, ones which have those qualities for people from a diversity of backgrounds and teaching situations. Diversity is a perennial problem (and resource) in ESP teaching, so at least the trainers are faced with the same challenge as those they train. It would therefore be extremely valuable if one legacy of Jack Ewer's work could be a continuing exchange of the kinds of group tasks which trainers have found effective in developing professional ESP teaching skills.

I should like to conclude by mentioning an area of training need which fits no neat category, unless one generates yet another acronym. We may call it the need of the EIP teacher. This teacher is faced with English for Institutional Purposes. The EIP teacher works in a tertiary technical in- stitution and runs a compulsory English language course which he has been told to make into an ESP course. However, his task is not that of achieving the usual transition from unspecific target language to needs- related target language, as the students who take his course make no use of English at all in either their technical studies or in their professional life. By this I mean that in practice the students are not required to read texts in English or to speak or write in English in their academic training. Once at work, the language of the country is used for all professional purposes.

It is, then, very difficult for such a teacher to feel he is training "students to do a definite job in the real world", and analyses of the English of the technical disciplines, while attractive, are difficult to justify on conventional needs analysis grounds. Perhaps there is an element of SP in that the teacher is training his students to perform as students of English in his English class. It is "student-centred teaching" with a double meaning, but leaves the teacher with relatively few clearly specifiable requirements on which to base his teaching judgements. Not surprisingly the teacher frequently has a most unenviable role in teaching unmotivated students for a minimal number of badly timetabled periods. While one can fairly easily think of large-scale iconoclastic solutions to the problem, devising realistic means of helping teachers in this situation is much harder. I find it difficult to determine whether "EIP-ESP" is a remnant from the days

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of English as purveyor of culture, or whether it is a phenomenon likely to endure because of institutional needs for a powerful means of distin- guishing between students. It would be most valuable to have other train- ers' views on EIP.

This writer's debt to Jack Ewer is unquantifiable, for he has helped to form my perceptions of what ESP is, of ways of teaching it and of ways of training others to teach it. The loss of further expressions of his practical sympathy for teachers and learners, and of his precepts clearly grounded in research and trial, will be most sorely felt.

Jennifer Jarvis Overseas Education Unit

School of Education University of Leeds

REFERENCES

Hughes, G. 1981. A Handbook ofClassroomEnglish. Oxford: Oxford Uni- versi ty Press.

Willis, J. 1981. Teaching English through English. London: Longman Group Limited.