English for Specific Purposes最新文献

This commentary reviews Flowerdew & Wan's 2010 research article, in which a genre analysis of finished audit reports is combined with an ethnographic investigation into the context of their production within the Hong Kong accounting and audit community. The process whereby an audit report is created is observed from start to finish, with elements of both intertextuality and interdiscursivity (as well as L1 use) noted. Meanwhile, a sample of 25 authentic auditors' reports is examined, with examples involving "original" (as opposed to boilerplate) language being subjected to a move structure analysis. It is concluded that the approach embodied by this study is useful in two main ways. It makes it possible to identify a range of competencies that tax accountants and auditors need to be able to write an audit report in a specific workplace and cultural context. However, it also illustrates how combining both information sources and research methods can yield insights that can inform Business English or ESP training.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide rich academic content to learners around the world. However, understanding such content is challenging to second-language learners. Given the importance of vocabulary knowledge to comprehension, this study constructed a 10.2-million-word corpus of MOOCs from four disciplinary areas (engineering, humanities and arts, science and math, and social sciences), and examined (a) the lexical demands of MOOCs, (b) the coverage of general and discipline-specific academic vocabulary lists in MOOCs, and (c) the extent to which these lists helped learners with MOOCs' lexical demands. The results show that – together with proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds, and acronyms – the most frequent 3,000 and 4,000 word families of general English respectively provide 90% and 95% coverage of the corpus, indicating that MOOCs are as lexically challenging as university lectures. Also, because both general and discipline-specific academic vocabulary lists provide high coverage of MOOCs, studying them can lower students' learning burdens and help them achieve higher coverage of MOOCs than learning words by frequency. Lastly, based on learners’ existing vocabulary knowledge and target disciplines, this study provides pedagogical recommendations to teachers on how to employ general and discipline-specific academic word lists as vocabulary support for EAP students.

Visuals (e.g., figures) are prevalent in academic writing across disciplines, and they are usually accompanied by commentaries that summarize and/or interpret the information they contain. Commentaries on visuals have not yet been studied in terms of their rhetorical and phraseological features, and insights into these features could help novice academic writers integrate such commentaries more effectively. To address the gap, this study examined and reported on frequently employed rhetorical functions and phrase-frames for commentaries on visuals, based on a corpus of such commentaries extracted from 100 social science research reports. Specifically, the corpus was first manually annotated using a rhetorical function framework developed based on previous studies. Five- to seven-gram phrase-frames were also automatically extracted based on corpus statistics and then manually scrutinized to generate a pedagogically useful list. The finalized 169 phrase-frames were then linked to the rhetorical functions based on their occurrences and sorted accordingly in the final list. Under each rhetorical function, the phrase-frames were further categorized into specialized, semi-specialized, and non-specialized types, following previous studies. Pedagogical and empirical implications of the phrase-frame list for English for specific purposes programs are discussed.

This study explores the changes in perceptions of transitional challenges faced by learners studying Chemistry through English-medium instruction (EMI) at a university in Japan over one academic semester. The research investigates the relationship between students’ English proficiency, academic performance, and their perception of transitional challenges. The study involves 27 students from an introductory Chemistry course and adopts a mixed-methods approach. The quantitative analysis utilises IELTS scores, as well as pre-and post-content tests, to examine the relationship between language proficiency and academic performance. Complementing these findings, the qualitative analysis provides insights from semi-structured interviews conducted at the start and end of a 12-week semester. These interviews offer an in-depth look into the individual transition processes of six purposefully selected students who represent a range of backgrounds and varying degrees of success in EMI, including both international and local students. The findings indicate that English proficiency alone does not guarantee a successful transition into EMI. Other factors play crucial roles in the rate and extent to which students overcome transitional challenges. The study recognises the need for ongoing support to help students navigate persistent transitional challenges in EMI. Implications are discussed regarding language support, EMI curriculum planning, and future research directions.

Despite a long history of citation research, its focus has been on the linguistic and rhetorical characteristics of citations rather than their semantic nature. Using a move-based approach grounded in the CARS model (Swales, 1990), this paper studies the sorts of source ideas cited in different parts of literature reviews (LR) of Information Systems research articles following the design science research (DSR) and interpretivist research (IR) paradigms. Findings reveal three types of epistemically-oriented semantic content – theoretical, research, and methodological – and one type that is non-epistemically-framed, which vary quantitatively and qualitatively between the DSR and IR LRs. For example, both types of LRs cite more often in Move 1 Establishing a territory than in Moves 2 and 3 Establishing a niche and Occupying the niche, with theoretical terminologies, definitions, propositions being referred to more frequently in the IR writing than in the DSR writing. On the other hand, citations in the DSR writing often display prescriptive propositions, design concepts, artefacts, and methods which are absent from the IR writing. These findings not only help us better understand how citation is shaped and constrained by rhetorical moves and research paradigms but also provide implications for the teaching of citation content.

As the most important journal for ESP research, The ESP Journal/English for Specific Purposes (ESPJ) is now more than 40 years old, having been launched in 1980. With source data from 705 articles published between 1980 and 2019 in ESPJ, we set out to trace the development of the journal in terms of the most frequently explored topics, the most highly cited ESPJ articles and the references of ESPJ articles, plus the changes in contributors with regard to countries/regions. The topic analyses highlight two broad trends in ESPJ over four decades. The first trend is the significantly increased focus on the analyses of target language varieties, which has grown in both research scope and depth. The second trend appears to be a shift from the coverage of a wide range of teaching issues in the 1980s to the primacy of writing and literacy since the 2000s. Given that the ability to use the target language variety to communicate effectively in writing is a main objective for the majority of ESP learners, ESPJ has been playing a leading role in the field by focusing more on issues central to this aspect of ESP teaching.

Evans (2013) analyzed the nature and frequency of Hong Kong professionals' workplace presentations as well as the challenges they faced when delivering these presentations. This commentary analyzes the pedagogical significance of Evans’ (2013) findings, recommends relevant classroom activities, and suggests directions for future research. Specifically, the commentary offers pedagogical activities to address each main challenge Evans (2013) identified from a robust needs analysis: “engaging the interest of the audience through the selection of relevant content, handling questions spontaneously and authoritatively, communicating in a natural spoken style, and integrating clearly designed slides into the flow of a presentation” (p. 205). As an initial step to narrowing the research-pedagogy gap which exists in business English, the commentary underscores the importance of a robust needs analysis which triangulates quantitative and qualitative data from multiple sources to identify learner needs. To address these needs, practitioners can implement research-informed activities using authentic materials. Since some of the challenges identified by Evans (2013) have been discussed in other studies about oral presentations and are likely shared by learners in other contexts, it is hoped that the pedagogical activities targeting these challenges offer practitioners new ways to help learners hone the skills needed to excel at workplace presentations.