English for Specific

Purposes BIP 3063

Assoc. Prof Dr. Mahendran Maniam
English Language and Literature Department
Faculty of Languages and Communication
Approaches to Course Design in ESP

 Course design is the process by which the raw data about a learning need is
interpreted in order to produce an integrated series of teaching and
experiences whose ultimate aims is to lead the learners to a particular state
of knowledge (Hutchinson and Waters, pp. 65).
 In practical terms this entails the use of the theoretical and empirical
information available to produce a syllabus, to select, adapt or write
materials in accordance with the syllabus, to develop a methodology for
teaching those materials and to establish evaluation procedures by which
progress towards the specified goals will be measured (Hutchinson and
Waters, pp. 65).
 So assume we have completed our need analysis and reviewed the theoretical models of learning
and language available. Ask yourself the following crushing questions?
1) What do we do with the information we have gathered?
Asking questions about learner needs will not of itself design a course.
The data must be interpreted.
When we come to designing our course, we will find yet another series of questions. The data from
our needs analysis can help to answer these questions.
But care is needed: there is no necessary one-to-one transfer from needs analysis to course design.
 We have seen already that answers from one area (what learners need) and another (what
learners want) may conflict.
 We must remember that there are external constraints (classroom facilities/time) that will
restrict what is possible.
 There are also our own theoretical views and (not to be discounted) experience of the classroom
to take into account.
 There probably as many different approaches to ESP course design as there are course designers.
 We can, however, identify three main types: language-centred, skills-centred and learning-
centred.
Task 1
Read Robinson (pp. 33-34) and Hutchinson and Waters (p. 65). Then fill in the gaps in the text
below.

1 ____________, in British usage, is concerned with the content of education and its rationale, it
reflects policy and planning in a wider context.
2 ____________ is a more restricted concept, it is often a physical document providing an inventory
of contents, a specification of intent, which is based on a needs analysis. It will reflect ideology
about the nature of language, learning and teaching.
The process of incorporating specifications of content and learning objectives (and information
about constraints) into a specific, contextualized plan, which is often represented by a timetable,
is greatly referred to as
3 _______________.
Language-centred course design

 The simplest kind of course design process and is probably the one most
familiar to English teachers, particularly prevalent in ESP.
 The language-centred course design process aims to draw as direct a
connection as possible between the analysis of the target situation and the
content of the ESP course:
Identify learners’ target Select theoretical views of
situation language

Create syllabus

Design materials to exemplify syllabus items

Establish evaluation procedures to test

Figure 1: A language-centred approach to
acquisition of syllabus items course design
(Read Hutchinson and Waters pp. 67-68)
Skills-centred course design
 The skills-centred approach to ESP has been widely applied in a number of countries,
particularly in Latin America.
 Students in universities and colleges there have the limited, but important need to read subject
related texts in English, because they are unavailable in the mother tongue.
 In response to this, a number of ESP projects have been set up with the specific aim of
developing the students’ ability to read in English.
 The skills-centred approach is founded on two fundamental principles, one theoretical, the
other pragmatic:
a) The basic theoretical hypothesis is that underlying any language behavior are certain skills and
strategies, which the learner uses in order to produce or comprehend discourse. A skill-centred
approach aims to get away from the surface performance data and look at the competence
that underlies the performance. A skill-centred course, therefore, will present its learning
objectives (though probably not explicitly) in terms of both performance and competence. This
example from a Brazilian ESP syllabus for Library Science students is given in Maciel et al.
(1983) :
General objective (i.e. performance level):
The student will be able to catalogue books written in English.
Specific objectives (i.e. competence level):
The student will be able to:
-extract the gist of a text by skimming through it.
-extract relevant information from the main parts of a book.
b) The pragmatic basis for the skills-centred approach derives from a distinction made by
Widdowson (1981) between goal-oriented courses and process-oriented courses. Holmes (1982)
points out that:
‘ in ESP the main problem is usually one of time available and student experience. First, the aims
may be defined in terms of what is desirable,
i.e. to be able to read in the literature of the students’ specialism, but there may be nowhere near
enough time to reach this aim during the period of the course. Secondly, the students may be in
their first year of studies with little experience of the literature of their specialism…Accordingly
both these factors…may be constraints which say right from the start, “The aims cannot be
achieved during the course.’’’
 Holmes puts his finger on a contradiction that arises from interpreting ‘needs’ in the narrow
sense of ‘target situation necessities’.
 If the ESP course is designed in terms of goals, there is in effect a tacit admission that a large
number of students will fail the course.
 Since ESP is by its very nature a process that is intended to enable people to achieve a purpose,
it is at best a little odd to frame the course in such a way as to almost predict failure.
 The process-oriented approach tries to avoid this problem by removing the distinction between
the ESP course and the target situation.
 The ESP course is not seen as a self-sufficient unit from which learners emerge as proficient
target situation performers.
 This is due to, a number of students are unlikely to achieve this proficiency.
Instead, the ESP course and the target situation are seen as a continuum of
constantly developing degrees of proficiency with no cut-off point of success
or failure.
 The emphasis in the ESP course, then, is not on achieving a particular set of
goals, but enabling the learners to achieve what they can within the given
constraints:
 The skills-centred model, therefore, is a reaction both to the idea of specific registers of English
as a basis for ESP and to the practical constraints on learning imposed by limited time and
resources.
 In essence it sees ESP course as helping learners to develop skills and strategies which will
continue to develop after the ESP course itself.
 Its aim is not to provide a specified corpus of linguistic knowledge but to make the learners into
better processors of information.
 The role of need analysis in a skills-centred approach is twofold.
 Firstly, it provides a basis for discovering the underlying competence that enable people to
perform in the target situation.
 Secondly, it enables the course designer to discover the potential knowledge and abilities that
the learners bring to the ESP classroom.
 The skills-centred approach, therefore, can certainly claim to take the learner more into
account than the language-centred approach:
a) It views language in terms of how the mind of the learner processes it rather than as an entity
in itself.
b) It tries to build on the positive factors that the learners bring to the course, rather than just
on the negative idea of lack’.
c) It frames its objectives in open-ended terms, so enabling learners to achieve at least
something.
In spite of its concern for the learner, the skills-centred approach still approaches the learner as a
user of language rather than a learner of language.
The process it is concerned with are the processes of language use not of language learning.
 Theoretical
views of
language

Analyse Establish
Select texts
Identify skills/strategi evaluation
Write and write
target es requires to procedures
syllabus exercises to
situation cope in target which require
focus on
situation the use of
skills/strategi
skills/strategi
es in syllabus
es in syllabus

Theoretical
views of
learning

Figure 2: A skills-centred approach to

course design
A learning-centred approach
 Before describing this approach, we should expand our explanation of why we have chosen the
term learning-centred instead of the more common term learner-centred.
 The learner-centred approach is based on the principle that learning is totally determined by
the learner.
 As teacher we can influence what we teach, but what learners learn is determined by the
learners alone.
 Learning is seen as a process in which the learners use what knowledge or skills they have in
order to make sense of the flow of new information.
 Learning, therefore, is an internal process, which is crucially dependent upon the knowledge the
learners already have and their ability and motivation to use it.
 Learning is not just a mental process, it is a process of negotiation between
individuals and society.
 Society sets the target (in the case of ESP, performance in the target situation) &
the individuals must do their best to get as close to that target as is possible (or
reject it).
 The learners will certainly determine their own route to the target and the speed
at which they travel the route but that does not make the target unimportant.
 The target still has a determining influence on the possible routes.
 In the learning process, then, there is more than just the learner to consider. For
this reason we would reject the term a learner-centred approach in favour of a
learning-centred approach to indicate that the concern is to maximize learning.
 The learner is one factor to consider in the learning process, but not the only
one. Thus, the term : learner-centred would for our purpose be misleading.
 The skills-centred approach does not fully take the learner into account,
because it still makes the ESP learning situation too dependent on the target
situation.
 The learner is used to identify and to analyse the target situation analysis.
 With the language-centred approach, the learner is discarded and the target
situation analysis is allowed to determine the content of the course with little
further reference to the learner.
 A language-centred approach says: This is the nature of the target situation
performance and that will determine the ESP course.
 A skills-centred approach says: That’s not enough. We must look behind the
target performance data to discover what processes enable someone to
perform. Those will determine the ESP course.
 A learning-centred approach says: That’s not enough either. We must look
beyond the competence that enables someone to perform, because what we
really want to discover is not the competence itself, but how someone
acquire the competence.
Figure 3: A comparison of approaches to course design
 Identify target situation
___________________________A language-centred approach considers the learner to here

____
Analyse target situation

Identify learning situation A skills-centred approach considers the learners to

her

Write syllabus

Write materials

Teach materials

Evaluate learner A learning-centred approach must consider the learner at every stage
achievement
Task 2:

Refer to Hutchinson and Waters, draw their discussions and your own views to answer the following
questions:

a) What is the argument against a language-centred approach?

b) What is the argument against a skills-centred approach?
c) How is a learning-centred approach different from language-centred and skills-centred approach?

* Discuss in groups of 3-4.