“…As a course design mechanism, ESP belongs to the class of objects called educational programmes or designs, more specifically, language education programmes. As an educational programme or design, ESP, as do other educational designs, becomes subject to educational theory and practice (the curriculum) regardless of whether validations of these are through nomological networks, the theory-constituting systems of scientific laws proposed by Cronbach and Meel (1955); by the score-based interpretations, arguments and inferences proposed by Messick (1989), and supported by Kane (2001), or by the realist measurementcausal attributions approach of Borsboom, Mellenbergh, and van Heerden (2004, as critically discussed in Baghaei &Yazdi, 2016: 169-170, andin Colliver, Conlee, &Verhulst, 2012: 367-369). ESP initially sought to set itself apart from language education theory and practice as a special kind of ELT with special methodologies, but the reality of the practical constraints imposed by non-observance of curriculum principles often inhibited the effectiveness of this language teaching approach, as came to the fore in the shortcomings identified in Munby's needs analysis model of 1978.…”