Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Approaches in English for Specific Purposes (ESP)

During the last decade, the spread and influence of English has contributed to the rise of an area of investigation called English for Specific Purposes (ESP). A lot of attention has been given to ESP because it is deemed an effective way of teaching English.

In the field of ESP, genre analysis has been a widely recognized concept concerning linguistic analysis of language. Since the early 80s, interest in genre-centered approaches to the analysis of written and spoken discourse has been motivated by the need to provide satisfactory models and descriptions of academic and scientific texts and to enhance the ability of non-native speaker students to understand and to produce them (Holmes, 1997).

According to Bhatia (1993a, 1993b), the notion of genre analysis offers a powerful and useful system of analysis which allows a far “thicker” observation to be made on the repeated communicative functions than that offered by any other system of analysis in existing literature. He believes that genre analysis has become a powerful and useful tool to arrive at significant form-function correlations which can be utilized for a number of applied linguistic purposes, including the teaching of English for specific purposes.

Consequently, in order to make an analysis of a particular type of text, the study of genre should be employed to obtain knowledge of how the texts are organized, what linguistic features are used, and why they are written and used by the specialist communities the way they are (Bhatia, 1993a, 1993b).

Genre is an instance of a successful achievement of a specific communicative purpose using conventionalized knowledge of linguistic and discoursal resources (Bhatia, 1993a: 16).

Genre analysis is a study of the lang...

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