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Post-World War II
After the WWII, the activity in commerce and technology massively increased over the world, leading to the necessity of a lingua franca to respond to the needs of cross cultural communication, business doing, and information sharing. The lingua was English due to the USA worldwide influence and military power. This new job-related wave of English learners led to the branching in ELT as there were several fields to cover. -
Register Analysis
Referred by Gonzáles as the "First Boost of ESP", register analysis "extremely" focused on form and little input about use was given. This boost is characterized by giving "special importance to to semi- or subtechnical vocabulary." And Smoak (2003) refers to it as “to teach the technical vocabulary of a given field or profession.” -
Rhetoric and Discourse Analysis
This movement prioritized use over form. In other words, the focus on the lexical properties and statistical grammar accounts to the communicative values of discourse. Although this movement had a deep interest in the relation between grammar and rhetoric, it did not pay attention to study skills, which would be the focus of EAP on the late 70's. -
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Skill-Based and Student-Centered Approaches (Hutchinson & Waters)
The focus now was placed on skill-based curricula with a learner-centered approach that wanted to develop "underlying competences" in the students for them to, later on, extrapolate to their occupational realities. Hutchison and Waters also outlined in this approach the focus on the exploitation of learner's previous knowledge. -
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Wide-Angle Approach vs Narrow-Approach
These two approaches differ in the broadness of the content taught, the Narrow-approach stood within the specific area of development of the students while the Wide-angle approach also included the teaching "through topics beyond students’ specialist area". This period of time also witnessed a debate on monoskills. Johns Dudley-Evans stated that teaching one skill only can be limiting while concentrating on multiple ones can "enhance the language learning processes." -
Tarone et al.
Held the rhetorical-grammar relationship as well as introducing the implementation of "subject specialist informants" which continue to be fundamental in ESP research and curricula. -
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ESP Expansion
Hewings (2002) noticed the overseas spread of ESP research across Central and South America, China and Hong Kong, which, in his words, "demonstrates the growing acceptance of ESP as an academic discipline." Johns also came to the same conclusion. -
Genre Analysis and Rhetorical Moves
John Swales refer to these two as (1) the way texts function inside a discourse community, according to the target population; (2) the "moves" or strategic steps ESP practitioner should follow to develop a genre's curriculum.