Orienting university students to the language and culture of their disciplines

International concerns about the inability of university English programs in the United States and elsewhere to adequately prepare students for the English of their professions prompted the creation of two important English language education movements: Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Both of these movements have considerably improved English language education for specific disciplines, but neither has adequately addressed discipline-specific English language needs in a comprehensive fashion, neither theoretically nor in practice. The paper reports on progress toward this goal for Japanese university students in the field of computing and then suggests how this work might be carried out for specific populations of English language-learners in other disciplines