English for Specific Purposes最新文献

Aviation English (AE) represents a noteworthy area of investigation within the realm of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), aimed at fostering English language competency among aspiring pilots. In this study, a simulation-based aviation English course was designed and implemented for improved learning gains. The present study took place at a tertiary educational institution, focusing on the analysis of AE vocabulary development, the readback performance of student pilots, and the examination of participants' perceptions of simulation-based training. Employing a mixed-methods sequential explanatory research design, data were gathered from 21 ab-initio pilots enrolled in the Pilotage Training program. The quantitative results showed that participants significantly improved their readback performance and AE vocabulary knowledge over the course of a semester. With regard to the qualitative results, student pilots overall perceived the simulation-based training as an innovative and effective method. The present study, therefore, constitutes a notable advancement in the AE research domain by documenting, for the first time, the application of simulation-based training in the aviation context. Moreover, the study offers insights into the implications for ESP practitioners and stakeholders in the aviation sector, along with recommendations for future research, which are delineated in the study's conclusion.

In light of globalization and international travel, English plays a predominant role in the tourism and hospitality industries. Hence, effective communication in English becomes a requisite skill for Food and Beverage (F&B) employees, especially in luxury resorts. Nonetheless, there has been limited research into the linguistic needs of these employees. This preliminary study explored the English language needs and problems encountered by F&B staff at a 5-star resort in Vietnam in a post-pandemic context. Data included two sets of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews of full-time F&B employees and related stakeholders. In addition, an analysis of Tripadvisor reviews was utilized to understand customers’ opinions about the employees’ English abilities. The findings showed that the F&B employees perform various tasks requiring four English skills in their daily work. Regarding problems, these employees considered listening and writing to be the most difficult skills. Also, the F&B employees expected an ESP course prioritizing speaking and listening skills to mitigate the lack of exposure to English due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its concomitant travel restrictions. Based on the findings, practical course syllabi and pedagogical implications for related ESP courses were developed.

Aviation English (AE), a specialized register of English, prioritizes precision, brevity and clarity to maximize aviation safety. While there has been a growing focus within the linguistics community on AE training and assessment since the release of a set of standards and recommended practices, its linguistic properties remain comparatively underexplored. Drawing upon Biber's (1988) multi-dimensional (MD) analysis framework, the present study conducted a corpus-based comparative MD analysis to investigate the multi-dimensional linguistic profile of AE vs. casual conversational English (CE) and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to extract and interpret the co-occurring linguistic features of routine AE and non-routine AE. The comparative MD analysis shows that AE exhibits more information condensation, less authorial stance and technicality, and fewer features of online information elaboration compared to CE. The EFA shows variations in the linguistic and textual composition of the two sub-registers of AE across two dimensions. Non-routine AE demonstrates a present-focused, viewpoint/intention-oriented approach, involving higher levels of integrative information flow compared to routine AE. Routine AE is characterized by a higher degree of information condensation and is marked by a planned, procedural, and intensive use of standard phraseology. Some pedagogical implications are then proposed for enhancing AE training to cultivate pilots' and air traffic controllers' language competence for precise, unambiguous communication tailored to both routine and non-routine operational contexts.

This situated case study focuses on two international doctoral students' academic socialization processes in conference presentation preparation sessions in an engineering research team at a university located in the United States. Language socialization theory (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) and dramaturgical theory (Goffman, 1959) were utilized as conceptual lenses to examine the students' academic socialization processes. Based on ethnographic observations, videotaping of team interactions, and semi-structured interviews, the study focused on the research team's use of corrective feedback as the unit of analysis. The findings showed that the research team socialized the students into specific ways of using language on PowerPoint slides, professional vision, and oral conference performance. The study contributes to existing research by discussing 1) how academic socialization is inextricably linked with various competencies and thus is a multifaceted process, and 2) the systematic nature of academic discourse socialization in communities of practice which are located at the intersections of professional and academic interaction.

The study of rhetorical devices and how corporate leaders organise the texts and convey attitudes to stakeholders in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports has become an important research area in recent years. A relatively neglected means of rhetorical expressions, however, is metadiscursive nouns. This study investigates the use of metadiscursive nouns in a 0.5-million-word self-built corpus of the US and Chinese CEO letters in CSR reports to reveal cross-cultural variations. The results show that the interactive metadiscursive nouns are twice as frequent in the US discourse as in the Chinese discourse, demonstrating greater efforts invested in cohesion by the US companies. This difference can be attributed to the writer-responsible rhetoric in the West and the reader-responsible conventions in China. The interactional metadiscursive nouns in the US discourse occur twice as frequently as in the Chinese counterpart, suggesting greater exertion of nominal stance by the US companies. This discrepancy mainly arises from the high- and low-context variations between the US and China. This study sheds new insights on metadiscursive nouns as rhetorical resources in cross-cultural CSR communication and provides implications for ESP practitioners to use them as a means of conceptualising writer–reader interaction in corporate communication.

In the past, whereas much attention has been paid to exploring doctoral dissertation writing as a whole or the move analysis of results section, there is a dearth of studies examining how the problems keep posing for doctoral EFL students in writing such a section. The current study focused on students' problems when they write the results section of their dissertations in the fields of education and chemistry, and investigated the degree to which students' understanding was in line with that of their supervisors through semi-structured interviews with ten pairs of supervisors and students. The results showed that (1) disciplinary differences played an important role in writing the results section; (2) supervisors and students in the same discipline understood the purposes of writing the results section to a certain extent, but the overall result varied in different disciplines; (3) there was a lack of agreement between supervisors and students regarding the reasons for the students' problems, especially in the field of chemistry; and (4) students, regardless of discipline, tended to attribute their problems to limited language proficiency while their supervisors provided reasons other than that. In light of the findings, the pedagogical implications for writing instruction are discussed.

Thesis writing (used here as an umbrella term to cover both master's and doctoral postgraduate-level writing) is a high-stakes genre for postgraduate students. This important student genre has been well-researched from a corpus-based perspective. Corpora of theses and also research articles have been used for data-driven learning (DDL) of this key genre. The purpose of this article is to critically examine key DDL initiatives, some of which take a ‘research into practice’ orientation. Importantly, the discussion is framed around the notion of ‘specificity’ in the context of needs analysis, and whether the initiatives take a wide-angle, narrow-angle or move from a wide-angle to a narrow angle approach. Accounts which focus on DIY (do-it-yourself) mini-corpus compilation and use by students are also reviewed. The final section of the article presents a critique of current pedagogic applications, taking a closer look at the issue of ‘specificity’ within the wider context of needs analysis and mapping out areas for future consideration. It is suggested that an ethnographic perspective may be particularly useful for conceptualising specificity relating to students' present situation needs. The article also considers the impact of AI/ChatGPT on future corpus-based pedagogy of thesis writing.

Scholars in the medical field have described medical writing as particularly challenging and have called for instructional support for both novice writers and L2-English medical scholars. One of the main challenges is that there exist conventionalized terms that express a wide range of concepts, and any inappropriate use of such terms can lead to miscommunication with real consequences for practitioners, researchers, and the public. Therefore, the investigations of such conventionalized expressions could constitute a good starting point in addressing some of the challenges in medical writing. Thus, the present study investigates the use of multiword collocations (a type of register-specific word combinations) in medical research articles and the medical case reports, using two corpora of over a million words, representative of the two registers. The subsequent structural and functional analyses revealed that the majority of multiword collocations in both registers consisted of complex noun phrases mostly formed through noun premodifications (e.g., fine needle aspiration, fluorescence in situ hybridization, single nucleotide polymorphisms). The identified sequences served distinct discourse functions that reflect the differences in the specific communicative functions of the two registers. Some pedagogical applications are suggested in this paper.