Developing specialised vocabulary in ESP through professional texts: a genre-informed, technology-supported input-processing-output model

Specialised vocabulary development in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) remains a central challenge in preparing learners for professional communication in terminologically dense disciplines. This study examines how the systematic integration of professional texts, genre-based pedagogy, and targeted digital support facilitates lexical depth and transfer within professional discourse, addressing the limited empirical evidence on how these dimensions interact in classroom practice. Drawing on a classroom-based mixed-methods design conducted across three higher education institutions ( N = 84 undergraduate students; N = 10 ESP instructors) within medicine-, pharmacy-, engineering- and IT-oriented ESP programmes, the study combines structured classroom observations (24 lessons over eight weeks), instructor questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, student focus-group discussions, and a comparative content analysis of five widely used ESP textbooks. The analysis foregrounds discourse-relevant indicators of specialised lexical competence, including collocational control, register sensitivity, contextual appropriateness, and transfer from text-based input to written and spoken output. Results indicate that sustained engagement with authentic professional genres—such as research abstracts, clinical documentation, pharmaceutical texts, technical manuals, laboratory protocols, and engineering reports—supported by explicit genre scaffolding and digitally mediated noticing activities (e.g., corpus-based exploration and spaced repetition), appears to facilitate deeper lexical internalisation and supports more accurate professional language use. On this basis, an empirically grounded input–processing–output model is proposed, in which professional texts provide genre-mediated input, guided processing supports noticing and consolidation, and output tasks operationalise lexical transfer. The model offers empirically grounded design principles for ESP curricula and teacher development in terminologically dense disciplines.