Sandra Gollin Kies,
David R. Hall,
and Stephen H. Moore

(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

What is LSP?

Examples of LSP

• Courses can be highly tailored to a context:
• English for Academic Purposes
• English for Business
• English for Tourism
• Airspeak, Seaspeak, etc.
• English for doctors, nurses, and medical technicians
• Medical Spanish

Airspeak

English was established in 1950 as the predominant language used in aviation by the International Civil Aviation Organization, but it is still not the mandatory official language in Air Traffic Control (ATC). Some countries (e.g. France, Italy and many of the former Soviet Union) still allow their own languages as well as English to be used for domestic ATC (Itokawa, 2000, p.52) "However, realistically speaking, if one cannot use English, one cannot participate in the field" (Tajima, 2004 p.453).

See also Seaspeak, Policespeak, Emergencyspeak, EDIFACT.

Needs Analysis

• LSP starts from needs analysis of students and other stake holders:
• academics
• administrators
• funding bodies
• clients
• Research using ethnographic methods
• observation/interview/survey
• collection of artifacts
• discourse analysis

Motivations for the book

• My history: English -> EFL -> ESP + EAP
• Macquarie University, MA in Linguistics
• Need for a book for teachers and researchers that draws the research together, and shows new directions in the field.
• Need for a reference for student teachers of LSP
  (e.g., Vietnam)

Key trends and issues

Globalization and LSP

Why focus on English?

English as a Lingua Franca

• Number of native speakers of English in the world
• Number of speakers of English as an "official" second language
• Number of speakers of English as a foreign language in comparison with other key languages

What is a lingua franca?

"any of various languages used as common or commercial tongues among peoples of diverse speech: (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). A lingua franca can be used regionally or internationally (Meierkord, 2006) English is the lingua franca of international communication "the main language of books, newspapers, airports and air traffic control, international business and academic conferences, science, technology, medicine, diplomacy, sports, international competitions, pop music and advertising. Over two-thirds of the world's scientists write in English. Three quarters of the world's mail is written in English. Of all the information in the world's electronic retrieval systems, 80% is stored in English" (David Crystal, 1995, p. 358).

The most spoken languages worldwide (Ethnologue)

Percentage of English native speakers
(The World Fact Book)

Percentage of English speakers by country
(The World Fact Book)

World Englishes

(Kachru 1991, 1997)

Issues of international communication

• ELF - the EU - argument for teaching a "simplified" version of English - fewer colloquial expressions. etc.
• "Spanglish," "Chinglish." etc.
• Official languages (e.g. Indian English)
• International Academic journals - overwhelmingly in English (Swales, 1997)

Codeswitching and Code meshing

Using a number of different languages interchangeably, or mixing codes within one exchange is common. In a Finnish firm with international connections, colleagues used English, Finnish and "Finglish" to communicate both within and outside the company. English was used primarily for reading and writing, particularly emails, and Finnish for face to face speaking. Telephone calls were in either language according to the backgrounds of the interactants (Louhiala-Salminen, 2002).

Codeswitching and Code meshing

In Hong Kong, engineers in a land surveying consultancy used written English for all formal documentation but spoke in Cantonese or English depending on audience and purpose (Cheng and Mok, 2008).

Canagarajah (2006) suggests "code meshing" - integrating local varieties of English with Standard Written English, with the goal of pluralizing academic writing and developing multilingual competence.

English as the common International Language of Science (EILS)

In 1995, over 95% of the research papers in the Science Citation Index were in English; French, German and Russian accounted for almost all the rest (van Leeuwin, Moed, Tussen, Visser and van Raan, 2001 (cited in Tardy 2004). Within the scientific community, strenuous, and perhaps highly prejudicial attempts are made to maintain standards, chiefly through the gatekeeping activities of prestigious scientific journals, the majority of which are now published in the United States ( Flowerdew, 1999; Canagarajah, 2002).

Which variety of English to teach?

• Whose English?
• Arguments for and against "Standard" English
• Will English speakers become mutually unintelligible?
• Intelligibility - pronunciation - recognizing individual words
• Comprehensibility - understanding meanings of words in context
• Interpretability - understanding a speaker's intention

Whose English?

"How English develops in the world is no business whatever of native speakers in England, the United States, or anywhere else. They have no say in the matter, no right to intervene or pass judgment. They are irrelevant. The very fact that English is an international language means that no nation can have custody over it" (Henry Widdowson, 1994, p. 385).

Whose English?

"ELF speakers are...not primarily concerned with emulating the way native speakers use their mother tongue within their own communities, nor with socio-psychological and ideological issues. Instead, the central concerns for this domain are efficiency, relevance and economy in language learning and language use. The reasons why the linguistic imperialism school has had little impact on mainstream ELT are rather obvious: people need and want to learn English whatever the ideological baggage that comes with it" (Barbara Seidlhofer, 2000, p.57).

Intelligibility, comprehensibility, interpretability

In India we speak English in a different way, and in the States it is in a different way. [Interviewer: So they want you to learn...] A neutral accent. [Interviewer: What does that mean?] Neutral. Means they can understand what we tell. Like [for example] "schedule" - they say skedule... And the American accent you have more r's rolling, there's a stress on the r's. ... So it's sem-eye-conductor, it's not se-me-conductor. ... You're not supposed to speak anything except English, except American English. (Female worker, respondent 11) (Mirchandani, 2004)

Standard English

Alan Davies (1999) defines as standard English "the language [variety] used by the educated" (p.184).

Standard English is no longer the preserve of a group of people living in an offshore European island, or even of larger groups living in continents elsewhere. It is an international language. As such it serves a whole range of different communities and their institutional purposes and these transcend traditional communal and cultural boundaries (Henry Widdowson, 1994, p. 382).

What else is in the book?

• Concepts and Issues

Historical and conceptual overview; Key trends affecting learning, teaching, and researching LSP

• LSP in the Classroom

Course planning; Course design and implementation; Measuring LSP learning and course effectiveness; LSP methodology/ pedagogy; classroom management

What else is in the book?

• Conducting applied research in LSP

Research practices in LSP; Case studies; researchable projects

• Resources for teachers and researchers

Questions?

References

Canagarajah, A. S. (2006). The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued. College Composition and Communication, 57(4), 586-619.

Central Intelligence Agency. (2019). The World Fact Book. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

Cheng, W., & Mok, E. (2008). Discourse processes and products: Land surveyors in Hong Kong. English for Specific Purposes, 27(1), 57-73.

Crystal, D. (1995). Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davies, A. (1999). Standard English: discordant voices. World Englishes, 18(2), 171-186.

References

Deterding, D., & Kirkpatrick, A. (2006). Emerging South-East Asian Englishes and intelligibility. World Englishes, 25(3/4), 391-409.

Flowerdew, J. (1999). Problems in writing for scholarly publication in English: The case of Hong Kong. Journal of Second Language Writing, 8(3), 243-264.

Gollin Kies, S., D. Hall, and S. Moore. (2015). Language for Specific Purposes. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Itokawa, H. (2000). The mental state of an air-line pilot as a machine operator. International Association of Traffic and Safety Sciences Review, 26(2), 48-56.

References

Kachru, B. B. (1991). Liberation linguistics and the Quirk concern. English Today, 25, 3-13.

Kachru, B. B. (1997). World Englishes and English-using communities. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 17, 66-87.

Louhiala-Salminen, L. (2002). The fly's perspective: Discourse in the daily routine of a business manager. English for Specific Purposes, 21, 211-231.

Meierkord, C. (2006b). Lingua Franca communication past and present. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 177, 9-30.

Mirchandani, K. (2004). Practices of global capital: gaps, cracks and ironies in transnational call centres in India. Global Networks, 4(4), 355-373.

References

Pennycook, A. (1998). English and the discourses of colonialism. London: Routledge.

Seidlhofer, B. (2000). Mind the gap: English as a mother tongue vs. English as a lingua franca. Unpublished manuscript, Vienna.

Summer Institure of Linguistics. (2019). Ethnologue: Languages of the World. https://www.ethnologue.com/

Swales, J. (1997). English as Tyrannosaurus rex. World Englishes, 16(3), 373-382.

Thank you!

https://rhetory.com/lsp

Sandra Gollin Kies
skies@ben.edu