Ann M. Johns

English for Specific Purposes: International in Scope, Specific in Purpose

Over the past 30 years, English for specific purposes has established itself as a viable and vigorous movement within the field of TEFL/TESL. In this paper, English for specific purposes is defined and its distinguishing features examined. The international nature and scope of the movement are particularly emphasized. Finally, questions and controversies surrounding the movement are discussed.

Necessary English: A Faculty Survey

An Academic Skills Questionnaire was distributed at San Diego State University to 200 randomly selected faculty from all departments in order to determine which skills (reading, writing, speaking or listening) were most essential to non-native speaker success in university classes. The receptive skills, reading and listening, were ranked first by faculty teaching both lower division and upper division/graduate classes. The faculty of all departments but Engineering ranked General English above Specific Purposes English. This study concludes with implications for testing, literacy requirements and curriculum development.

Genre awareness for the novice academic student: An ongoing quest

Genre, the most social constructivist of literacy concepts, has been theorized and variously applied to pedagogies by three major ‘schools’: the New Rhetoric, English for Specific Purposes, and Systemic Functional Linguistics. In this paper, I will discuss my long, and ongoing, search for a pedagogy drawn from genre theories for novice academic students. With others, I am trying to find or develop an approach that is coherent and accessible to students while still promoting rhetorical flexibility and genre awareness. I will first define and problematize the term genre. Then, I will briefly discuss what each of the three genre ‘schools’ can offer to novice students ‐ as well as their pedagogical shortcomings. Finally, I will suggest two promising approaches to teaching genre awareness: learning communities and ‘macro-genres’.

Past imperfect continuous: Reflections on two ESP lives

In this dialogic essay, we reflect on various aspects of our two professional lives. The first section begins by offering commentaries on our initial reactions to each other as authors. It then discusses our first face-to-face meeting (Egypt in 1984), and briefly describes how we subsequently came to co-edit English for Specific Purposes for a number of years. The second section, entitled ‘Observations on a professional life’, provides personal and selective impressions of the career of the other, wherein we individually trace certain themes, certain milestones, and certain influences on the ESP profession at large. Finally, in the third section, we come together in an attempt to summarize some currently shared beliefs about the contemporary ESP scene.