READING AND WRITING IN ESP

English language literacy is a complex learning process that every English Language learner
must acquire to communicate efficaciously in order to participate successfully in jobs and economy.
Because English plays a dominant role in information access and knowledge transfer, no country,
according to Grabe (1988a), can afford to ignore the importance of English and still expect to
compete professionally and economically.
According to Grabe and Stoller (2001), amongst the four skills reading is considered to be the
most important academic language skill because reading is the central means for learning new
information. We read a text for a variety of purposes including: (1) to get the main idea, (2) to
search specific information, (3) to learn new information, (4) to synthesize and evaluate
information from multiple texts, (5) for general comprehension, (6) for pleasure, etc.
Reading is at the heart of much of what ESP students do, both in acquiring knowledge of
target community discourse and in conjunction with the use of another skill, such as writing. Thus,
says McDonough (1984, p.70), “ It will come as no surprise to most people to discover that, in ESP
terms, by far the most significant skill is that of reading”. There are, then, important reasons to
focus on reading in ESP courses and conduct research in this area.

READING COMPREHENSION________________________________________________
Whatever the purpose when reading, when one engages into a reading process, one generally
aims at reaching a certain comprehension, so what is meant by “reading comprehension”?

 According to Tarigan (1990, p.7), reading is a process done and used by the readers to
understand the message delivered by the writers through words or written language.
 Goodman and Niles (1980) simply say that reading comprehension is a process of
reconstructing the message contained in the text.
 Alderson (2000) defines reading as “…an enjoyable, intense, private activity, from which
much pleasure can be derived, and in which one can become totally absorbed” (p.28).
 Baron (2013, p.141) affirms: “comprehension requires a dynamic participation of the
readers and their ability to seek, organize and reformulate the information in their own
words, resorting to their own experiences and background knowledge”.
 Bergeson et al. (1998) say that reading is “the process of constructing meaning
through the dynamic interaction among the reader’s existing knowledge, the
information suggested by the written language and the context of the reading
situation” (p. 6).
 Lipson and Wixson (2003) “Reading comprehension is the ability to use previously
acquired information to construct meaning for a given text” (p.23).

In general terms, reading comprehension can be defined as the ability to understand

information in a text and interpret it appropriately. Additionally, it is agreed that reading
comprehension is the ability to read the text and understand its meaning. In that sense,
comprehension requires the reader to be an active constructor of meaning through comprehension
strategies.
Some researchers have posited that comprehension is an active process which involves
understanding and selectively recalling ideas in individual sentences, inferring relationship between
clauses and/or sentences, identifying main ideas intended by the author and supporting details,
relating prior knowledge with those ideas, summarizing ideas, drawing conclusions, finding
cause-and-effect relationships, and making inferences. These processes work together and can
be controlled and adjusted by the reader as required by the reader’s goals and the total situation in
which comprehension is taking place.
Since reading comprehension is a complex process, many researchers asserted that there are
different approaches applied to it, namely the top-down approach, the bottom-up approach, and
the interactive approach.

 In the top-down approach, learners use their knowledge of the genre to predict what will
be in the text (British Council, 2006). The reader obtains a global meaning of the text
through clues in the text and the reader’s good background knowledge. This is often
associated with a good reader, who does not read word for word but quickly and efficiently.
 In the bottom-up approach, the reader builds up meaning by reading word for word and
carefully scrutinizing both vocabulary and syntax. This is often associated with poor or slow
readers, but can sometimes occur when the readers own schema knowledge is inadequate.
 In the interactive approach, there is a combination of elements of both bottom-up and top
down models. When applied in isolation, neither bottom-up nor top-down could successfully
describe the reading process (Eskey, 2002). Reading is considered to be an interactive
process (a conversation between the reader and the text) and for this to occur, both
 processes are necessary, top-down to predict the meaning and bottom-up to check it. The
two are therefore complementary ways of processing a text.

IMPORTANCE OF READING_________________________________________________
Many scholars agree that reading is one of the most important skills for educational and
professional success (Alderson, 1984). In highlighting this importance:
o Rivers (1981:147) stated that “reading is the most important activity in any language
class, not only as a source of information and a pleasurable activity, but also as a means of
consolidating and extending one’s knowledge of the language”. In other words, reading
reinforces the learner’s other language skills.
o Kim and Krashen (1997) confirm that those who read more, have larger vocabularies, do
better on grammar tests and write better.
o Chastian (1988:218) while accepting the significance of reading for meaning claimed that
all reading activities serve to facilitate communication fluency in each of the other language
skills.
o Eskey (1988) added that in advanced levels of second language, the ability to read the
written language at a reasonable rate and with good comprehension has long been
recognized to be as oral skills if not more important.
o Grabe (1994) stated that “Reading is the most important skill for language learners in
academic contexts. It is the core of the syllabus because by reading a book most students
learn” (p.137).
o Bright and McGregor (1986) have claimed: “Only by reading can students acquire more
knowledge when they intend to learn new content in their discipline and when they leave
schools” (p.52).
o Roe, Stoodt, and Burns (1987) said, “Students cannot learn unless they can comprehend
reading material, and they cannot remember what they have read unless they have
understood them” (p.80).
o McKenna and Robinson (1993) stated that the ability or skills to use reading and writing to
acquire new content within learners’ subject area or discipline are needed (p.12).
o Paul (2007) has claimed, “EFL learners need to read and write in order to deeply internalize
the English they learn” (p.83).

This being said, university students need to have efficient reading skills to comprehend a great
number of materials in their studies and develop knowledge and skills essential for independent
learning. Moreover, the quantity and quality of reading both determine their professional
competence and further education.

THE READING PROCESS___________________________________________________

It is believed that students perform an efficient task when the reading goes through a process
that can be explained as follows:

 Pre-reading prepares students to read efficiently, which facilitates comprehension and is

related to students’ backgrounds. Lebauer (1998, p. 5) notes: “Pre-reading activities can
improve students’ cognitive burden while reading because prior discussions will have been
incorporated.” Thus, teachers have to provide supplemental activities such as
brainstorming, differencing, guessing, and analyzing titles and pictures, among other
activities.
 While-reading allows students to carry out “active reading” with activities such as arguing,
summarizing, questioning, evaluating, and comparing the text with their own personal
experience. It is necessary that students avoid using dictionaries while engaged in these
activities and encouraged to use strategies such as skimming and scanning for faster and
more in-depth reading practice. At the same time, Ur (1996) and Vaezi (2001) suggest
such strategies as making predictions, integrating prior knowledge, re-reading, making use
of context or guessing, breaking words into their component parts, reading in chunks and
monitoring one’s reading.
 Post-reading exercises depend on the purpose of reading and the type of information the
reader is interested in gaining. With reference to the previous statement, Barnett (1988, p.
5) remarks: “Post-reading exercises first check students’ comprehension and then lead
students to a deeper analysis of the text.” Finally, reading has to accomplish the func tion of
imparting new knowledge in tandem with activities such as group discussion, summariz ing,
questioning, filling out charts, completing a text, listening to or reading other related
materials, and role-playing. Hence, students must have the autonomy to choose the best
techniques for them, according to their own needs and learning styles.

READING UNDER THE PARAMETERS OF ESP____________________________________

To gain a better understanding of current perspectives on and approaches to ESP and
reading, it is helpful to see where reading has come from as related to the discipline. Like ESP
itself, interest in reading began to shift in the 1970s. As Peter Strevens (1977, p.109) commented
while noting a significant pedagogical change taking place at that time: “The pendulum may have
swung too far in the direction of speech, and many teachers are now seeking to increase the effort
applied to learning and teaching a command of the written language, and especially to the learning
and teaching of reading”. Reinforcing this different view of reading, McDonough (1984, p.70)
pointed out that “English is the language of textbooks and journals”. In other words, for very many
learners, English is a “library language,” especially in EFL contexts. Thus, there was a new climate
in which to approach reading. Anthony et al. (1997, p. 5) add that “Nowadays, reading has been
the base of the curricula of ESP” because most of the information that a person receives is through
reading
Anthony (1997) argues that reading is relevant to ESP learners because it provides them
with the vocabulary and the knowledge that will be used in their professions; accordingly, many
educational institutions have adopted ESP reading materials as the basis of their curricula. The goal
of reading is to obtain information one needs for specific or personal purposes; it involves
understanding, decoding, and constructing meaning from a text and reading through a process; it
is the main source of knowledge and it facilitates discussion of the topics within their own field of
study.

READING COMPREHENSION DIFFICULTIES IN ESP_______________________________

Since ESP contains both content-based and language-based knowledge, learners are
required to be good at a specific field of knowledge and at language, but in reality ESP learners
often suffer from various problems ranging from acquiring the content to mastering language. It is
further pointed out that ESP learners who struggle to comprehend the content have limited
knowledge of language (Pulido, 2004), and those who cannot tackle ESP content in depth cannot
recall information learned or locate information explicitly stated in a text (Abdulghani, 1993).
Recent studies have recognized different obstacles of ESP reading comprehension. Rosyidah (2013)
conducted a study determining the students’ difficulties in reading comprehension in ESP and their
efforts to solve those difficulties. The subjects of the study were seventy-five students, and the
results showed problems related to metalinguistic processing, phonological processing, word
recognition problems, text-processing problems and other difficulties such as teaching methods or
uninteresting instructions.
Another study (Thao1 and Tham, 2018) conducted on Vietnamese university students
revealed two significant factors which hindered them from comprehending ESP reading texts, which
are insufficient technical vocabulary and background knowledge of ESP subject matters, and among
the difficulties, the top five most common ones faced by students were about problems of technical
vocabulary, background knowledge, type of ESP reading materials and timing in reading ESP texts,
while the top five least common difficulties were about motivation in reading ESP texts, grammar
used in ESP texts, and reading strategies. One of the possible explanations for this may be that
students were not exposed to ESP terminology very often, which may cause them some problems
in understanding a particular ESP reading text.

TEACHING READING_____________________________________________________
Teachers naturally want to know what to teach students in ESP reading courses, with
improving reading comprehension as a driving goal. The purpose of teaching reading is aimed to
help students acquire reading skills to become independent learners and, therefore, the method
and strategies of teaching should be directed to achieve it. Based on several studies, Prapphal
(2003) has summarized, “Reading comprehension can be facilitated by explicitly teaching readers
about expository text structure and by teaching various strategies for identifying and utilizing that
structure during the reading process” (para. 3). Furthermore, many studies (Sweet et al., 1993) in
which novice readers were trained to use strategies such as inferencing, identifying important
information, summarizing, and question generating, have shown very promising results.

Students typically do not receive any instruction on reading skills and strategies required to
read some complicated texts in their educational life. Knowledge of language learning strategies,
however, is important to the learning process. Below are two examples of how reading could be
taught.

1. READING THROUGH INTEGRATED SKILLS

Reading is sometimes taught on its own as a separate skill, sometimes in conjunction with
writing, and sometimes as a component of a study skills programme. Regardless of which one is
applied, the main focus of reading instruction often tends to be the development of sub-skills
related to extracting different types of information from texts, such as skimming for gist and
scanning for specific details.
While there has been important work in the context of reading as a stand–alone skill, the
integrated-skills approach also has received considerable attention from ESP specialists, with
reading seen as a stepping stone to other skills or as complementing them. In the latter category,
there has been some interest in connections between speaking and reading (e.g. Kelly and
Khrishnan, 1995; Murphy, 1996). For the most part, though, the emphasis has been on the linking
of reading and writing. As Jordan (1997, p.143) explains: Reading, as a skill, is normally linked
with writing. This is a fundamental characteristic of the target academic situation in which students
are typically reading books and journals, noting, summarizing, paraphrasing, and then writing
essays, etc. In practice material for reading, the link with writing is normally included. Although the
focus may be on various reading strategies and comprehension practice, the resultant exercises
usually involve writing (apart from some multiple-choice questions and yes/no, true/false formats).

2. GENRE-BASED APPROACHES
Hyland (2004, p.5) has observed that “Today, genre is one of the most important and
influential concepts in language education”. In the genre-based work in ESP, students, as readers,
are repeatedly exposed to texts exemplifying the genres they must learn to understand and
reproduce as they seek to gain membership in their chosen disciplinary communities. This process
starts with the reading and analysis of these genres and culminates in students writing those same
genres, such as literature reviews. Through this genre-based combination of reading and writing,
they seek to develop what Johns (1997) refers to as socio-literate competence, that is, an
understanding of the socially constructed nature of genres as well as the components of literacy
necessary for their creation.
Basically, Genre-based Instruction (GBI) is teaching language based on results of genre
analysis. Genre analysis is, thus, the study of how language is used within a particular setting and
is concerned with the form of language use in relation to meaning (Swales, 1990). Bhatia (1993)
states that genre analysis is a tool that serves to:
(1) Examine the structural organization of texts by identifying the moves and strategies, and to
understand how these moves are organised in order to achieve the communicative purpose of
the text.
(2) Examine the text to show statistical evidence of a particular linguistic feature in a specific
genre.
(3) Examine the lexico-grammatical features of genres to identify the linguistic features chosen
by expert users of the genre to realize the communicative purpose, and to explain these
choices in terms of social and psychological contexts.

Other considerations in genre analysis include the communicative purpose of the target genre, the
roles of the writer and the audience, and the context in which the genre is used. The results from
analyzing a genre serve as the instructional materials in GBI.

3. SUMMARIZATION
Teaching students to summarize what they read is another way to improve their overall
comprehension of text. Students who write good summaries are students who know how to identify
the main ideas and leaving out detail; some scholars asserted that summarization helps improve
students reading skills. Further, the instruction of summarization improves memory for what is
read, both in terms of free recall and answering questions. In order for summarization to be
effective, the student must be able to process the ideas of the passage and consider how they are
related to one another (Friend, 2000). Since reading comprehension is of high importance in
foreign language contexts, many studies attempt to investigate the impact and effectiveness of
summarization strategy as a cognitive strategy and the explicitness of instruction on reading
comprehension of EFL and ESL learners. Duke and Pearson (2002) suggested that instruction and
practice in summarizing not only improves students' ability to summarize text, but also their
overall comprehension of text content. Thus, instruction in summarization can be considered to
meet dual purposes: to improve ESP students’ ability to summarize text and to improve their
ability to comprehend text and recall. It is especially worthwhile when used with other strategies
such as generating questions and answering questions (NRP, 2000).

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Historically speaking, of the four language skills, reading comprehension and writing in a
second or foreign language can be regarded as the oldest and most viable skills both in being
learned or taught at educational settings across the world. Furthermore, reading and writing skills
are said to be so much interrelated at every level of one’s instruction that it has been claimed that
"Good writers are good readers” and “Good reading is the key to becoming a good writer"
(Rodriguez Kessler, 2006, p. 5-6). Moreover, reading, as a skill for EAP students, is often linked to
writing because the former often precedes the latter within the target disciplines. Seen together,
reading and writing today are described as "parallel processes" or "natural partners" (Sarasota,
2008; Tsai, 2008) where the activities of readers are congruent to or mirror images of the activities
of writers.

THE CHALLENGE OF ESP WRITING___________________________________________

 The literacy demands of the modern world challenge ESP teachers to recognize that their task
involves far more than simply controlling linguistic error or polishing style. Instead it encourages
them to respond to a complex diversity of genres, contexts and practices. They are expected to not
just “teach writing” but teach particular kinds of writing which are valued and expected in some
academic or professional contexts.
Writing is perhaps the central activity of institutions. Complex social activities like educating
students, keeping records, engaging with customers, selling products, demonstrating learning and
disseminating ideas largely depend on it. Not only is it hard to imagine modern academic and
corporate life without essays, commercial letters, emails, medical reports and minutes of meetings,
but writing is also a key feature of every student’s experience. While multimedia and electronic
technologies are beginning to influence learning and how we assess it, in many domains
conventional writing remains the way in which students both consolidate their learning and
demonstrate their understanding of their subjects. With the continuing dominance of English as the
global language of business and scholarship, writing in English assumes an enormous importance
for students in higher education and on professional training courses. Countless individuals around
the world must now gain fluency in the conventions of writing in English to understand their
disciplines, to establish their careers or to successfully navigate their learning.
Written texts, in fact, dominate the lives of all students, even those in emergent, practice-
based courses not previously thought of as involving heavy literacy demands, as Baynham (2000,
p. 17) illustrates when he asks us to think of: “The harassed first-year nursing student, hurrying
from lecture to tutorial, backpack full of photocopied journal articles, notes, and guidelines for an
essay on the sociology of nursing, a clinical report, a case study, a reflective journal”. These kinds
of experiences are extremely challenging to students and can be especially daunting to those who
are writing in a second language. This is not only because different languages seem to have
different ways of organizing ideas and structuring arguments but because students’ prior writing
experiences in the home, school or elsewhere do not prepare them for the literacy expectations of
their university or professional workplace. Moreover, their experience in their new context
underlines for students that writing (and reading) are not just key elements of learning and
professional practice, but that it cannot be regarded as an homogeneous and transferable skill
which they can take with them as they move across different courses and assignments.

THE GENRE APPROACH TO WRITING________________________________________

While there are a number of ways of studying texts, genre analysis has become established as
the most widely used and productive methodology in ESP writing research (Hyland 2004a; Johns
2002). A genre approach to writing assumes that texts are always a response to a particular
communicative setting and which attempts to reveal the purposes and functions which linguistic
forms serve in texts. The writer is seen as having certain goals and intentions, certain relationships
to his or her readers, and certain information to convey. Every text, then, carries the purposes of
the writer and expectations about how information should be structured.
Genres in ESP are usually regarded as staged, structured events, designed to perform various
communicative purposes by specific discourse communities (Swales 2004). The term reminds us
that when we write we follow conventions for organising messages because we want our readers to
recognize our purposes and we all have a repertoire of linguistic responses to call on to
communicate in familiar situations. Writers therefore anticipate what readers expect from a text
and how they are likely to respond to it: they use the rhetorical conventions, interpersonal tone,
grammatical features, argument structure, and so on that readers are most likely to recognize and
expect.

SPECIFIC PURPOSES WRITING INSTRUCTION_________________________________

ESP practitioners have made considerable use of findings about the genre approach and
discourse analysis to determine what is to be learned and to organize instruction around the genres
that learners need and the social contexts in which they will operate. Texts and tasks are therefore
selected according to learners’ needs and genres are modelled explicitly to provide learners with
something to aim for: an understanding of what readers are likely to expect.
The demands of the modern workplace and university therefore mean that ESP recognizes the
specificity of writing done in different domains and in the instruction that leads to competence in
such domains (Belcher, 2009; Hyland, 2002). Since successful writing depends on an
understanding of a professional context, texts produced in legal, medical, technical, and business
fields differ enormously from each other and often from one site to another. In fact, even students
in fairly cognate fields such as nursing and midwifery, for example, are given very different writing
assignments (Gimenez, 2009). Students may find that they face literacy demands which span
several fields; business students, for example, may be expected to confront texts from
accountancy, economics, financial management, corporate organisation, marketing, statistics, and
so on.
There is, then, a marked diversity of task and texts in different fields. In the humanities and
social sciences, for example, analyzing and synthesising multiple sources is important, while in
science and technology, activity–based skills such as describing procedures, defining objects, and
planning solutions are required. Genre and lexis also vary considerably; the structure of an
experimental lab report, for instance, can differ completely across different technical and
engineering disciplines.
An important consequence of this is that ESP continues to base instruction on a study of the
texts students will need in their target contexts rather than our impressions of writing. While all
teaching starts with where the students are and takes their backgrounds, language proficiencies,
teaching and learning preferences into account, ESP focuses on the world outside the writing
classroom by going beyond grammar and vocabulary to prepare students for their future
experiences using the most detailed needs analysis that time allows. This seeks to ensure that
learning to write is related to the genres that students will confront and the contexts in which they
will confront them: it is the means of establishing the how and what of a course.
Many of these considerations are used by focussing on both the purposes for which people are
learning a language and the kinds of language performance that are necessary to meet those
purposes. Generally, this has meant employing particular approaches such as the content-based
approach.

A WRITING COURSE FOR ESP______________________________________________

Since ESP students need to be able to use and understand the language which occurs in the
types of texts used in their disciplines, there’s a need for employing a content-based approach to
the teaching of writing. Tütünis (2000) explains what this approach implies:

In a content-based approach, writing is required as a mode of demonstrating knowledge

and as a mode of prompting independent thinking, researching and learning. Students
learn to gather and interpret data according to methods and standards accepted in their
fields, to bring an increasing body of knowledge to bear on their interpreting, and to write
in specialised formats.

This approach emphasizes the integration of writing tasks with the reading of academic texts
and the need to develop the student’s ability to synthesize and to interpret information (Shih,
1986). Before writing, students must have knowledge of the topic, so that they can have control
over their ideas and can organize and process new information. A content-based syllabus should
raise awareness on the audience, the context of writing, and the concept of genre, since these are
variables which constrain what the writer can write and how they can express their ideas.
A fundamental concept in the teaching of ESP with a content-based approach is that of task.
Skehan (1998) claims that an activity can be considered a task if meaning, rather than the
teaching of forms, is the most important aspect, if the activity has a purpose and it is evaluated by
taking the outcome into consideration, and if there is a relation with the real world. Phillips (1981)
considers that the task must be seen by the student as “meaningfully generated by his or her
special purpose”, authenticity of the language, tolerance of error. The principle of authenticity is
especially important, but it is still a controversial one. Swales (1985) proposes that it is the task
that should be authentic rather than the text.
Grabe andKaplan (1996, p. 261) claim that a writing course should meet, among others, the
following criteria:

1. It should be a “content-driven” course which “presents topical issues and writing tasks
which motivate and engage students”;
2. It should “engage students in the writing process”, that is, students should be involved
in the selection of tasks, of materials, etc.;
3. It should incorporate activities which promote cooperative learning. The course should
include activities which allow for interaction to improve writing skills;
4. It should integrate language skills. Students should read extensively, relate the reading
to the writing tasks, and discuss the readings and the writing;
5. It should focus on formal constraints which reflect the writing purpose, the conventions
of genres, and the audience’s expectations;
6. It should take into consideration the audience and the social context;
7. It should enable writers to “practise a range of writing tasks and learn to work with a
variety of genres and rhetorical issues”.