The development of ESP: There are five phases:

1. Register analysis: this stage took place in the 60s and early 70s. The aim was to identify the grammatical and
lexical features of the different registers (engineering, biology), because it would be included in the teaching
materials for the syllabus. The focus was on the language at the sentence level (grammar, lexis, words that we
can see)

2. Rhetorical or discourse analysis: the focus was on the level above the sentence, the communication aspect of
the language, understanding how sentences were combined in discourse to produce meaning. The aim was to
identify the organizational patterns in texts, that would then form the syllabus of the ESP course. (The teaching
materials: text-diagramming exercises, to recognize textual patterns and discourse markers)

3. Target situation analysis/need analysis: the aim was to relate language analysis to the learners’ reasons for
learning, and the target situations in which they would use it. The ESP course purpose is to enable learners to
function adequately in a target situation so the ESP course design process would start with identifying the target
situation and then carrying out an analysis of the linguistic features of that situation that will form the syllabus.