Summary
In most of today’s courses of English as a foreign language, the learners and teacher share 
the same mother tongue, but English is the language used to carry out all activities as far 
as the learner level allows. is means that the teacher’s level of target language mastery 
plays a signiﬁcant role in the quality of language teaching and the resulting learning. e 
paper looks at the functions of teacher talk as a source of input and model language use 
as well as a tool for managing classroom processes. Based on that, an argument is made 
for ‘teacher English’ as a case of English for speciﬁc purposes.
Key words: target language use, teacher talk, English for speciﬁc purposes, language 
input, classroom management 
 Povzetek
Večidel pouka angleščine kot tujega jezika v današnjem svetu poteka v okoljih, kjer 
učitelj in učenci delijo isti materni jezik, vendar pa je angleščina tisti jezik, v katerem se 
izvajajo vse učne aktivnosti, kolikor to le dopušča nivo znanja učencev. T o pomeni, da 
učiteljevo znanje in raba ciljnega jezika vpliva na kakovost jezikovnega poučevanja in 
učenja. Prispevek podaja pregled funkcij učiteljevega govora kot vira jezikovnega vnosa 
in vzora jezikovne rabe kot tudi orodja za vodenje učnih procesov. Na tej osnovi je 
podana trditev, da je ‘učiteljeva angleščina’ primer angleščine za posebne potrebe. 
Ključne besede: raba ciljnega jezika, učiteljev govor, angleščina za posebne potrebe, 
jezikovni vnos, vodenje pouka 
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.2.1-2.223-230
In order to teach a certain subject, mastery of that subject is the key requirement. at is 
common sense and hardly needs to be proven by research (e.g. Hustler and McIntyre 1996). 
One cannot be, for example, a maths teacher without being competent in mathematics. 
But, what exactly does being competent in mathematics entail? For people not involved in 
educational systems this may seem a redundant question. However, from the point of view of 
describing teacher competences, a general idea is not a suﬃcient basis for planning, executing 
and developing teacher training programs, nor for the management of teacher employment 
and evaluation of practicing teachers’ work, all of which should be aimed at increasing the 
quality of language learning in the schools. 
Of course, any attempt to deﬁne teacher competences, whether across subject areas or for a 
speciﬁc subject, has to take into consideration that in the actual teaching process, a teacher’s 
subject knowledge interplays in intricate ways with his/her pedagogical / instructional 
competences and personality (Tsui 2003). Within this context, however, an analysis of subject 
area competences brings to the surface subject-speciﬁc issues. In the case of foreign languages 
(in our case, English), we could ask whether subject area competence means being able to 
describe the system and structures of the language, or understanding the principles of the 
language as a social tool, or understanding of the language processing in the brain, or the 
ability to use the language, or all of those, and in what proportions. 
Obviously, these are very complex questions, so let us focus on just the last of the enumerated 
aspects of an English teacher’s knowledge of English - practical competence in language use, 
or language proﬁciency. What is the minimum threshold of target language proﬁciency that 
ensures quality teaching at diﬀerent levels in diﬀerent contexts? e higher, the better? Is it 
enough to equip teacher trainees with a high proﬁciency in general English, or do they need 
to develop certain speciﬁc language uses, skills and strategies?
ese questions rest on the assumption that English as the target language, and not the native 
language the teacher and students often share, is indeed predominantly the language of classroom 
discourse in most EFL classrooms. Franklin (1990) lists a number of authors who provide theoretical 
arguments for this. In fact, there has been a strong movement in the 20th century to teach foreign 
languages exclusively through the target language, but this has widely been found too extreme by 
both theoreticians and teachers. However, as Atkinson points out (1993, 4), “failure to engender 
enough use of the target language in the classroom is one of the major methodological reasons 
for poor achievement levels in language learning.” e currently widely professed and practiced 
communicative approach to foreign language teaching assumes that while the mother tongue has 
a meaningful role to play, using English as much as possible in the classroom is one of the main 
factors in developing a learner’s communicative language competence. While theories diverge on 
the issue of how important it is for learners to have an opportunity to interact (form output) 
rather than just listen to the target language, there is general agreement in the EFL ﬁeld that 
exchange of authentic messages is one of the most important aspects of successful communicative 
language learning. Clark (cited in Franklin 1990) similarly points out that in order to develop 
communicative competence, TL rather than the mother tongue has to be used extensively in 
classroom communication, as it is only that way that students will perceive the language as a real 
communicative tool rather than just a subject to be studied.  
 In an attempt to describe the teacher’s use of TL in the classroom, we have to start from the 
‘why’ before we can answer the ‘how’. e teacher’s classroom talk in English mainly fulﬁls two 
types of functions: it provides language input / a model of target language use, and is a tool for 
managing classroom processes. As regards teacher talk as input, students are nowadays of course 
heavily exposed to English through the media, travel and other out-of-school sources as well, but 
as research done into classroom interaction (e. g. Long 1983) suggests, teacher talk can and should 
be more structured and ﬁne-tuned to students’ learning needs than random input they get outside 
the classroom, and therefore out-of-class exposure does not diminish the value of classroom input. 
As Stephen Krashen pointed out in 1982, the foreign language classroom is not a substitute for the 
real world, but should bring students to a point where they can better learn from it.  
ere are also functions of teacher talk that are not subject-speciﬁc. In any subject, the teacher 
has to demonstrate mastery of the subject as an aspect of his/her authority (related to his/her 
professional self-conﬁdence), which has many implications in the teaching/learning process. 
At the same time, a teacher in any subject uses language as the primary tool of classroom 
management; to organize daily classroom activities, explain, give feedback, discipline, motivate, 
encourage, correct etc. It is in carrying out these speciﬁc communicative tasks that language 
teachers have the opportunity to provide error-free, meaningful, structured and ﬁne-tuned 
input in the target language.
What conﬁguration of language competence and what level of proﬁciency in the target 
language are required for that? ere are as yet few studies available which would detail the 
teachers’ target language needs from this perspective. A set of requirements such as provided 
by Kreeft Peyton for FL teachers in the USA (cited in Philips 1991) is much too general: “A 
high level of language proﬁciency in all of the modalities of the target language – speaking, 
listening, reading, and writing, the ability to use the language in real-life contexts, for both 
social and professional purposes, and the ability to comprehend contemporary media in the 
foreign language, both oral and written, and interact successfully with native speakers in 
the United States and abroad.” ere have been several calls in the literature to deﬁne “the 
components of language proﬁciency most crucial for language teachers” (Richards 1998, 7). 
Atkinson says that “teachers should be encouraged to acquire a sound knowledge of the highly 
speciﬁc target language items related to the minutiae of (communicative) language teaching” 
(1993, 4). Some authors even make a straightforward claim that English for the teacher is a 
case of LSP (Language for Speciﬁc Purposes) (Richards 1998, Bondi). 
 T o prove or disprove this idea, we must examine the notion of ESP (or LSP). ESP has always 
been deﬁned more in terms of an approach to language teaching than language per se. e 
most widely cited deﬁnition of ESP was given in 1988 by Peter Strevens, who proposed four 
absolute and two variable characteristics of ESP . ese were later revised by Dudley-Evans and 
St. John (1998), so that now the absolute characteristics of an ESP course are considered to be 
the following: 
• it is designed to meet speciﬁc needs of the learner;
• it makes use of the underlying methodology and activities of the discipline it serves;
• it is centered on the language (grammar, lexis, register), skills, discourse and genres 
appropriate to these activities.
Since this paper does not look at the methodology of teaching ESP , let us focus only on 
what ESP means in terms of content (a model of language description) or aims. What is 
meant in the above deﬁnition by 'speciﬁc needs' and 'activities of the discipline it serves'? 
Munby (1978) and Mackay and Mountford (1978) claimed that the word 'speciﬁc' refers to 
the purposes for which learners learn a language, not the nature of the language they learn 
(speciﬁc jargon or registers). Many later authors agree that 'needs' is equal to 'communicative 
purposes' or 'communicative tasks'. It could be noted, however, that it is always the purpose of 
a communication act that deﬁnes the language used to fulﬁl it, and it is therefore impossible to 
disassociate speciﬁc purposes from speciﬁc language items and processes used to fulﬁl them. 
In 1978, John Munby made a formidable attempt to provide a system for deﬁning both in his 
'Communicative Syllabus Design' for ESP language programmes. Although his model was not 
widely used in practice, and attracted much criticism due to its atomistic approach, which reduced 
to a linear order the extremely complex and inherently organic process of verbal communication, 
Munby nevertheless provided a scientiﬁc basis for a modern deﬁnition of ESP .
Widdowson in his 1983 'Language Purpose and Language Use' criticized Munby and deﬁned 
ESP in contrast to EGP (General English). He explained that while EGP develops a general 
capacity for language use, which the learner could apply in diﬀerent situations, ESP is a 
restricted language competence, which enables one to cope only with a clearly deﬁned set 
of language tasks. While Widdowson disagrees with the labelling of diﬀerent ESP courses 
'English for Waiters,' 'English for Lawyers' etc., he considers it evident that diﬀerent areas 
of human activity involve diﬀerent language tasks, and that to cope with them, we employ 
diﬀerent sets of language items and skills. 
As far as the contrast between LSP and general language goes, DeBeaugrande (1989, cited in 
Robinson 1991, 6) says that “[...] no LSP is composed of its own resources. Instead, every LSP 
overlaps heavily with at least one language for general purposes and is free to use any part of 
the latter without expressing justiﬁcation. One could not, for example, state the 'rules' which 
determine which parts of the grammar or lexicon of English may or may not appear in 'scientiﬁc 
English'.” is suggests, as is conﬁrmed by other authors (Gačić 1985, Roelcke 1999), that 
LSP is diﬀerent from general language primarily in the distribution / dominance of certain 
language means. Roelcke (1999) also points out that each type of LSP is not just a subsystem 
or variety of general language but is also deﬁned against other types of LSP pertaining to other 
professions / activities.
Several other authors have tried to deﬁne ESP in terms of pure linguistic description. According 
to Hoﬀman (1988), ESP is all the language means used to communicate in a limited ﬁeld by 
people who are experts or active in this ﬁeld. Under language means Hoﬀman understands 
prosodic and lexicogrammatical means in functional interplay in all the communicative acts 
possible within the speciﬁc area.
It seems that from the deﬁnitions of ESP by a number of authors we can extract two main 
points:
1. ESP is restricted to a group of users involved in the same profession, scientiﬁc discipline, 
educational or leisure activity as distinct from other groups. It is the language used by members 
of a group to carry out the activities and talk about the concepts, many of which, but not all, 
are speciﬁc to the group.
2. ESP is language that is used to fulﬁl a speciﬁed communicative purpose. In this sense, 
the English you need to buy a postcard is equally speciﬁc as the English a physician needs 
to understand a scientiﬁc article. From this follows that an ESP description is always based 
on a speciﬁcation of communicative situation, act, task or purpose. Secondary to this is a 
speciﬁcation of language items and processes required by the speciﬁed communicative 
situations. ese may be largely absent from or used diﬀerently in general language. 
In the 1980s and later, numerous ESP courses were developed for a wide range of scientiﬁc 
disciplines and professions. It should not be surprising that their content and aims speciﬁcations 
were largely functional/notional or situational/generic. Within this, there are almost always 
itemized descriptions of lexis speciﬁc to an area of knowledge or activity, use of grammatical 
patterns that 'deviates' from general English, and restrictions or selective focus in terms of 
language skills, subskills and strategies taught. In a theoretical sense, the inclusion of all of 
these in deﬁning an area of ESP can be traced back at least as far as the work of John Munby. 
T oday, a comparably comprehensive, but less atomistic and much more ﬂexible model of 
specifying language use is provided in the Common European Framework of Reference for 
Languages (Council of Europe 2001). 
How do all of the discussed characteristics of ESP relate to the English used / needed by 
teachers of English as a foreign language? Firstly, at the risk of stating the obvious, teachers 
of English as a foreign language are deﬁnitely a group of users of English sharing a profession 
that is distinct from other professions. All of them use English on a daily basis to carry out 
activities typical of their profession. It is true that to some extent these (communicative) 
activities overlap with the activities of teachers of English as a mother tongue, teachers of 
other subjects, and parents teaching their children to speak, but there are also ways in which 
TEFL is diﬀerent from all of these. As opposed to learning a mother tongue in a home 
environment, the foreign language classroom for example almost entirely lacks contextual 
clues, while on the other hand students already possess competence in one language. As 
opposed to school classes of English as a mother tongue, or subjects like mathematics or 
history, foreign language classrooms are speciﬁc because in them the “language is both 
the vehicle and the object of instruction” (Long 1983, 9). In addition to clearly deﬁned 
communicative tasks TEFL shares with these other ﬁelds of activity, the diﬀerences give rise 
to tasks which are typical only of TEFL and largely absent from or handled diﬀerently in 
other contexts.
e communicative tasks typically carried out by teachers of English as a foreign language 
have been identiﬁed by several authors of handbooks for teachers which fairly closely follow 
the patterns of similar textbooks / handbooks for various other professions (English for 
nurses, English for customs oﬃcers etc.). Spratt (1994), Heaton (1981), Hughes (1981) and 
Willis (1981) all take the functional/notional approach to describing the EFL teacher's use 
language in the classroom. Jane Willis for example deals with how the teacher uses English 
to control and discipline a class, how to introduce a reading passage, how to divide the class 
in pairs for dialogue practice etc. While of course there are several linguistic realizations of 
each of these functions, teachers widely tend to use the same phrases and sentences for a 
certain function. Some of these structures are of course used in general English (situations 
other than the EFL classroom) as well. For example, 'Listen carefully' is a perfectly everyday 
phrase, the only thing that is speciﬁc about it in terms of teacher English is that it may have 
a much higher frequency. On the other hand, there are phrases used in an English classroom 
that would hardly be used anywhere outside of it, for example 'When we've ﬁnished this 
exercise, we're going to practice asking questions' or 'Would you turn around to make a 
group of four, please?'.
Many theorists and teachers of ESP have focused on lexis as the main deﬁning characteristic 
of ESP as opposed to general English, perhaps because it is the most obvious one. English as 
used by teachers of EFL is a bit problematic in this sense because by its very nature (which is 
talking in English to people whose English might be quite limited) it does not contain much 
lexis which would be incomprehensible to people outside the profession. Perhaps the word 
'transparency' is not a household word, but there are few others to suggest a typical ESP such 
as found in 'English for biologists' or 'English for stockbrokers'.
'Teacher English' might not be a stereotypical ESP; it is indeed speciﬁc in terms of 
communicative functions and frequency of more or less speciﬁc phrases / grammatical 
structures, but does not really have a stock of highly speciﬁc lexis. ere is, however, further 
speciﬁcity to be found beyond the level of language functions and lexicogrammatical items. 
ere are uses of prosody that are distinct from those in other contexts (for example, use 
of intonation, pauses and stress for the purposes of presentation and elicitation). Also, in 
terms of language skills, even in the broad sense, the language teaching profession has needs 
which are not the same as in other contexts of language use. In particular, for a teacher's 
daily classroom needs, competence in speaking is obviously by far the most important as 
compared to the competence in listening, reading and writing. So, while some groups of 
users of English as a foreign language might need a competence in producing even quite 
complex types of written discourse in English (such as contracts or scientiﬁc papers), the 
EFL teacher, particularly at the primary level, might have hardly any need for a competence 
in composing written text in English, as suggested by the creators of the European Language 
Proﬁle for FL primary teachers (Bondi 2002). 
Further special demands become apparent if we explore the area of language subskills and 
strategies. As an example let us look at one of the most important aspects of an EFL teacher's 
target language competence – the ability to adapt the level of their language output to the 
abilities and learning needs of the students. is often means a high degree of selection and 
reduction in grammar and vocabulary to ensure comprehension, while at the same time 
input needs to be rich and varied. rough this, the teacher can expose learners, at the 
right moment, to language which is slightly above their level of mastery but provided in a 
suﬃciently appropriate context so that they can infer the meaning and integrate the new item. 
While adapting output to the communicative partner's abilities in order to ensure mutual 
comprehension is a general language strategy, it is more crucial, complex and demanding in 
foreign language instruction settings. 
 Beyond the previously mentioned classroom language handbooks, there is unfortunately very 
little research-based literature to date that deals with ‘teacher English’, particularly from an 
ESP point of view. However, considering the fact that the teacher’s use of English is the key 
aspect of EFL classrooms, EFL teacher training programmes “(both pre- and in-service) should 
give much more weight to the importance of teacher talk and its link to language acquisition” 
(Walsh 2003). Richards writes that “presumably one needs to attain a certain threshold level 
of proﬁciency in a language to be able to teach eﬀectively in it ...” (1998, 7). is idea seems 
worryingly vague and tentative from the point of view of designing EFL teacher training 
programs and ensuring proper standards of teacher performance in schools. is paper proposes 
that ‘teacher English’, although perhaps in less obvious ways, is just as much of a language for 
speciﬁc purposes as any other that has been labelled as such for decades. As such, it deserves 
and calls for more ‘ESP treatment’, which primarily means a detailed analysis of the teachers’ 
communicative language needs. Only this kind of an analysis can be a solid basis for equipping 
teachers with an eﬃciently proﬁled target language mastery to ensure quality teaching for 
quality learning in a world which demands constantly that more people be constantly more 
proﬁcient in the English language.