ESP

=__What's ESP? __=

What did you learn about ESP?

What did you already know about it?

What´s the difference between ESP and GE (General English?)

What other acronyms did you learn? What do they mean?

And, in your own experience what are the more common language skills taught in ESP?

Just because of the meaning of the acronym ESP, I supposed it was all about getting into an specific field by learning the vocabulary, terms and expressions, and then adjust our knowledge in General English to that.

However, ESP is not just about a list of words of an specific subject. ESP requires living English language into the field we want to be specialized in.

What’s more, assumption is not compatible with ESP, as many (if not all) of the things we will consider as obvious at the beginning, will be wrong later; ESP changes every single day in every field.

And that’s, from my point of view, one of the main differences between GE and ESP. While GE keeps its basis as time goes by, ESP keeps on changing continuously day by day.

In my own experience, some time ago, a teacher tried to make me learn a lot of vocabulary about aviation, nothing but specific words. And what did I get with that once classes had finished? Nothing. One week later I could not even remember half of the list of words she gave me.

Nevertheless, just a pair of days after I started working as flight attendant I had already learnt double the words of that list.

I think the point about ESP is getting into the field, it would have been better by far if my teacher had asked any flight attendant before about the difficulties encountered during the flights or about the importance of English language on board. What do you think about it?

· These are some of the acronyms I learnt when I read this article M.A. : master of arts F.I.T: Free Independent Traveller ESL: English as second language EFL: English as foreign language