ESP and Writing

Writing is central to central to modern life. Not only is it hard to imagine modern academic and corporate existence without essays, emails, medical reports and minutes of meetings, but writing is also a key feature of every student’s experience. Conventional forms of writing remain the way in which students both consolidate their learning and demonstrate their understanding, but multimedia and electronic technologies are beginning to influence learning and how we assess it. A dominant feature of academic literacy is the requirement to control a range of genres appropriate to different settings and to handle the meanings and identities that each evokes. Writing is therefore not an homogeneous and transferable skill, but complex and multifaceted, specific to different contexts and audiences. In this chapter, I map something of the territory of ESP writing, sketching how we study it, what we know about it, and illustrating how it impacts teaching and research.