1 What ESP Is and Can Be: An Introduction DIANE BELCHER Georgia State University General (language for no purpose) courses at any proficiency level almost always teach too much, e.g., vocabulary, skills, registers or styles some learners do not need, and too little, e.g., omitting lexis and genres that they do. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, it is more defensible to view every course as involving specific purposes. . . . (Long, 2005, p. 19) Ideally, as Michael Long suggests, English, or any language, is taught with specific purposes explicitly in mind. The reality, of course, is that the pur- poses served in language instruction are not always those of the language learners, so the instruction may look to learners like “language for no pur- pose,” to borrow Long’s words, or more troubling, like language for other people’s purposes (i.e., individuals or even national entities in positions of power; see Morgan & Fleming, this volume). Commitment to the goal of providing language instruction that addresses students’ own specific lan- guage learning purposes is what those who take an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) 1 approach see as distinguishing it from other approaches to English Language Teaching (ELT) (Hyland, 2002). However, while the 1 We should note that the specific-purposes approach is not exclusive to the teaching of English; it can be used to teach any language, hence the broader term Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) also exists. Since this volume focuses primarily on the teaching of English, the term ESP will be used throughout. English for Specific Purposes in Theory and Practice by Diane Belcher, Editor http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=770237 Michigan ELT, 2009