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Communication and Community: The Pragmatics of ESP John Swales has long been the most authoritative and influential figure in the field of English for Specific Purposes, and he and Ann Johns have, through the ESPJ , really set the agenda for its development over the past fifteen years or so. This special issue of the journal allows us to pay tribute to Ann Johns and John Swales and their achievement in our own specific ways. My way (as they know only too well) is to indulge in speculative reflection. So what I want to do is to raise one or two very general questions about ESP which I think are worth pondering on. The very term English for Specific Purposes implies that it is English which is somehow peculiar to the range of principles and procedures which define that particular profession; and so, we have English which is specific, associated with a kind of institutional activity which is also conceived of as specific. The S of ESP links language with purpose and establishes the association, but what exactly is the nature of that specificity? Perhaps the first point to be made is that in one sense all uses of English, as of any other language, are specific. All uses of the language serve particular purposes. Whenever we indulge in utterance, we fashion the form of my message according to communicative requirements. We open our mouth to speak, or take up our pen to write (or, nowadays switch on our computer to process words) and we thereby make a bid to focus the recipient’s attention on what we mean in the most effective way possible. We are doing just that at this present moment. My English at the moment is designed to serve a specific purpose and it is that which makes it communicative. In this sense, English for specific purposes is what communication in English in general is all about, and indeed it was this recognition that led to the development of more general principles of communicative language teaching in the early seventies. So, what then, we might ask, is so especially specific about so called ESP? All language use is specific in a sense. In a pragmatic sense. By this it is meant that people use the resources of a language to design utterances, spoken or written, which will achieve their intended purposes; and they do this in accordance with the principles of co-operation and least effort. Thus, they design utterances which will key into the context of recipient knowledge in the most economical way. It is for this reason that what we mean is generally not recoverable from what we say. We use language indexically, to point to aspects of knowledge assumed to be shared between us and our interlocutors (see Widdowson, 1983, 1990). What we suppose is known already we do not refer to; all we need to do is to activate it and indicate its relevance. All this is simply to say that what language means semantically is not at all the same as what people mean by language pragmatically. This can be illustrated in an obvious way by public notices. If we see the word ‘TRAINS’ on the wall in the Russell Square station of the London Underground, we read it as a complete text and interpret it as a reference to the trains on
the Piccadilly Line and interpret its force as an indication as to where we should go to catch one. The designer of this single word text, confident that he (or she) can assume shared knowledge of the Underground, in placing the text in this particular location thus directs us to a quite specific meaning. This is not what the word itself means, it is what it means to me. The word itself is actually very unspecific: a plural noun, a lexical item. As the dictionary has it: TRAIN : railway engine with several carriages or trucks linked to and pulled by it. The text can, of course, be referred to the linguistic code in this way, and treated as the manifestation of linguistic items. It is only when it is referred to context, to shared knowledge, to communicative purpose, that it becomes realised as pragmatically specific and takes on significance as discourse. If the text does not textualize a discoursal relationship between first person intention and second person interpretation, then it remains inert as a linguistic object. What happens, then, when the text fails to textualize in this way, when it does not serve to activate the necessary discourse? Let us consider a text or two. What, we might ask, is all this about? And anyway, what relevance does it have for ESP? It is an obscure text. But what is the reason for its obscurity? The text is in English after all, and there is nothing difficult about the syntax or the semantics. It is cohesive enough. It is easily processed in this respect, and we can indeed use it for the posing of comprehension questions in the conventional way. What happens when the apparatus is picked up? It snores. How is the ghost woken up? By tickling it. Good: students would get a full grade even though they might not really understand what the text is actually about. It is cohesive as text, but incoherent in that it fails to textualize. Why is this so? The title of the poem provides the clue. It represents the impressions of a Martian, unfamiliar with earthly things. There is therefore no convergence on shared knowledge , no common frame of reference. If a frame of reference is given, saying that what is described here is a telephone, then things fall into place, and we begin to make sense of the text. We adapt it to our familiar world, so the text now mediates pragmatically and becomes coherent by activating a relevant discourse. Another example: TEXT B The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Lok along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the middle. Lok peered at the stick and the lump of bone and the small eyes in the bone thing over the face. Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him, but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again. The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice. “Clop!” His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig. (from William Golding: The Inheritors )
and non-native speakers of a language. In the case of examples such as the telephone, the bow and arrow or the awl, it might seem that this is simply a semantic question, namely, to identify the appropriate term. One might think that learning terminology is enough to satisfy the conditions of belonging to a specific linguistic or cultural community. Things, however, are not that simple. The issue is not reduced to lexical mastery but rather concerns pragmatic and cultural skills that allow language to be correctly placed in a specific context of meaning and use. TEXT C The Chamberlains were Seventh Day Adventists (which, by normal Bruce rules, was peculiar), and Lindy, a rather spiky, intense individual, failed to act out in court the required sub-Neighbours version of the innocent grieving mother. In more than one way, she suffered from cultural insensitivity. The Aborigines at Ayers Rock did not seem surprised that a dingo might have taken a baby, but who gave a XXXX what the Abos thought? (from a review by Mark Lawson of Lindy Chamberlain: Through my Eyes , The Independent on Sunday 4.2.91) In the case of the two literary texts we looked at, the obscurity came about because they represented the familiar world from an outsider’s point of view. In this case, the obscurity is a result of the reader being positioned as outsider. This text does not represent a fiction but refers to facts. The difficulty is that the reader may not know what the facts are, may have no frame of reference which can serve as indexical bearings. What event is being referred to? Who are the Chamberlains? You have to be in the know to make much sense of this text. And you have to be in the know about a good deal else as well. You have to recognise that the expression “Bruce rules” refers to the attitudes of stereotypical Australian men, that Neighbours is a television soap opera about Australian life, that XXXX is meant as an intertextual allusion to a popular advertisement for Australian beer, and so on. However, it is not only a matter of the text failing to mediate reference by a convergence of common knowledge. The writer also positions the reader as a person who shares not only knowledge, but values as well. So it is that we are invited to adopt the same somewhat superior and contemptuous view of Australian attitudes. The text is designed to be accessible to, and acceptable to, a like- minded reader; and if you can identify with this assigned reader , then you confirm your common communal values and ratify your role as insider. You then authenticate the text as a discourse which is expressive of a particular community to which you belong. There is thus the creation of a solidarity between writer and reader, and a kind of conspiracy against those who cannot fill the position of assigned reader: the writer makes allusions to things which are particular, specific indeed, to a closed community of like-minded people. If you cannot ratify the role of assigned reader, you become an outsider, excluded, alienated from the text. Either you cannot authenticate it, and no coherent discourse is derived from the text, or you authenticate it on your own terms, and assert your own discourse which may have little convergence with that of the writer’s original intention.
Communication implies community , and membership is mediated with the meaning of the text. It is not just a matter of knowing the semantic meanings of the words. For the words are schematically connected to form conceptualizations of reality which define the culture of a particular discourse community (Swales, 1990). It would not help the Martian to know that the device he encounters is called a telephone, or Lok that the stick that so baffles him is called a bow. What they lack is insider experience of a whole new way of conceptualizing things and talking about them. They do not have the culturally determined ideational and interpersonal schemata. Without that, they remain outsiders. You do not acquire the conceptual significance of things when you learn their names. Innumerable people who attempt to interpret the newspaper article about the Chamberlains remain outsiders too; and notice that their inability to authenticate the text, their pragmatic incompetence, has nothing to do with their competence in the language. If you are baffled by this text, it is no reflection on your linguistic proficiency. It is not that you do not understand English, but rather that you do not understand the English, or at least those who are familiar with the culture of popular television. It follows that being a native speaker of the language is no guarantee against pragmatic incompetence. You can still find texts incoherent. With that in mind, perhaps we can turn to the last sample text. Here, at last, we come to a use of English of obvious relevance to our concerns: recognizably ESP-English, in this case, for financial affairs. We can say that, even for those who have their native speaking credentials and would like to claim to be competent in English, this turns out to be Greek. What are these gilts and conventionals and quiet builders? An explanation would involve induction into (for me) a strange culture of the stock exchange: I cannot just be informed about the meaning of the words in dissociation from the whole schematic complex of international finance. Since stocks and shares are a mystery to me, I have to fall back on what linguistic competence I have to make sense of this. So it is, for example, that I recognise the expression “index linked” as a past participle, but does it function here as a nominal, like conventional, and so a different kind of stock (or share?), or does it refer to a kind of conventional index-linked kind, distinct from conventionals in general, or does it refer to all of the conventionals mentioned earlier? I do not know. Those who belong to the discourse community of investment banking would, of course, be able to use the expression to key them in directly to what you know. In other words, the term “index-linked” would itself be pragmatically index-linked to their familiar affairs. They would be able to infer the relevant discourse because of their professional competence as members of this discourse community. There will be no need for them to analyse the meaning out of the text painstakingly, as I have to do as an outsider.
speakers of English, it follows that native speakers have no jurisdiction over the way the language is modified to suit professional purposes. We need to think, therefore, not of the English of computers or commerce or whatever, as if it were fixed in advance, but the English for computers or commerce or whatever, which will change in all manner of ways as these activities develop. The English language may even cede its supremacy to other languages. English is a business language and not the business language. So, business English is emphatically not at all the same thing as English business, and in spite of the deliberate intertextuality and shared idiom of institutional authority in the phrasing, the Bank of England should not be confused with the Bank of English. Native speaker authorities in Britain often take on the role of custodians of the language and take on responsibility for maintaining the standard to preserve standards of international intelligibility. But their sense of responsibility is misplaced. These standards will be regulated by the requirements for international communication. If business English approximates to the standard language, it will be because it makes for efficient communication among businesspeople, whatever their primary language. Native speakers of English have no right to pronounce on the matter. (for further discussion see Widdowson, 1994, 1997). However, there are implications here too for the concept of genre. If, in thinking of English for professional and occupational purposes, we need to accept that these purposes will change as the professions and occupations change, then it does not seem reasonable to account for them generically as stable sets of conventions. Because conventions will also change. We know that medium has an effect on mode, that development in communications alters communication, that technological advances like the printing press, the telephone, the computer, the fax machine have led to different modes of language use, different genres. Thus, the rapid development in electronic communications will have radical effects on the way we conduct our communicative affairs. Clearly, this needs to be taken into account in ESP teaching : it would be counterproductive to instruct students in outdated generic conventions. It would seem to be wise to present such genres not as specific norms to be conformed to, but as more general points of reference within which room for manoeuvre is possible and indeed desirable; and here we come to the vexed question of authenticity. Genres are sets of typical features of language use in certain domains. They are abstracted out of actual occurrences by the expertise of discourse analysts. If students of English for such domains are to learn such generic structures as points of reference, they must also be able to abstract from actual linguistic data. If you simply expose them to the actual data in the form of authentic texts, you give them no guidance as to how to do this. It seems to me that the pedagogy of ESP, therefore, requires us to devise different textual versions of generic structure, beginning with realizations in simple language and gradually complexifying in
the direction of genuine, actually occurring language use. In contemporary English language teaching , both in general and specialized contexts, there is a strong preference for using authentic or real English materials in the classroom. However, what counts as real or authentic for proficient users of the language is not necessarily authentic for learners. A text is not “real” to learners if they do not understand the conventions and communicative practices that make it real for native speakers. By definition, learners lack this familiarity because they are not yet members of the discourse community in which such language operates. As a result, they are likely to find so-called authentic materials confusing or inaccessible—just as the earlier example of the text on gilts and quiet builders illustrated. There seems to be little point in insisting on authenticity as a matter of principle. The crucial pedagogic question is how to guide students to an authentication of actually occurring language by a process of gradual initiation into the conventions of communication accepted in the discourse community for which they are bidding for membership; and it should be noted, too, that these are conventions for facilitating communication, not inhibiting it. There must be some scope for individual self-expression within the framework of schematic convention. One may be able to identify genre as a rhetorical type, but there will always be stylistic variation in the way it is realized by individuals; and the very process of learning, I would argue, requires room for individual scope as much as does the process of language use itself. In short, it is hard to see how the effective pedagogic application of genre analysis can be consistent with an insistence on authenticity. Also, there is a further point to be made about genre and authentic use. Professional cultures change over time, and so their generic conventions change too, as does the English which serves them, but they also vary at any one time. Publishers’ lists are full of books about the English of this, that and the other: the English of engineering, of science, of accounting, of commercial correspondence. These all have to do with what we can referred to as secondary cultures ; but do they not vary in relation to primary cultures? Are the accepted ways of writing a technical report or exchanging commercial correspondence, or negotiating a contract the same everywhere? We could hazard a guess that they are not, that particularly in those professions or occupations which crucially involve human interaction we are likely to find the secondary culture much modified by primary culture. There are, as is well known, quite distinctive management practices in Japanese industry, for example, which derive from the primary cultural values of Japanese social life. In the same way, we can imagine that the conventions of commercial correspondence must differ from place to place, that business negotiations between, let us say, Americans, will take a somewhat different course (and so will need a somewhat different course) from those
All this may seem remote from the practicalities of ESP, which can be considered, and commonly are considered, as simply a matter of providing people with mastery, with the expertise to do their job properly. It is that, of course, but it is not only that: it is, I think, also a matter of recognising the responsibility that such expertise brings with it, particularly in how these professional or secondary cultures relate to the primary cultures of everyday life. The greater the power conferred by professional expertise, the greater the responsibility in exercising it, and this ethical dimension should form part of ESP education alongside the training in technical mastery. It has become fashionable over recent years to talk about the baleful hegemony of EIL— English as an international language (Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 1994). Such talk, in many ways, misses the mark. The international spread of English is sustained only by the institutionally specific purposes it serves. In this respect, EIL is a consequence of ESP. There is nothing hegemonic about the language itself. The language is simply the symptom, not the cause. The E in ESP is innocent, but the SP is not. One can (and should) argue about the moral problems that arise from the exercise of power through the control of finance, commerce, and education. To the extent that ESP is concerned with sustaining the discourse communities that are in control and in power, and with supporting their purposes, it is obviously more implicated in moral and political issues than is general English teaching. So, this aspect of ESP is necessarily part of its nature and is a matter of educational awareness which goes beyond practical pedagogy. Specificity to purpose is a general pragmatic condition for effective communication, and that to be communicatively specific is to be communally restrictive, so that insiders within the discourse community understand and outsiders do not. The more communicatively effective we are, the more exclusive we become. This is because we count on the sharing of common assumptions, beliefs, and values: in short on a shared culture. As this culture changes and varies, so the language which services it alters accordingly. All of this has led me to conclude that our primary concern is not with the English of business or whatever, but with English for business, the language that happens to be required to further the purposes of the profession. This, in turn, leads to the question of what these purposes actually are. What is business for? What kind of culture is it? What is its role and its responsibility? How does it adapt to different circumstances? An ESP programme is designed to instruct students in the effective use of the language which serves to further their professional purposes. The English is there because it happens by historical accident to be the global means of communication for the international discourse community concerned. Mastery in the profession requires mastery of the relevant language, as it requires mastery in other kinds of expertise, and it obviously must be a crucial objective: a pedagogic objective, to which all classroom teaching must ultimately be accountable. This does not imply
simple uncritical belief in authenticity, but the special and specific contrivance of appropriate conditions in classrooms. Specificity is as much a matter of the process as the purpose of learning. However, mastery also implies mystery. There are implications of wider significance too which should not be disregarded. Professional and occupational cultures , especially those which have a global range of operation, have immense power. They should accordingly have an immense sense of responsibility. This is also an objective, an educational objective , and classroom teaching needs ultimately to be concerned with that as well. ESP, then, needs to be accountable in two ways, on two counts, indeed. These are pedagogic and educational ways concerning mastery and mystery that accountants cannot advise us about.
