ESL for foreign-born professionals

The purpose of this thesis is to suggest guidelines for an English as a Second Language (ESL) curriculum designed to develop the communicative competence of foreign-born professionals residing in the United States. Empirical descriptions of language from the fields of the ethnography of communication, discourse analysis, and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) have been chosen for review because they focus on the description of contextualized language. Such descriptions are needed to inform the decisions of curriculum designers in their efforts to meet the needs of students, whose English proficiency level is generally high intermediate or advanced. Ethnographers of communication define communicative competence and provide insights into intercultural communication. Discourse analysts describe the grammatical forms and communicative functions of sentences in combination. Applied linguists in ESP describe the specialized uses of English in various registers, such as in science or business. The context emphasized in this study is that of the American-business speech community since skills in business communication are vital for professional success in any organization. The advice of business communication experts is presented wherever relevant. Aspects of the English for Business and Economics (EBE) register are therefore described on the levels of lexicon, syntax, and discourse. The curriculum guidelines suggested in this study focus on the productive language skit is of speaking and writing. For speaking, the contextualization cues, speech acts, conversational moves and routines needed for telephone talk, job interviews, group discussions, and everyday interaction are identified. For writing, features of the EBE register, frequently performed speech acts, and devices of textual cohesion and rhetorical coherence are identified for business letters and reports. In conclusion, the most general recommendation is that the curriculum prepare foreign-born professionals for effective participation in real situations of language use as members of the American-business speech community and help them to incorporate their knowledge of grammatical form with communicative function. Furthermore, the curriculum should expand students' knowledge of English structure by presenting the Interrelationships between sentence-level grammar and the discoursal patterning which occurs beyond the sentence level.