ESPの潜在力を発揮させる視座  [in Japanese]

The purpose of this paper is to propose a broader perspective on ESP to adjust it better to the current conditions in Japanese university education. In recent years, ESP has gained growing attention because it can be employed to teach "practical" English both to meet the requests of the business community and to enhance students' motivation for learning. With the accelerating popularization of university education, however, more students are finding it difficult to discern a future path. Under such circumstances, ESP might not work well, for it basically presupposes that students aspire to work in a field where English is one of the important skills. In addition, most of the ESP practices now rendered in university classrooms seem to be centered mainly on teaching the surface usage of frequently used vocabulary, phrases or other language features of a specific field. These practices may not succeed in exposing the learner to the intended purpose of real-world materials which is key to the development of the "professional mind." Therefore, this paper explores three perspectives in which ESP can be made to fit Japanese education more effectively. One is to introduce elementary teaching materials designed to awaken the sensitivity to detect language features of any genre used in any specific field. Another is to develop the "professional mind" by utilizing materials likely to help sharpen it. These attempts, along with the third perspective of promoting autonomous genre analysis, could possibly help the ESP approach realize much more of its potential.