English for Specific Purposes最新文献

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.

Authors’ rebuttal letters (ARLs) in response to journal reviewers critically affect whether a paper is accepted or rejected. However, the genre is traditionally “occluded” from the public view, and its linguistic or rhetorical features are seldom examined in the literature. Using Hyland’s (2005) model, this study analyzes stance markers, i.e., expressions of the speaker’s attitudes towards or commitment concerning a proposition, in 50 ARLs from five high-impact Nature Portfolio journals, which started publishing ARLs as supplements to manuscripts in 2020. The analysis shows that authors’ stance deployment differs markedly between different sections of the ARL, i.e., Opening Statement, Point-by-Point Response, Additional Changes, and Closing Remarks. Attitude markers, boosters, and self-mentions are more frequent in ARLs than in research articles, serving to advocate the paper, highlight improvements, and show gratitude towards reviewers. Only 6 % ARLs fully accommodate all reviewer suggestions. When rejecting a criticism, authors rarely express total disagreement with reviewers, choosing instead to hedge the No Revision claims, use expressions of agreement and gratitude as buffers, and boost positive aspects of the paper. Findings of this study may be of interest to those who seek a better understanding of the language of ARLs, including ESP teachers and novice researchers.

As scholarly communication becomes more multimodal in nature, research articles embrace semiotic resources in appended genres such as the graphical abstract (GA). As an established genre in Chemistry research articles, GAs visually remediate chemical processes or research niche. However, this genre still remains in a peripheral area of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses as ESP practitioners mainly focus on textual modes. With limited opportunities to compose GAs, students foster genre remediation skills that are limited to textual genres only, ignoring the potential of reading-to-design skills. Upon student composition and critical reflections on GAs, as well as qualitative and quantitative data collection from a survey and interview involving professors, young researchers (YRs) and students, this paper examines rhetorical functions as well as image and text relations, while throwing some light on skills and challenges involved when GA composition is intentionally embedded in an ESP course, and discusses ensuing pedagogical implications.

Recent critical inquiries in metadiscourse research call into question the functional inadequacy of a word-based lexical approach. To account more fully the functional affordances of metadiscoursal features in academic writing, this paper examines the Interactional Metadiscourse, namely hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mentions based on a 2.64-million-word corpus of L1-English expert and L1-Chinese student writing in Agricultural Science. Through an intra-generic lens, we found a significant effect of part-genre on the use of all four target categories for both writer groups; and L1-English experts employed significantly more hedges than L2 students while L2 students used significantly more boosters and attitude markers. Functionally, both groups shared a largely similar deployment of functional subtypes across part-genres with L1-English experts outperforming L2 students only in one function: ‘stating a goal or purpose’ in self-mentions. Subsequent qualitative discourse-functional analyses at part-genre level between two writer groups explained some student-produced discipline-inappropriate metadiscoursal choices. This paper concludes with resources for a rigorous coding development, and implications for teaching metadiscourse to disciplinary writers with an emphasis on using available discipline-specific corpora to understand how functional taxonomizations of IM interface with socio-rhetorical contexts in disciplinary writing.

While pre-service teachers’ beliefs about different dimensions of English language teaching have been widely researched, little is known about their beliefs related to English for Specific Purposes (ESP). This article reports on three Vietnamese pre-service teachers’ beliefs about ESP teaching, captured over a six-month period. Data from semi-structured interviews, stimulated recall interviews, observations, and reflective journals were collected at two critical points in the teacher education programme: the methodology course and the practicum. The findings add fresh insights into pre-service teachers’ beliefs, particularly how these beliefs may change over time. The three case studies presented in this paper illustrate how participants developed their beliefs. The six belief changes identified are then discussed in terms of levels (from no to significant change) and the underlying motives. Implications are also discussed for teacher educators in designing or improving teacher education programmes and for researchers interested in pre-service teachers’ belief change.

Taking Hyland’s (2010) proximity as its conceptual orientation and lexical bundles as its analytical lens, the present study explores the extent to which phraseological configurations in TED talks encode the five facets of proximity. Adopting a corpus-informed discourse analytical approach to lexical bundles (frequently occurring four-word sequences in text), we aim to describe the popularizing features TED talks present. Lexical bundles are identified and extracted from a corpus of 500 TED talks totaling about 1.1 million words, followed by an analysis of their indexicality related to proximity. This study reveals that, in addition to communicating the lay version of knowledge, TED talks are devoted to both a democratic means of communication by facilitating audience comprehension and mitigating speaker-audience asymmetry and to a promotional agenda not dissimilar to that of advertising. These characteristics allow for movement between proximity of commitment and proximity of membership. This study demonstrates the indexical function of lexical bundles, expanding on their role as a discovery tool for obtaining a generic profile of a particular genre.

Medical eponyms can sometimes function as false friends, endangering communication. We demonstrate this by examining a selection of 50 medical phenomena in 8 languages for which eponyms, simple or complex ones, exist. The vast majority of medical eponyms are true friends. However, we have detected several types of false friends. Eponymic false friends in medical terminology may arise through clipping or truncation of the appellative or of a complex eponymic core. False friends may also come into existence through the confusion caused by auto-hyponymy. Finally, in addition to the choice between eponymic cores of variable complexity, there may also be alternatives that form a set of synonyms. Translation of the latter type of term may result in unwarranted introduction of a pseudo-eponym. This means that terminological variation, synonymy and homonymy—the notorious undesirables in terminology—are the hotbed of the majority of problems that may be described as false–friend relationship. We also suggest some pedagogical strategies that may help mitigate the problem of false friends in MELF contexts. These are based on recent insights from SLA and cognitively oriented research on the phenomenon of false friends, i.e., they integrate affective, cognitive and conative aspects of learning.

Article reviews play a pivotal role in fostering students’ critical evaluation and critical thinking skills. News & Views (N&V) articles published in Nature journals are one prominent example of article reviews and serve as excellent models for students to learn and refine their skills in writing article reviews. However, there is limited research on the rhetorical features of N&V articles, especially in terms of textual organization across different disciplines. To address this gap, three corpora were compiled for the present study, representing the disciplinary groups of natural sciences (NS), social sciences (SS), and technology and engineering (TE). Each corpus was comprised of 30 N&V texts from its respective disciplinary group. Using a self-developed coding framework building on previous research, we coded the move and step of each text in the corpora. The coding data were compared and analyzed to uncover the distinguishing textual features of the three disciplinary groups. The analysis revealed that the variations were predominantly at the step level. N&V articles of NS and SS shared most of the moves and steps, but N&Vs in TE exhibited unique stylistic characteristics. These findings hold significant implications for training and teaching article review writing, particularly in relation to disciplinary contexts.