English for Specific Purposes最新文献

Tertiary-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Taiwan are often required to read English-medium textbooks in their disciplinary courses. In science and engineering, it is a common practice for teachers to assign students English text but lecture in the local language, Chinese. In this study, we provided a situated picture of how these students interact with the text in their disciplinary context by triangulating multiple knowledge sources available to them. This includes analysis of the subject textbook in L2 (English), lectures in L1 (Chinese), and artifacts produced in the class, such as syllabus, exam sheets, and students' notes. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate the students' and an instructor's perceptions of the role of these sources and their interrelationships. The findings reveal that students exploited various meaning-making resources to comprehend the ideas covered in the textbook. In addition, the instructor's explanation of the teaching materials, homework problem sets, and exam questions all proved to be important and interconnected resources that students rely on in their reading practices. Notably, problem sets and equations captured the students' attention while reading the textbook. We discuss the role of problem sets in scientific textbooks and suggest implications for further research.

This paper analyzes discourse acts in an ESP context from a local grammar perspective. We illustrate this analysis by constructing a local grammar for the discourse act of commenting on information in graphics, i.e., graphic data commentary in the discourse of Economics. Based on a corpus of research articles of Economics, we extracted instances of graphic data commentary that contain lexical items indicating different types of graphics (e.g., table, figure). Eight functional terminologies (e.g., ‘Graphic’, ‘Data’) were identified from the instances for the subsequent local grammar analysis, which in turn led to 17 frequently occurring semantic patterns, i.e., local grammar patterns. Each pattern has been observed to have a distinctive way to organize meanings and a corresponding communicative function, fitting the variation of the context. The study indicates that local grammar can provide a precise and systematic description of the lexical-semantic means that economists rely on to communicate graphic information and can offer pedagogical insights into the teaching of academic writing in an ESP context.

Sentiment analysis has garnered significant attention in the academic field lately, which gives academic scholars a full comprehension of how emotion states are communicated in texts and how it works as a powerful persuasion strategy for academic writers. Based on a large dataset of over five million tokens, this study examined specific emotions in research articles across 18 subdisciplines of medicine, aiming to reveal the emotions presented by medical writers in academic writing. The results showed the following: (1) four emotions with positive valence—trust, anticipation, joy, and surprise—were observed; (2) the tendency of emotion represented by trust > anticipation > joy > surprise was identified, with the first (trust) being overwhelmingly dominant and the rest indicating minor presence; and (3) subdisciplinary emotion variation was found and the contributing variables were identified as research methods and paradigms, research objects, interdisciplinary features, and disciplinary status in knowledge accumulation. The findings contribute to our understanding of emotion strategy applied in academic writing and genre characteristics of medical science. This article concludes with pedagogical implications for EAP teachers and suggestions for possible future research.

In this commentary, I discuss the value of Chan's (2009) research-informed checklists for evaluating business English materials by providing a practitioner's approach to using the checklists. I adapted the checklists for three different uses. The first was to evaluate the teaching methodology followed in a business English textbook from an ESP series. The second use was as a guide and evaluation tool for my in-house business English material development. The final use was also to support the design and then evaluation of custom-made banking English course materials. In conclusion, I found that adapting these research-informed checklists, based on local needs, creates opportunities for professional development, tailored courses, and transferability to other ESP genres.

The assembly of corpus-based discipline-specific word lists for pedagogical purposes has recently been on the rise (e.g., Arndt, 2022; Fraser, 2007; O'Flynn, 2019; Yang, 2015). In order to cater to the needs of learners in veterinary medicine (VM) and for field-specific academic literacy, this paper analyses a reiteration of the Veterinary Medicine Corpus (Özer and Akbaş, 2023; hereafter the VMC), assembling a specified list of academic words used in published research articles (RAs) in VM. So far, VM has remained largely unexplored with the exception of Durrant's (2009) limited coverage of VM texts. The analysis was conducted using LancsBox 6.0, prompted to yield a list of PoS-tagged lemmas (P-lemmas) sorted by frequency (Coxhead, 2000; Yang, 2015) and dispersion (Arndt, 2022). The most frequent 1,000 lemmas for each content word category were collated into a candidate list. We then manually eliminated proper nouns and GSL (West, 1953) words. The final list, the Veterinary Medicine Academic Word List (VMAWL), contains 835 PoS-tagged lemmas (P-lemmas), a reiteration of which was produced by adding the types in Bauer and Nation’s (1993) taxonomy at the second level to test coverage. The VMAWL was profiled and validated against the four parent categories independently on AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2022a) with analysis showing the VMAWL comprises 13.75 % of the VMC and diverges greatly from generic word lists like the AWL, NGSL, new-GSL, and AVL. The list can be used to develop teaching materials for EAP or ESP academic writing courses.

As part of the special issue “Business English: Research into Professional Practice”, this article aims to contribute to a major discussion in the field of business English concerning ways of strengthening the research–pedagogy interface. The article is a commentary on my previously published paper, “Forging a link between research and pedagogy: A holistic framework for evaluating business English materials” (2009). In this commentary, I discuss various aspects of the paper, including the significance of its proposed approach to connecting research with pedagogy, the influence of the paper on business English and other fields, and the application of its ideas by practitioners to business English materials evaluation and beyond. I also reflect on the paper's influence on my subsequent work as both a researcher and a practitioner. I conclude by suggesting future directions that should help to bring research closer to pedagogical practice.

Genre awareness, the conscious knowledge of how genre features function in reading and writing (Tardy et al., 2020), plays a facilitating role in reading academic texts. However, there is limited empirical research focusing on novice academic learners' genre awareness acquisition and development in collaborative reading contexts, despite the great benefits associated with such collaborative designs (Johns, 2008; Ye, 2020). Therefore, the current study, employing a qualitative case study approach, investigated how Chinese first-year university students acquired and developed genre awareness in collaborative academic reading. Data from multiple sources were collected, including classroom recordings, students’ written products, and semi-structured interviews, from two focal groups in a university English for Academic Purposes (EAP) reading course with a pedagogical design aimed at collaborative reading of research reports. Drawing on relevant genre and metacognition theories, data analyses revealed that these two groups of Chinese freshmen developed awareness of text structure, academic language, and academic norms, and that the development of the three types of metacognitive genre awareness followed different trajectories over a semester of collaborative academic reading. These findings contribute to our understanding of how novice academic learners become aware of an academic genre and learn it through a collaborative approach.

This commentary attempts to offer a practitioner's perspective on Chan (2019), which looks at how the communication skills of senior managers have changed throughout their careers. The findings of the study suggest that educators in ESP and higher education should prepare future leaders in a more long-term and holistic way so that they can become successful members of the business community. As they take up leadership functions, they will not only need an advanced proficiency of English but will have to use it as a lingua franca in business combined with relationship building, which requires relational language and soft skills. This repertoire will not only empower them but also create a company culture of trust and integrity for all the stakeholders. Educators in ESP and higher education need to prepare their learners to become holistic leaders and to overcome the challenges of workplace communication using English. This commentary discusses how Chan's findings could also be used to inform corporate training/coaching. It also provides tasks intended to support course participants in learning more about themselves, their own values, and their beliefs that are important for long-term relationship building.