TIESPJ, Vol.

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Book Reviews

Diane Belcher. (ed.) English for Speciic Purposes in Theory and Practice.
Ann Arbor, M.I.; University of Michigan Press, 2009, 308 pp.
(ISBN 13-978-0-472-03384-3)

English for Speciic Purposes in Theory and Practice is a three-part collection of

articles reviewing the literature and illustrating common themes in the areas of English
for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Occupational Purposes (EOP), and English
for Sociocultural Purposes (ESCP). The editor, Diane Belcher, opens the book with
an extended introduction explaining some of the key features of ESP methodology,
including its diverse range of sub-disciplines, the importance of needs analysis, the
recent use of corpus tools, and the importance of needs-knowledgeable instructors.
This is followed by four articles covering EAP, seven chapters covering EOP, and two
chapters covering ESCP. Then, Brian Paltridge closes the book with an afterword on
the past and current state of ESP, in which he comments on the increasingly complex
picture of language that ESP researchers have discovered.
Many of the book’s chapters are written by very well-known and active
researchers in ESP, and so, it provides an excellent insight into some of their latest
work. However, the authors approach the chapters in quite different ways giving very
different weightings to the two themes of ‘theory’ and ‘practice.’ Some authors focus
almost exclusively on defining and reviewing previous research in the target area.
This is most noticeable in the second part of the book covering EOP. Other authors
provide a more balanced presentation that discusses current trends in the target area
and then illustrates these using case studies or examples from their own research. Even
in these chapters, however, readers should not expect to ind detailed task designs or
lesson plans. The overall emphasis of the book is clearly on reviewing the work being
carried out by ESP researchers rather than providing step-by-step guides to help novice

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teachers manage a new class. In this respect, the book title may be slightly misleading
to some readers. It is interesting to note that the presentation of the chapters also varies
widely, with each author choosing very different sub-headings, and one author even
avoiding sub-headings altogether. Most likely, the editor’s intention is that each chapter
is read in isolation. But, for those readers who read the book from beginning to end
there is a slightly disjointed feel to its design.
Part One of the book is comprised of four chapters looking at EAP. In Chapter
One, Ken Cruickshank discusses TESOL education to international students as an
example of EAP. He opens the chapter with a rather controversial argument that “all
TESOL in school contexts falls under the umbrella of EAP” (p. 23), and then proceeds
to discuss TESOL programs in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Although the content of the chapter is interesting, many of the described teaching
practices closely resemble those of English for General Purpose (EGP) teachers around
the world. As a result, readers may be confused about the use of the term ESP in this
context, particular when compared with the definition given by Dudley-Evans and
St. John (1998). In Chapter Two, Ann M. Johns considers what the purpose of EAP
education should be at the university undergraduate level. Again, controversially, she
argues that the primary aim should NOT be to identify the speciic needs of learners
based on expected target situations and analyses of target discourses, but instead to
help learners become rhetorically lexible. To defend this view, she reviews the work
on genre and describes exemplar practices before offering a set of goals for EAP
classes based on Carter’s (2007) taxonomy of writing processes in different disciplines.
In Chapter Three, Christine Feak gives a detailed account of why and how graduate
students should be taught critical writing skills. She proposes asking students to write
research commentaries as an effective alternative to writing book reviews. Finally, in
Chapter Four, Ken Hyland looks at writing for scholarly publication. First, he reviews
work plotting the growth of English as the language of academic journal publication,
and then reviews the literature on successful instructional practices that addresses
journal targeting, paper-writing strategies, sentence and discourse structure, and
revising and negotiating.

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Part Two of the book is comprised of seven chapters looking at EOP. In Chapter
Five, Brigitte Planken and Catherine Nickerson look at business English and review
work that shows that traditional ESP teaching materials are perhaps too narrowly
deined and do not match real-world practices in the business world. Next, they review
work defining and describing practices of real-world Business English specialists,
suggesting that this work can provide a framework for developing effective ESP
materials. Unusually, Chapter Six is also written by Planken and Nickerson (in reversed
order). Here, they review work defining written business English and then discuss
effective teaching practices for written business English. The focus and mood of
Chapter Seven, by Jane Lockwood, Gail Forey, and Neil Elias is rather different. Here,
the authors look at the problems of using scorecards to assess call-center operators
working for US companies in the Philippines. Next, they perform a discourse analysis
of a call-center interaction to show how current scorecards are ineffective. Chapters
Eight and Nine look at legal English. In Chapter Eight, Jill Northcott reviews work
describing the characteristics of legal English and then discusses some effective
teaching practices. Like most of the reviews in the book, the author here only very
briely introduces the work, expecting the reader to refer to the source text for details as
the example below illustrates,

“Northcott gives an account of an unusual legal teaching context - a training

program for interpreters in the courts of Zimbabwe, concluding that demands of a
new teaching assignment can act as a catalyst for teacher education.”

In Chapter Nine, Vijah K. Bhatia discusses intertextuality in legal texts.

Intertextuality refers to the appropriation of words, phrases, and sections from one text
into another. Bhatia discusses four different functions where intertextuality plays an
important role, i.e., signaling textual authority, providing terminological explanation,
facilitating textual mapping, and deining legal scope. Chapters Ten and Eleven look at
medical English. In Chapter Ten, Ling Shi irst deines English for Medical Purposes
(EMP). Next, she reviews research on the characteristic features of written and spoken
medical texts before looking at various approaches to needs analysis in an EMP setting.

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 74 Book Reviews

Finally, in Chapter Eleven, Diane Belcher introduces problem-based learning (PBL)

as a new model for nursing education in which real-world problems are discussed and
solved.
Part Three of the book is a short two-chapter section discussing ESCP. In Chapter
Twelve, Helen De Silva Joyce and Susan Hood look at English courses for adult
immigrants in Australia aimed at facilitating their early entry into community life.
Although the authors explain that the theoretical framework for the courses is based
on genre and register principles, they regrettably do not discuss any needs analysis. As
a result, the distinction between ESP and EGP again becomes blurred, as it did in the
irst chapter of the book. Providing an interesting contrast to Joyce and Hood’s work, in
Chapter Thirteen, Brian Morgan and Douglas Fleming look in detail at the concept of
citizenship and argue that a critical aspect of a successful program is the deinition of
learner needs.
In summary, this collection of articles presents an unusually broad picture of
ESP theory and practices that on occasion may cause readers to start questioning
the distinction between ESP and EGP. The book leans heavily towards work in EOP
and EAP, with only two chapters dealing with ESCP. Clearly, the book is aimed at
an audience of applied linguists, and it gives them a useful list of references that can
initiate or support new research projects. However, the book provides little for ESP
practitioners that are looking for in-class teaching materials and methodologies. Each
chapter should be read in isolation and readers should be aware that the authors’
weightings of theory and practice vary considerably. The editor has clearly given each
author a large degree of freedom in writing each chapter, which allows them to reveal
their individual characters and writing styles. However, perhaps it would have been
useful if the editor had guided the authors a little more to ensure consistency in content
and presentation across chapters.

References

Carter, T. (2007). Ways of knowing, doing, and writing. College Composition and Communication,
58, 385-418.

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Dudley-Evans, T. and St John, M. J. (1998). Developments in English for Speciic Purposes: A multi-disciplinary
approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Laurence Anthony
Professor, Director of CELESE
Center for English Language Education in Science and Engineering (CELESE)
Faculty of Science and Engineering
Waseda University, Japan
anthony@waseda.jp

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