The ESP version: Genre, community and identity

Keynote Session 6ESP regards genre as the recurrent uses of more-or-less conventionalized forms through which we develop relationships, establish communities, and get things done using language. More a heuristic than a systematic model of language use, its analytical flexibility and sensitivity to community language use has been extremely useful in problem solving, teaching, and learning about ourselves and our communities. Its massive impact on teaching and research is largely due to its accessibility, its theoretical eclecticism and its sensitivity to community-based uses of language. In this paper I look at what the ESP version has contributed to our understanding of context and in particular how it has illuminated two key concepts of the social sciences – community and identity