English for Specific Purposes最新文献

In many highly heterogenous hospitality and tourism (HT) settings around the world, English is used to mediate hospitality service encounters. However, little is known about how front-desk staff are able to effectively communicate with international guests of diverse linguacultural backgrounds to deliver quality service. This study investigates the use of communications strategies by Thai front-desk staff that is characterized by increased explicitness in their interactions in English as a lingua franca (ELF) with international tourists. The data comprise 15 h of authentic interactions recorded at three sites: a tour service counter, an airport information counter, and a hotel front office. Using conversation analytic procedures, the analysis reveals the staff's orientation to explicitness: they repeat key information multiple times to increase its prominence, use explication, circumlocution, and self-reformulation to clarify keywords and repair ongoing utterances to address potential ambiguity. In the absence of overt displays of non/misunderstanding, the staff's use of multiple explicitness strategies in these short, routine exchanges points to explicitness as a defining feature of ELF HT service encounters. The findings of this study have implications for ESP course development in HT where awareness raising and practice in the use of explicitness strategies should be incorporated.

With the growing popularity of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) nursing courses worldwide, considerable work has gone to identifying the English language learning needs of nurses and nursing students, with their perceptions well documented. However, needs analyses grounded in students' communicative behaviors in performing nursing tasks are still in their fledging stage. This study offers an ethnographic discourse analytical account of role-play conversations collected from 100 college nursing students in China. It explores nursing students' communicative practices by identifying the communication patterns that students adopt in a simulated scenario of giving a patient an injection. Findings show students' awareness of patients’ concern and preferences, and their informational skills such as giving instructions, negotiating treatment options, and explaining medical procedures. Yet students demonstrate a great reliance on prescribed phraseology, struggling to adjust their nursing plan based on differing patient needs. This study sheds light on the specificity of ESP nursing courses and the challenges complicated by the changing nature of the global healthcare landscape, where patient-centered care is prioritized. It also provides implications for ESP curriculum development and highlights the importance of learner-centered tailor-made language instruction.

While lecturers' teaching practices continue to be a focal point of English-medium Instruction (EMI) research, contrastive studies between EMI and L1 lectures remain extremely scarce. The present study addresses this research gap by analyzing five sets of matching L1 and English-medium lectures given in different disciplines at three Italian universities. Each set of lectures is given by the same lecturer, about the same topic. Thus, the study, closely examines the lectures’ content in order to investigate which changes, if any, accompany the linguistic shift from L1 to English-medium teaching. The investigation focuses mainly on quantity and organization of content; nonetheless, other variables (such as speech rate, questions, language alternation), which can play a relevant role towards the organization of the lecture, are also considered. The analysis reveals a high correspondence of the core topics addressed in the lecturers; however, significant differences in the way such knowledge is conveyed are also observed. Such differences are grouped into three categories: differences in content quantity, differences in content selection and differences in rhetorical devices used.

CEO statements from CSR (corporate social responsibility) reports serve as an important channel to promote the positive image of a company. It is critical for CEOs to take a positive stance to address the company's strategy to stakeholders. This paper examines grammatical stance constructions that US and Chinese Global Fortune 500 companies employed for establishing a responsible image in CEO statements. Based on 50 US and 50 Chinese CEO statements, the present paper investigates how CEOs use attitudinal, epistemic, and modality stance constructions to introduce their strategies for social responsibility. The findings of the study show that US CEO statements use significantly more attitudinal and epistemic stance constructions than Chinese CEO statements, indicating an affective stance taken by US CEOs. In addition, Chinese CEOs employ stance strategies focusing more on the companies' competence of environmental protection and self-improvement that conforms to the government policy. By contrast, US CEOs tend to actively present CSR participation in a wider range of social benevolence activities. The present study thus contributes to the increasing scholarly attention to CSR as well as to the understanding of different institutional practice across cultures. The study also provides implications for teaching and learning business writing and communication.

This empirical study explores some of the effects of coloniality on social sciences research writing and publishing in the Arab World. The study investigates some aspects of the English for Research Publishing Purposes (ERPP) practices of Arabic-speaking academics who have English as an additional language (EAL) and Native English-speaking (NES) academics who write and publish about issues pertaining to the Arab World, from the Arab World. Employing qualitative interviews, this study examines the accounts of 11 EAL and 11 NES scholars in social sciences (SS) and science, technology, engineering and mathematic (STEM) disciplines about their ERPP practices. The study answers critical questions about the ERPP challenges EAL and NES academics face when writing about their local issues. The study's findings suggest that SS academics face significant challenges with epistemological dependency, discouraging border thinking, and managing the demands of disciplinary writing conventions. The study's accounts, from the Arab World, suggest how embracing border thinkers, who employ local and/or Western epistemic frameworks develops academic research and knowledge construction. The study's findings contribute essential considerations about the necessity of critically approaching the buzzing conversation on decolonization in ESP and ERPP scholarship by recognizing the experiences of EAL and NES scholars with decoloniality.

Linguistic expressions of interest as emotive responses are not uncommon in academic discourse but have hardly attracted any research attention. This paper reports on a study designed to examine how the deployment of such expressions in academic writing is mediated by an academic author's disciplinary background and gender. Drawing on a semantic frame developed for interest markers found in a corpus of 640 research articles sampled from four disciplines, corpus-based quantitative analyses were conducted on the incidence of the various elements of the Interest frame. Text-based interviews were also conducted with 16 disciplinary informants to explore considerations behind their use of interest markers. The corpus analyses found that although discipline and gender did not reliably predict academic authors' overall use of interest markers, they were robust predictors of several frame elements. The analyses of the interview data revealed that the observed quantitative differences were related to disciplinary knowledge-making practices, knowledge/knower epistemological orientations prevailing in the disciplines, gender-preferential discursive practices and an author's relative status in academia.

Previous lexical bundle research has stimulated heated discussions on disciplinary variations and disciplinary specificity-generality spectrum. The current study explores whether (and how) bundle extraction criteria (i.e. frequency, dispersion, and bundle length) may affect the conclusions on disciplinary variations and specificity-generality. Focusing on eight disciplines, it used an 11-million corpus of academic journal articles with a balanced design (the same number of texts and similar average text length for each subcorpus). The results indicated a clear picture of disciplinary variations and a strong tendency towards disciplinary specificity. More importantly, the results suggested that different methodological criteria played an important part, especially concerning the analysis of disciplinary specificity or generality. The choice of ‘4-word’ bundles over ‘3-word’ bundles, in particular, would tend to be associated with a result of a higher degree of disciplinary specificity. Regarding disciplinary variations, it was found that the effect from different choices of bundle extraction criteria was relatively smaller. Only the choice on different dispersion requirements could predict the significant differences between certain disciplines. These findings provide support for disciplinary variations and new perspectives on the disciplinary specificity-generality debate.

Semi-technical vocabulary, a type of vocabulary with both a technical and non-technical meaning (e.g., colon: part of the large intestine; punctuation mark), is an area of controversy owing to disagreement over its definition and characteristics. While it is widely held that learning technical vocabulary is critical for learners of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), several studies have also focused on semi-technical vocabulary because these words often have multiple meanings, depending on the context, and may therefore be harder to learn and understand than purely technical words. This study aims to revisit semi-technical vocabulary in medicine to address these controversial issues by re-evaluating a 595 semi-technical medical word list developed by Hsu (2013). A core meaning-based analysis identified 302 potentially confusing semi-technical medical words. These are mostly mid-frequency words; some are academic and low-frequency words. The findings also revealed pedagogic challenges associated with word form frequency-based lists deserving of further research.

Online painting exhibition overviews (OPEOs) on websites of art museums and galleries not only promote on-site exhibitions, but also inform and educate the public who might have a limited background in art. Embedding both informational and promotional discourses, the OPEO displays rhetorical hybridization, which sets it apart from predominantly univocal genres like art history texts or traditional advertisements. In line with the global increase in the number of art venues, there is a greater demand for art professionals equipped with the written English communication skills necessary to produce OPEOs. This paper aims to identify the rhetorical moves and key lexico-grammatical features in the previously underexplored genre of OPEOs through the analysis of a 35,175- word corpus of 120 texts obtained from the websites of 20 highly reputed art museums in the UK and the US. The move analysis reveals five moves and nine steps, which can be categorized into two key discourse types: promotional and informational, according to their communicative functions. Among these, Move 2, ‘justifying the exhibition’, is highly significant as an obligatory move, and is most commonly recycled across the corpus. The study presents recommendations for ESP pedagogies in raising writers' awareness of the generic features of OPEOs.