Revolution in linguistics

Traditionally the aim of linguistics had been to describe the rules of English usage, that is, the grammar. However the new studies shifted attention away from defining the formal features of language usage to discovering the ways in which language is actually used in real communication (Widdowson, 1978). One finding of this research was that the language we speak and write, from one context to another. In English language teaching this gave rise to the view that there are important differences between, say, the English of commerce and that of engineering.

Swales (1985) presents an article by C L. Barber on the nature of Scientific English which was published as early as 1962. But it Was the late 1960.1 and early i970s which saw the greatest expansion of research into the nature of particular varieties of English - for example, descrip¬tions of written scientific and technical English by Ewer and Latorre (1969), Swales (1971), Selinker and Trimble (1976) and others. They used the principle of ESP "Tell me what you need English for and I will tell you the English that you need