Chapter in Handbook of English for Specific Purposes. (2013) Editors: Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp 95-114 ESP and writing Ken Hyland Introduction: The challenge of ESP writing Writing is perhaps the central activity of institutions. Complex social activities like educating students, keeping records, engaging with customers, selling products, demonstrating learning and disseminating ideas largely depend on it. Not only is it hard to imagine modern academic and corporate life without essays, commercial letters, emails, medical reports and minutes of meetings, but writing is also a key feature of every student’s experience. While multimedia and electronic technologies are beginning to influence learning and how we assess it, in many domains conventional writing remains the way in which students both consolidate their learning and demonstrate their understanding of their subjects. With the continuing dominance of English as the global language of business and scholarship, writing in English assumes an enormous importance for students in higher education and on professional training courses. Countless individuals around the world must now gain fluency in the conventions of writing in English to understand their disciplines, to establish their careers or to successfully navigate their learning. Written texts, in fact, dominate the lives of all students, even those in emergent, practicebased courses not previously thought of as involving heavy literacy demands, as Baynham (2000: 17) illustrates when he asks us to think of: 1 The harassed first-year nursing student, hurrying from lecture to tutorial, backpack full of photocopied journal articles, notes and guidelines for an essay on the sociology of nursing, a clinical report, a case study, a reflective journal. These kinds of experiences are extremely challenging to students and can be especially daunting to those who are writing in a second language. This is not only because different languages seem to have different ways of organizing ideas and structuring arguments but because students’ prior writing experiences in the home, school or elsewhere do not prepare them for the literacy expectations of their university or professional workplace. Their trusted ways of writing are no longer valued as legitimate for making meaning in these new institutional contexts and they find the greater formality, impersonality, nominalization and incongruence of these discourses mysterious and alien (see e.g. Lillis, 2001). Moreover, their experience in their new context underlines for students that writing (and reading) are not just key elements of learning and professional practice, but that it cannot be regarded as an homogeneous and transferable skill which they can take with them as they move across different courses and assignments. In this chapter I map something of the territory of ESP writing, sketching how we study it, what we know about it, and illustrating how this impacts on the practice of teaching and research. ESP conceptions of writing Unlike older ‘process’ traditions which saw writing as a kind of generic skill which could be taught by modeling expert practices, ESP conceptions of writing focus on assisting students towards competence in particular target genres. Teachers do not simply ‘teach writing’ but teach particular kinds of writing which are valued and expected in some academic or 2 professional contexts. The literacy demands of the modern world, therefore, challenge ESP teachers to recognize that their task involves far more than simply controlling linguistic error or polishing style. Instead it encourages them to respond to a complex diversity of genres, contexts and practices. In recent years the field of ESP has become increasingly sensitive to the ways in which texts are written and responded to by individuals acting as members of social groups. Ideas such as communicative competence in applied linguistics (Canale & Swain, 1980), situated learning in education (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and social constructionism in the social sciences (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) have contributed to a view which places community at the heart of writing and speech. Basically, it encourages us to see that not all writing is the same and that that we use language to accomplish particular purposes and engage with others as members of social groups. For these reasons, the concept of needs (see L. Flowerdew this volume) retains its position as a key feature of ESP practice while ESP itself steadfastly concerns itself with communication, rather than isolated bits of language, and with the processes by which texts are created and used as much as with texts themselves. Of relevance here is the notion of ‘academic literacies’which rejects: the ways language is treated as though it were a thing, distanced from both teacher and learner and imposing on them external rules and requirements as though they were but passive recipients. (Street 1995: 114) Instead, literacy is something we do. Street characterizes literacy as a verb, an activity ‘located in the interactions between people’ (Barton and Hamilton 1998: 3). From a 3 student’s point of view, a dominant feature of academic literacy is the requirement to switch practices between one setting and another, to control a range of genres appropriate to each setting, and to handle the meanings and identities that each evokes. One problem for students, however, is that while achievement is assessed by various institutionalized forms of writing, what it means to write in this way is rarely made explicit to students. A failure to recognize that conventions of writing are embedded in the epistemological and social practices of communities means that writing is a black box to students, particularly as subject lecturers themselves have difficulty in explaining what they mean (Ivanic 1998). The academic literacies position (Lea and Street, 1999) therefore encourages us to see that writing must be understood as the crucial process by which students make sense not only of the subject knowledge they encounter through their studies, but also how they can make it mean something for themselves. The ESP literature is coming to understand this and to recognize that the difficulties students experience with writing are often not due to technical aspects of grammar and organization, but the ways that different strands of their learning interact with each other and with their previous experiences. Entering the academy means making a ‘cultural shift’ in order to take on identities as members of those communities. Gee (1996: 155) stresses the importance of this shift: [S]omeone cannot engage in a discourse in a less than fluent manner. You are either in it or you’re not. Discourses are connected with displays of identity - failing to display an identity fully is tantamount to announcing you do not have that identity - at best you are a pretender or a beginner. 4 In other words, we cannot view writing as simply the medium through which students present what they have learned without consideration of its deeper cultural and epistemological underpinnings. An important implication of these observations has been a commitment to contextual relevance in ESP. By finding ways of helping students to gain control over the texts they are asked to write ESP seeks to involve them in their studies and encourage them to take active responsibility for their learning. At the same time, an exploration of their target genres helps learners to see the assumptions and values which are implicit in those genres and to understand something of the relationships and interests in that context. In other words, seeing ‘needs’, contexts, and genres together locates writing in a wider frame while providing a basis for both developing the skills students’ need to participate in new communities and their abilities to critically understand those communities. So while ESP continues to be heavily involved in syllabus design, needs analysis and materials development, it has also moved to become a more theoretically grounded and research informed enterprise. ESP approaches to writing research i. Textual studies. While there are a number of ways of studying texts, genre analysis has become established as the most widely used and productive methodology in ESP writing research (Hyland 2004a; Johns 2002). A genre approach to writing looks beyond the struggles of individual writers to make meanings and delves beneath the surface structures of texts as products to understand how writing actually works as communication. This is an approach which assumes that texts are always a response to a particular communicative setting and which attempts to reveal the purposes and functions which linguistic forms serve in texts. The writer is seen as having certain goals and intentions, certain relationships to his 5 or her readers, and certain information to convey, and the forms a text takes are resources used to accomplish these. Writing is therefore seen as mediated by the institutions and cultures in which it occurs, so that every text carries the purposes of the writer and expectations about how information should be structured and writer-reader relationships conveyed (Hyland 2009). Genres in ESP are usually regarded as staged, structured events, designed to perform various communicative purposes by specific discourse communities (Swales 2004). The term reminds us that when we write we follow conventions for organising messages because we want our readers to recognise our purposes and we all have a repertoire of linguistic responses to call on to communicate in familiar situations. Writers therefore anticipate what readers expect from a text and how they are likely to respond to it: they use the rhetorical conventions, interpersonal tone, grammatical features, argument structure, and so on that readers are most likely to recognize and expect. ESP research into texts thus seeks to show how language forms work as resources for accomplishing goals by describing the stages which help writers to set out their thoughts in ways readers can easily follow, and identifying salient features of texts which allow them to engage effectively with their readers. Genre approaches in ESP therefore attempt to explicate the lexico-grammatical and discursive patterns of particular genres to identify their recognisable structural identity. This work follows the move analysis work pioneered by Swales’ (1990) which seeks to identify the recognisable stages of particular institutional genres and the constraints on regular move sequences. Moves are the typical rhetorical steps which writers or speakers use to develop their social purposes and analysts often make several passes through the texts in a corpus to identify what each move is doing, its boundaries, its typical realisations, and how it contributes to the text as a whole. A recent example of this kind of analysis is that by 6 Flowerdew and Wan (2010) of the company audit report. The auditors’ report is a text of about two pages produced for public and private company annual reports and intended to inform and assure readers of the accuracy of the financial statements prepared by the company. Their study of 25 such reports found that this is a highly formulaic text which, like many genres in the corporate world, is based on existing templates which the auditors follow. Table 1, shows the structure, functions and frequency of each move in their corpus. Table 1 here please The frequencies shown in Table 1 indicate that the genre has two obligatory moves (or more accurately, two strongly prototypical moves) and that there are options for the third move depending upon whether the auditors are happy with the audit. Where the evaluation is positive, then there is a simple ‘opinion move’ which expresses the positive evaluation of the auditors and that the opinion conforms with international standards. Where auditors want to draw attention to some issues, they opt instead for an ‘Emphasis of matters’. Where the audit does not give the company the all-clear then this is signalled in a separate qualified opinion, disclaimer of opinion or adverse opinion. Before each of these moves there is an explanatory move labelled basis for qualified /disclaimer of/adverse opinion which provides a warrant for the opinion that has been chosen. This explanatory move is less formulaic than the others in the audit report and can vary in content from report to report, but generally it is heavily hedged to avoid threatening the face of the company. While analysing moves (or schematic structures) has proved an invaluable way of looking at texts, analysts are increasingly aware of the dangers of oversimplifying by assuming blocks of texts to be mono-functional and ignoring writers’ complex purposes and “private intentions” (Bhatia 1999). There is also the problem of validating analyses to ensure they are not simply products of the analyst’s intuitions (Crooke 1986). Transitions from one move to another in a 7 text are always motivated outside the text as writers respond to their social context, but analysts have not always been able to identify the ways these shifts are explicitly signalled by lexico-grammatical patterning. ii. Contextual studies. ESP research has not been entirely focused on the printed page, however. Treating texts as purely textual artifacts can mean that while students are often able to handle the forms of professional genres when they go out to work, they are often unprepared “for the discursive realities of the professional world” (Bhatia 2008: 161), a consequence which is particularly problematic in legal contexts, for instance. Text analyses, then, are frequently accompanied in ESP research by more qualitative investigations to fill out the context in which the particular genre is created and used, using observation, surveys, diaries, interviews and focus group discussions (Hyland 2011). Thus research has explored ethnographic case studies (Prior 1998), reader responses (Locker 1999) and interviews with insider informants (Hyland 2004a). In the study reported above on audit reports, for example, the researchers observed the auditing process in situ and conducted in-depth interviews with four auditors and a technical manager. Such approaches infuse text analyses with greater validity and offer richer understandings about the production and use of genres in different contexts. More fully explicit ethnographic studies have also been used to explore writing contexts and to take professional practices more seriously. Prior’s (1998) study of the contexts and processes of graduate student writing at a US university is a classic example of this kind of research. Drawing on transcripts of seminar discussions, student texts, observations of institutional contexts, tutor feedback and interviews with students and tutors, Prior provides an in-depth account of the ways students in four fields negotiated their writing tasks and so became socialized into their disciplinary communities. Swales’ 8 (1998) ‘textography’ of his building at the University of Michigan, is also a milestone of research in this regard. By combining discourse analyses with extensive observations and interviews, Swales traces the workings of individuals and of systems of texts to provide a richly detailed picture of the professional lives, commitments and projects of individuals in three diverse academic cultures working on different floors of a university building: the computer centre, the Herbarium and the English Language Institute. Ethnographic research has also been conducted into professional workplaces, although these mainly focus on talk, and particularly on the talk that occurs in meetings (see Holmes 2011 for a recent overview). Studies into written professional discourse are relatively rare, although there are a number of studies which focus on the collaboration that goes on around the creation of corporate documents such as environmental reports (Gollin 1999), committee papers (Baxter et al. 2002), and legal documents (Gunnarsson 2009) or how computer-mediated technologies facilitate collaboration in writing projects (Hewett and Robidoux 2010). One study worth mentioning here is that conducted by Smart (2008) who, as an employee of the Bank of Canada, collected data over 23 years into the practices of the Bank’s economists. Drawing on interviews, observations and documents, he depicts the culture of a professional community and discovered how the economists orchestrated the Bank’s external communications with the media, the government, financial markets, trades unions and academia In all these studies, research reveals how workplace writing is not an isolated act of creation but part of a socially organized and structured set of activities influenced by power, dominance, friendship, and group feeling (Gunnarsson 2009). While criticized by researchers from more positivist traditions for a perceived lack of rigour, imprecision and subjectivity, ethnography claims to offer a richer, first-hand 9 interpretation based on interaction with a local context. For analysts of academic and professional writing it suggests methods for studying texts in ways which are ‘situated’, offering an alternative perspective to an exclusive focus on texts. Through a variety of qualitative methods we get a sense of the individual voices and the kinds of insights which only close observation and detailed analysis can reveal. iii. Critical studies take a number of different forms drawing on diverse theoretical concepts and methods, but it is conventional to lump these together under the heading of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This views language as a form of social practice and attempts ‘to unpack the ideological underpinnings of discourse that have become so naturalized over time that we begin to treat them as common, acceptable and natural features of discourse’ (Teo, 2000: p. 1). CDA therefore links language to the activities which surround it, focusing on how social relations, identity, knowledge and power are constructed through written (and spoken) texts. This overtly political agenda distinguishes CDA from other kinds of discourse analysis and widens the lens of specific purposes teaching to take the sociopolitical context of teaching and learning into account. It attempts to show that the discourses of the academy and the workplace are not transparent or impartial means for getting things done or describing the world, but work to construct, regulate and control knowledge, social relations and institutions. This means that some kinds of writing, or what are called ‘literacy practices’, possess authority because they represent the currently dominant ideological ways of depicting relationships and realities and these exercise control of language users. The complexity and prestige of certain professional and academic literacies work to exclude many individuals, preventing their access to academic success or membership of professional communities. For those entering university it forces them to make a ‘cultural shift’ in order to 10 take on alien identities as members of those communities (e.g. Ivanic, 1998). Successful writing therefore means representing yourself in a way valued by your discipline or profession, adopting the values, beliefs and identities which such discourses embody. As a result, students often feel uncomfortable with the ‘me’ they portray in their academic writing, finding a conflict between the identities required to write successfully and those they bring with them (e.g. Phan Le Ha 2009) While CDA does not subscribe to any single method, Fairclough (2003) draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Halliday 1994) to analyse concrete instances of discourse. In this model, language is seen as systems of linguistic features offering choices to users, but these choices are circumscribed in situations of unequal power. SFL offers CDA a sophisticated way of analysing the relations between language and social contexts, making it possible to ground concerns of power and ideology in the details of discourse. To examine actual instances of texts, CDA typically looks at features such as:   Vocabulary - particularly how metaphor encodes ideologies. Transitivity - which can show, for instance, who is presented as having agency and who is acted upon    Nominalization and passivization - how processes and actors can be obscured. Mood and modality - which help reveal interpersonal relationships Theme - how the first element of a clause can be used to foreground information or presuppose reader beliefs.   Text structure - how text episodes are marked in texts Intertextuality and interdiscursivity - the effects of other texts and styles on texts -, such as where commercial discourses colonize those in other spheres. 11 It has to be admitted that research conducted from a critical perspective is fairly scarce in the professional writing literature. There are, however, several studies which show how language is used to influence readers or achieve control in written professional writing in different contexts. Harrison and Young’s (2004) analysis of the phrasal construction of a memo from a senior manager, for example, shows how he uses bureaucratic language to distance himself from unpopular decisions. Lassen (2004), for instance, reveals how implicit meanings are conveyed in an environmental press release, while Hyland (2004b) discusses how a writer uses modality, formality and thematic choices to disguise a reprimand as an information text. In academic contexts, research has explored the ways that the conventions of disciplinary writing can create tensions for students. The fact that specific forms and wordings are marked as more or less appropriate or more or less prescribed, can often create conflicts with the experiences students bring from their home community and the habits of meaning they have learnt there. The discourses and practices of their disciplines support identities very different from those they bring with them so that authoring becomes a complex negotiation of one’s sense of self and the institutional regulation of meaningmaking. The studies by Ivanic (1998) and Lillis (2001) into the experiences of ‘non traditional’ students in British higher education show how such regulation can be seen as confining and perhaps even threatening. This feeling of opposition between the new identity they are being asked to assume and those they are already comfortable with can provoke resistance. Both Lin (2000), in the case of Hong Kong students, and Canagarajah (1999) in the case of Sri Lankan Tamils, show how students passively resist the assumptions and values which they are assumed to share by using the language. 12 This critically-oriented research thus re-establishes the intrinsic relationship between knowledge, writing and identity and raises issues of relevance and legitimacy in relation to writing practices. Research in ESP writing It is perhaps unsurprising given ESP’s explicitly pedagogical orientation, that most research has followed a genre perspective as this most easily provides teachers with descriptions of texts that can be translated into syllabuses and materials (e.g Hyland 2004b, Johns 2002, Swales and Feak 2004). Figure 2 shows some of the written academic and professional genres that have been studied in ESP research. The great majority of this research, however, has focussed on academic genres with much less attention being paid to professional or workplace genres. Insert Table 2 Here As can be seen from Figure 2, a range of written academic genres have been studied in recent years. These include undergraduate essays (Bruce 2010; Hylan, 2009), student dissertations and theses (Petric 2007; Hyland 2004c), research articles (Basturkman 2009), scientific letters (Hyland 2004a), and book reviews (Hyland and Diani 2009), as well as various ‘occluded’, or hidden, genres such as the MBA ‘thought essay’ (Loudermilk 2007) and peer review reports on journal submissions (Fortanet 2008). Research is also beginning to appear on the role of multimedia and electronic communication in academic writing. This focuses mainly on Computer Mediated Communication in distance learning (e.g. Coffin & Hewings 2005), but also includes research on the use of wikis (Myers 2010) and hypertext environments (Bloch 2008). 13 Together this research demonstrates the distinctive differences in the genres of the academy where particular purposes and audiences lead writers to employ very different rhetorical choices. Research on professional written genres has tended to focus mainly on the business letter (Van Nus 1999), and more recently, on how this is recycled as part of other genres such as emails and annual reports (Gotti and Gillaerts 2005). Emails themselves have also figured in genre analyses of business texts (e.g. Jensen 2009), as have the various parts of company annual reports (Hyland 1998). Outside of business contexts, considerable research is beginning to emerge on legal and medical genres such as invitations for bids (Belotti 2006), legal judgements (Mazzi 2006) and medical research reports (Williams 1996). Unlike much of the academic writing research, however, a great deal of professional writing research has been motivated less by pedagogical concerns that by the desire to gain an understanding of how people communicate effectively and strategically in organisations. Research has also pointed to cultural specificity in rhetorical preferences (e.g. Connor 2002). Although culture remains a controversial term, one influential version of culture regards it as an historically transmitted and systematic network of meanings which allow us to understand, develop and communicate our knowledge and beliefs about the world. Culture is seen as inextricably bound up with language (Kramsch 1993), so that cultural factors have the potential to influence perception, language, learning, and communication. Although it is far from conclusive, in fact, results are hotly contested (e.g. Atkinson 2004), discourse analytic research suggests that the schemata of L2 and L1 writers differ in their preferred ways of organising ideas which can influence academic writing (e.g. Hinkel 2002). These conclusions have been supported by a range of studies over the past decade comparing the features of research articles 14 in various countries (e.g. Molino 2010), student essays (Kubota 1998), and conference abstracts (Yakhontova 2002). In business contexts too, issues of culture have been explored, particularly in the use of English as a Business lingua franca (BELF) in multinational companies (Nickerson 2005). While we cannot simply predict the ways people are likely to write on the basis of assumed cultural traits, discourse studies have shown that students’ first language and prior learning come to influence ways of organising ideas and structuring arguments when writing in English at university. It is difficult to summarise such a massive body of research into academic and professional genres, but it is possible to identify five broad findings: 1. That texts are systematically structured to secure readers’ agreement or understanding; 2. That these community-specific ways of producing agreement represent rhetorical preferences which are specific to particular contexts; 3. That language groups have different ways of expressing ideas and negotiating writer- reader relationships and that these represent serious challenges to students understanding of themselves and their fields; 4. That professional writing is distinguished by its expert character, its specialized goal orientation, and its conventionalized form; 5. That there is frequently a disconnect between authentic written language and that in textbooks. Together these studies help capture something of the ways language is used in the academy and workplace, producing a rich vein of findings which continues to inform both teaching and our understanding of the practices of professional and academic communities. Specific purposes writing instruction 15 ESP practitioners have made considerable use of these findings to determine what is to be learned and to organise instruction around the genres that learners need and the social contexts in which they will operate. Texts and tasks are therefore selected according to learners’ needs and genres are modelled explicitly to provide learners with something to aim for: an understanding of what readers are likely to expect. The demands of the modern workplace and university therefore mean that ESP recognises the specificity of writing done in different domains and in the instruction that leads to competence in such domains (Belcher 2009; Hyland 2002). Successful writing does not occur in a vacuum but depends on an understanding of a professional context (Hyland and Bondi 2006), so that texts produced in legal, medical, technical and business fields differ enormously from each other and often from one site to another. In fact, even students in fairly cognate fields such as nursing and midwifery, for example, are given very different writing assignments (Gimenez 2009). Students in practice-based or inter-disciplinary degrees in particular may find that they face literacy demands which span several fields, so that business students, for example, may be expected to confront texts from accountancy, economics, financial management, corporate organisation, marketing, statistics, and so on. There is, then, a marked diversity of task and texts in different fields and a considerable body of research testifies to the fact that the writing tasks students have to do at university are specific to discipline (e.g. Prior 1998; Hyland 2002). In the humanities and social sciences, for example, analysing and synthesising multiple sources is important, while in science and technology, activity-based skills such as describing procedures, defining objects, and planning solutions are required (Hyland 2009). Genre and lexis also vary considerably so that the structure of common formats such as the experimental lab report can differ 16 completely across different technical and engineering disciplines (Braine 1995) and even the lexis students are expected to use in particular fields varies enormously (Hyland and Tse 2007). An important consequence of this is that ESP continues to base instruction on a study of the texts students will need in their target contexts rather than our impressions of writing. While all teaching starts with where the students are and takes their backgrounds, language proficiencies, teaching and learning preferences into account, ESP focuses on the world outside the writing classroom by going beyond grammar and vocabulary to prepare students for their future experiences using the most detailed needs analysis that time allows. This seeks to ensure that learning to write is related to the genres that students will confront and the contexts in which they will confront them: it is the means of establishing the WHAT of a HOW and course. An analysis of students’ writing needs not only helps to determine the genres and content of a course, but also its objectives, materials, and tasks of a course (Dudley-Evans and St John 1998). Decisions about what to teach and how to teach it, however, are not neutral professional questions but are likely to reflect the ideologies of the most powerful parties in any context, notably the teacher, the employer or the funding body, with important consequences for learners (Benesch 2001). Many of these considerations are implemented in specific purposes programs by focusing on both the purposes for which people are learning a language and the kinds of language performance that are necessary to meet those purposes. Generally this has meant employing either text-based, content-based, or consciousness-raising approaches. Text-based syllabuses (Feez, 1998) organise instruction around the genres that learners need and the social contexts in which they will operate (Hyland 2004b). This involves adopting a scaffolded pedagogy to guide learners towards control of key genres based on whole texts 17 selected in relation to learner needs (e.g. Johns 2002). In ESP classrooms it often involves active and sustained support by a teacher who models appropriate strategies for meeting particular purposes, guides students in their use of the strategies, and provides a meaningful and relevant context for using the strategies. A content-based syllabus (Mohan, 1986), on the other hand, focuses on subject content as a carrier of language rather than a focus on language itself. For some practitioners, this simply means adopting any relevant themes from the students’ field as a way of providing sheltered assistance towards their transition into a new community. For others it means taking a more immersion-like approach with close cooperation with the specialist subject teacher and varying degrees of subject-language integration (Dudley-Evans and St John 1998). Finally, a consciousness-raising approach (Swales, 1990), is an explicit attempt to avoid simplistic and formulaic approaches to writing specialist texts and the prescriptive teaching of target genres. In particular, it seeks to harness students’ understandings of their fields by placing greater emphasis on exploratory, context-sensitive and research-informed understandings which promote both learner awareness and learner autonomy. Essentially, rhetorical consciousness-raising is a ‘top down’ approach to understanding language which encourages learners to analyse, compare and manipulate representative samples of a target discourse. Focusing on language is not therefore an end in itself but a means of teaching learners to use language effectively by encouraging them to experience for themselves the effect that grammatical choices have on creating meanings. Swales and Feak’s (2004) textbook Academic Writing for Graduate Students, for instance, draws on an EAP research tradition to both develop in novice research writers a sensitivity to the language used in different academic genres and insights into the conventions and expectations of their target communities. This is principally accomplished by encouraging students to analyze text extracts, often through comparison with other genres. 18 Looking to the future Predictions are never easy, but one certainty is that ESP’s concern with mapping the discourses and communicative challenges of the modern workplace and classroom will continue. This distinctive approach to language teaching, based on identification of the specific language features, discourse practices and communicative skills of target groups, and committed to developing teaching practices that recognize the particular subject-matter needs and expertise of learners, remain its core strength. ESP is, in essence, research-based language education and the applied nature of the field has been its strength, tempering a possible overindulgence in theory with a practical utility. It is possible, however, to anticipate some potential developments in the coming years. First, it is likely that the expansion of studies into new specialist professional fields and written genres will continue. There are numerous genres that we know little about and others that are emergent and described only superficially. Many student genres, such as counselling case notes, reflexive journals and clinical reports, remain to be described while analyses of more occluded research genres (Swales, 1996), such as referees reports and responses to editors’ decisions, would greatly assist novice writers in the publication process. We also know little about the ways that genres form ‘constellations’ with neighbouring genres nor about the ‘genre sets’ that a particular individual or group engages in, or how spoken and written texts cluster together in a given social activity (Swales, 2004). In addition, and as I have mentioned earlier, the mix of academic subjects now offered to students impact on the genres they have to participate in, compounding the challenges of writing in the disciplines with novel literacy practices that have barely been described. Moreover, literacy demands are made ever more complex by the increase in the use of electronic written texts, the growth of 19 workplace generification (Swales, 2004), and the proliferation of written genres into ever more areas of our professional lives. Control of these genres can pose considerable communicative challenges to all professionals, but for ESP teachers they demand a pedagogical response as well. Second, it is also clear that much remains to be learnt and considerable research undertaken before we are able to identify more precisely the notion of ‘community’ and how it relates to the professions and the discoursal conventions that they routinely employ in written texts. Nor is it yet understood how our memberships of different groups influence our participation in workplace discourses. For now, the term profession might be seen as a shorthand form for the various identities, roles, positions, relationships, reputations, reward systems and other dimensions of social practices constructed and expressed through language use. Community, profession, and discipline, together with the practices which define expertise in them, are concepts which need to be further refined through the analyses of texts and contexts. Third, ESP conceptions of literacy and writing instruction need to come to terms with the challenges posed by critical perspectives of literacy and teaching. Long-standing debates in the field have failed to resolve the issue of pragmatism versus criticality. This cuts to the heart of the ethics of ESP and the charge that in helping learners to develop their professional communicative competence, teachers reinforce conformity to an unexamined institutional and social order. The question, essentially, is whether ESP is a pragmatic exercise, working to help students to fit unquestioningly into subordinate roles in their professions, disciplines and courses, or whether it has a responsibility to help students understand the power relations of those contexts (e.g. Allison 1996; Pennycook 1997). This question is of central relevance to ESP writing teachers and it is becoming increasingly clear that the reciprocal relationship 20 between theory and practice is a central concern for students, instructors, and the institutional contexts in which they meet (see Benesch 2009). A fourth broad area is that of understanding the increasing role of multimodal and electronic texts in professional contexts. Scientific and technical texts have always been multimodal, but reports, brochures, publicity materials and research papers are now far more heavily influenced by graphic design than ever before and the growing challenge to the page by the screen as the dominant medium of communication means that images are ever more important in meaning-making. Analytical tools developed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) and others provide a starting point for researchers and teachers to explain how visuals have been organized for maximum effect, while considerably more work needs to be done to understand the role of multimedia and hypertext in corporate and academic communication and the genres that students will need to control as part of their repertoire of writing skills. Fifth, ESP writing instruction needs to pay greater attention to the contexts of professional writing and the ways that writers collaborate to produce corporate documents of various kinds. While academic assignments are generally written individually, the university is a temporary and idiosyncratic environment which does not reflect the realities of corporate and scientific text construction. In those contexts, activities are less focused on the individual than on the transactions and collaborations of working in teams and groups, and for second language speakers, often with less engagement with native English speaker interlocutors and texts. One major difference between instruction for academic and workplace contexts is that there is less consensus on the skills, language and communicative behaviours required in academic environments (St John 1996). It is also possible that text expectations may not only be linked to the values and conventions of particular discourse communities but to either 21 national or corporate contexts, so that communication strategies, status relationships and cultural differences are likely to impact far more on successful interaction. These are among the key issues which are emerging as important challenges which ESP writing teachers and researchers will need to confront. Conclusions ESP writing instruction is essentially a practically-oriented activity committed to demystifying prestigious forms of discourse, unlocking students’ creative and expressive abilities, and facilitating their access to greater life chances. The fact that it is grounded in the descriptions of texts and practices, however, means that it also seeks to provide teachers and students with a way of understanding how writing is shaped by individuals making language choices in social contexts, and so contributes to both theory and practice. In particular, it shows how ESP has nothing to do with topping up generic writing skills that learners have failed to master at school, but involves developing new kinds of literacy: equipping learners with the communicative skills to participate in particular academic and professional cultures. 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He was founding co-editor of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes and is now co-editor of Applied Linguistics 29 Table 1: The move structure of auditors’ reports (Flowerdew & Wan, 2010) Move Frequency Summary of credible actions taken - tells readers that statements were audited according to recognized standards 25 Address responsibilities - Details responsibilities of main players to show the auditors acted independently 25 Opinion - positive judgment of accounts 20 OR Emphasis of matters - draws attention to some issue in the financial statements 5 OR Basis for Qualified Opinion + Qualified opinion - states exceptions, as when something is misreported or when auditor was unable to 4 corroborate something OR Basis for Disclaimer + Disclaimer of opinion - auditor is unable to complete the audit and is not willing to give an opinion 1 Table 2 Some written genres studied in ESP research Academic Written Genres Professional Written genres Research articles Conference abstracts PhD dissertations Submission letters Undergrad essays Teacher feedback Editors’ letters Business letters Environmental reports Business emails Direct mail sales letters Company annual reports Medical case notes Book reviews Textbooks Grant proposals Peer review reports article bios acknowledgements lab reports 30 arbitration judgements mission statements committee papers legal contracts legal cases Engineering reports