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English for Specific Purposes, World Englishes, and their rise as research areas

Paper · 2025 · Philip Shaw

Summary

This is an essay (Forum piece), not an empirical study. Shaw asks why two areas, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and World Englishes (WE), came to dominate publishing in language and linguistics. Early twentieth-century linguistics studied the languages of rural, colonised or powerless speakers. Today much of the field describes the English of educated, internationalised people. Shaw traces both areas to Halliday, MacIntosh and Strevens (1964), who rejected the idea of one context-free language. He then contrasts them along Becher and Trowler's disciplinary dimensions. ESP is applied, a teaching technology that sits inside a cross-linguistic LSP field and is concentrated on a few topics ("urban"). WE is ideologically driven, not marketable, and spread across countless local varieties. His main argument is that research volume follows the large supply of university English teachers who must publish, not actual need. Citation metrics then push EAP toward a narrow set of topics. He proposes that LSP accept "nice to know" humanities-style description, including non-elite registers, and merge further with WE.

Key points

  • Halliday, MacIntosh and Strevens, The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching (1964), is presented as a common root of ESP/LSP and of the recognition of national post-colonial Englishes.
  • Swales wrote Writing scientific English (1971) while teaching at the University of Libya. This shows the early non-metropolitan orientation of ESP.
  • Europe's biennial LSP symposium came to an end with its 17th meeting, held in Århus in 2009. Journals such as JEAP and ESPJ have overshadowed Fachsprache.
  • In the taxonomy Shaw describes, ESP is a co-hyponym of German, French and Chinese for specific purposes under LSP. WE would belong under a weakly developed "Post-colonial Language Studies", which has no comparable journals or conferences.
  • Shaw cites Becher and Trowler (2001) for the "urban/rural" contrast. "Urban" EAP has many researchers per topic, so its articles are cited more, and metrics reinforce this concentration.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Shaw treats a language as a family of registers and regional varieties rather than one "best" standard, and argues each should be described on its own terms
  • I2. Mehringer's "words and things" principle holds that knowing the objects of a domain is what makes its vocabulary understandable
  • I3. Shaw organises fields as an explicit hypernym/hyponym hierarchy, which exposes where categories fail to line up (ESP fits under LSP; WE has no matching sister fields)
  • I4. Shaw warns that citation-style metrics reward crowded topics and narrow the range of what gets studied
  • I5. Shaw points out that within-genre cross-linguistic comparison is a productive lens, since the same purpose (research, business) shapes discourse similarly across languages

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): Treat inputs such as Indian English or academic register as variants with their own dialect-conversion or adaptation layer, rather than as noise against a single standard treebank.
  • I2 (world): Link domain lexicon to compiled ontology knowledge (WordNet/Wikidata) so that specialised terms are resolved through what the entities are, not only through string statistics.
  • I3 (world): Check the ontology for asymmetric or empty sister categories as a diagnostic for gaps or misplaced nodes.
  • I4 (learn): Balance evaluation across rare genres and registers instead of optimising one popular benchmark, so that improvement is not illusory concentration.
  • I5 (back): Use genre-level frame templates in the meta-world as a pivot for translation, mapping a genre's conventions rather than only individual sentences.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Stockholm UniversityStockholm · Sweden21 works · 1,832 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Philip Shaw. 2025. English for Specific Purposes, World Englishes, and their rise as research areas. Ibérica.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17398/2340-2784.49.5

@inproceedings{shaw2025english,
  title = {{English for Specific Purposes, World Englishes, and their rise as research areas}},
  author = {Philip Shaw},
  booktitle = {Ibérica},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.17398/2340-2784.49.5},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17398/2340-2784.49.5}
}

References

20 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Becher, T., & Trowler, P. (2001). Academic tribes and territories. McGraw-Hill Education. find
  2. Bennett, J. (1908). Gullah: a Negro patois. South Atlantic Quarterly, 7(4), 332-347. ↗
  3. Bohmann, A. (2019). Variation in English worldwide: Registers and global varieties. Cambridge University Press. find
  4. Cheng, A. (2023). Learning about research writing across the disciplines: pathways, problems, and possibilities. Ibérica, Journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes, 45, 7-22. https://doi.org/10.17398/2340-2784.45.7 ↗
  5. Dafouz, E. (2021). Crossing disciplinary boundaries: English-medium education (EME) meets English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Ibérica, Journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes, 41, 13-38. https://doi.org/10.17398/2340-2784.41.1 ↗
  6. Halliday, M. A. K., McIntosh, A., & Strevens, P. (1964). The linguistic sciences and language teaching. Longmans. find
  7. Hoffman, L. (1976). Kommunikationsmittel Fachsprache: eine Einführung. De Gruyter. find
  8. Hyland, K. (2023). Open Science: What’s not to like? Ibérica, Journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes, 46, 23-32. https://doi.org/10.17398/2340-2784.46.23 ↗
  9. Jenkins, J., Cogo, A., & Dewey, M. (2011). Review of developments in research into English as a lingua franca. Language Teaching, 44(3), 281-315. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444811000115 ↗
  10. Kortmann, B., Lunkenheimer, K., & Ehret, K. (Eds.). (2020). The electronic world atlas of varieties of English. Zenodo. http://ewave-atlas.org ↗
  11. Madeira, A. I. (2005). Portuguese, French and British discourses on colonial education: Church-State relations, school expansion and missionary competition in Africa, 1890-1930. Paedagogica Historica, 41(1-2), 31-60. ↗
  12. Negretti, R., & McGrath, L. (2022). Setting the stage(s) for English for Research and Publication Purposes: Authors, audiences, and learning the craft. Ibérica, Journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes, 43, 7-26. https://doi.org/10.17398/2340-2784.43.13.7 ↗
  13. Pennycook, A. (2006). Global Englishes and transcultural flows. Routledge. ↗
  14. Pérez-Llantada, C. (2021). Research genres across languages: Multilingual communication online. Cambridge University Press. find
  15. Preisler, B. (1999). Functions and forms of English in a European EFL country. In T. Bex, T. Watts & R. Watts (Eds.), Standard English: the widening debate (pp. 239-267). Routledge. find
  16. Schilling, U. (2017). Sattel, Koffer und Gewehr: Wörter und Sachen bei den kasachischen Nomaden der Westmongolei. Doctoral dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin. https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/8006 ↗
  17. Schuchardt, H. (1914). Die Sprache der Saramakkaneger in Surinam. Johannes Muller. find
  18. Swales, J. M. (1971). Writing scientific English. Nelson. find
  19. Swales, J. M. (2000). Languages for specific purposes. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 20, 59-76. https://doi.org/10.1017/S02671905002 00044 ↗
  20. Swales, J. M. (2019). The futures of EAP genre studies: A personal viewpoint. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 38, 75-82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2019.01.003 ↗

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