Research Issues in English for Specific Purposes

Research Issues in English for Specific Purposes

In this paper, I explore issues in English for Specific Purposes with a view to stimulating research interest among Korean applied linguists. Discussions of the ESP issues are centered around ESP needs and genre analysis. First, various approaches to ESP needs analysis are accounted . for, Next, the issue of ESP genres is discussed in detail, such as genre analysis in general, classifications of ESP genres, and current research in three ESP genres, i.e., English for Business Purposes (EBP), English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and English for Legal Purposes (ELP). Finally, the relevance of the corpus linguistics approach to ESP research is pointed out.