Developments Of Research On ESP In China And Abroad

The purpose of the thesis is to provide a review for the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) research from 1996 to 2005 in the mainland of People's Republic of China and for that in the West (Mainly in the United States of America and the United Kingdom) respectively and to put forward suggestions for research and teaching of ESP in China by reviewing literature on ESP in core Chinese and English journals available and making comparative analysis between the two. The review found: (a) Branches and sub-branches of ESP have undergone unbalanced development in the past ten years. Research on RA (research articles) took dominance in the West, while Business English was given the greatest weight in China. (b) Research methods employed in the research of ESP were different. Diverse research methods (e.g. corpus-based method) were employed in the West. Corpus-based analysis has been widely accepted as an effective methodology in genre analysis in the West. Corpus linguistics, however, had little intersection with genre analysis in China. (c) Situations of ESP teaching were different. An integrated system of EAP teaching has been built in the West, which could be manifested in two aspects, maturity of approaches teaching methods and well-developed ESP teaching system. Research on the teaching of ESP in China was not systematically conducted. Few studies were devoted to other related sectors such as assessment, needs analysis, authentic materials, and teacher training and so on.