Unit 1-22. The use of ESP in European business

Section 1. Guidelines for reading texts on the use of international English in European business

ESP makes considerable use of recurrent formulaic patterns of words or formulas. It is estimated that about half of written English text is constructed according to the idiom principle. Comparisons of written and spoken corpora suggest that formulas are even more frequent in spoken language. Formulaic language covers a range of prefabricated linguistic units from idioms and proverbs to speech act routines, turns of phrase and collocations. All of these are considered not to be creatively strung together, each time anew, following the rules of the language, but to be retrieved (by the speaker) and processed (by the hearer), which allows them to depart to various degrees from their predictable meanings. Speakers’ displays of identity and of alignment with particular groups provide one especially promising direction for hypothesis formation in this respect. Istvan Kecskes’ researchdescribes useful formulaic sequences for ESP speech. It determines ESP instructors’ evaluations of their pedagogical importance. It summarizes experiments which show that different aspects of formulaicity affect the accuracy and fluency of processing of these formulas in advanced L2 learners of English.