English for Specific Purposes最新文献

Despite the wealth of productive ESP/EAP research on promotional genres over the past decade, such research has yet to spotlight Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statements (DEISs) for academic job application purposes in U.S. higher education. To address this gap, this study systematically analyzes the rhetorical features of 80 DEISs and explores the perceptions of faculty administrators, ESP/EAP writing teachers, and novice writers regarding the genre analysis findings.

A step-driven rhetorical move analysis targeting the frequency and distribution of rhetorical moves/steps, as well as patterns in inter- and intra-move sequences within the DEISs, was implemented. The analysis unveiled five reoccurring moves, each consisting of multiple steps, with varying frequencies across different texts. It also identified a mixture of circular, linear, and somewhat disorganized patterns in inter-move sequences.

Furthermore, through subsequent semi-structured interviews with three faculty members and one L2 student writer, the study revealed a consensus among the interviewees regarding the practical value of the genre analytic findings, particularly for ESP/EAP writing instruction and professional assessment. Meanwhile, it highlighted the interviewees’ mixed reactions concerning specific rhetorical features of the DEISs and their collective doubts surrounding the writing and use of DEISs.

Both Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) and Legal English as a Lingua Franca (LELF) users engage with legal contracts regularly. However, contractual language is notoriously complex, due in part to the vocabulary it contains. To help mitigate the challenges related to learning the vocabulary of contracts, this paper introduces a word list of American English contracts called the Contracts Word List (CWL). We describe the compilation of the Corpus of English Business Contracts (CEBC) that represents six major contract types in 48 million words. The extraction of prevalent and specialized words from the CEBC is described, following validation procedures in terms of the word list's reliability and stability. The final word lists contains 684 lemmas along with definitions, parts of speech, illustrative concordance lines, and adjusted frequencies from the full corpus and each major contract sub-type. We provide recommendations to ELF professionals and teachers on using the CWL.

Researchers have indicated that integrating augmented reality into robot-assisted language learning modules could visually represent the students' learning needs and extend their embodied cognition of comprehension. To examine the potential of robots through extended embodied cognition, this quasi-experimental study was conducted in the English for Medical Purposes classrooms at the Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. In the 2022 academic year, 526 male and female participants, whose first language is not English, were selected. Students were sorted into three English proficiency levels: pre-intermediate (n = 176), intermediate (n = 175), and upper-intermediate (n = 175), then semi-randomly divided into three-member teams, subsequently, randomly assigned to control (n = 370) or experimental (n = 156) groups. Students in the control group learned English for Medical Purposes listening and reading through online classrooms, while those in the experimental group learned the skills in robot (augmented reality)-assisted classrooms. In the control and experimental groups, flipped classrooms were conducted under the supervision of the teachers. The primary data sources included formative assessments of the participants' English for Medical Purposes listening and reading, as well as interviews. The findings showed that the participants in the robot's augmented reality group achieved significantly higher results, when compared with robot-only and control groups, in English for Medical Purposes listening and reading in academia and the healthcare fields. The positive perception participants had of robot's augmented reality was clear, based on interview results. The outcomes are discussed in detail.

Using a critical approach in source-based writing remains a primary challenge for many learners, especially undergraduate-level L2 writers. However, studies examining the use of explicit pedagogical approaches to address this challenge in literature review writing instruction to undergraduate L2 writers are still limited. To bridge this gap, based on a measurement of students' (N = 46) writing performance on two literature review writing tasks, this study investigated the effectiveness of using an explicit unit-based approach to promote novice L2 academic writers' criticality in source use in an undergraduate course on research proposal writing. It also explored participants' (N = 55) perceptions of their genre learning experiences using data from individual written reflections and a survey. Textual analysis suggests that the approach facilitated participants' acquisition and successful sequencing of taught criticality enacting discoursal strategies. Learners' self-reports reveal that many appreciated the approach for enhancing their awareness of genre features and of ways to enact criticality. These findings reinforce the potential of explicit pedagogical approaches to promote learners’ source use skills in literature review assignments and contribute to research into how undergraduate novice L2 academic writers respond to genre-based instruction.

The need to promote research and make it visible to various audiences has led to the emergence of various digital genres which seek to draw attention to research publications. Tweetorials, long Twitter threads to communicate complex concepts, are increasingly being used by medical researchers to report on and promote their own published articles and preprints, in the competive context of academic publishing. The main purpose of this article is to examine the strategies employed by researchers to recontextualize scientific discourse in these tweetorials. The analysis of a corpus of 50 biomedical publication-promoting tweetorials has revealed five categories of strategies: strategies to establish the authors’ authority and credibility; strategies to make claims and arguments convincing; strategies to engage the reader, by creating intimacy and dialogic involvement or by attracting their attention to the tweetorials; strategies to facilitate quick processing of information; and strategies to deal with space constraints. The results suggest that the recontextualization strategies used in the composition of these tweetorials are determined by the promotional purpose of the genre, the audience, the affordances and constraints of the medium, and the genre contextual features.

Three Minute Thesis (3MT) presentations have received global popularity, which develop the discursive competence of postgraduate students to communicate their disciplinary research to a wide audience. Despite increased research into aspects of 3MT presentations, little is known about how student presenters react to the audience's knowledge base and recognize the possibility of rejecting their arguments. Therefore, this study focuses on the use of negation in 3MT presentations, suggesting how presenters introduce an alternative positive position into the dialogue, and hence acknowledging it, so as to reject it. We explored the frequencies, forms, and functions of negation at the discourse-semantic level with other appraisal resources in a corpus of 124 3MT presentations across hard and soft disciplines. Our results revealed that not, no, and negative contractions were the most frequent, and notably preferred by soft-disciplinary speakers. We also identified intriguing cross-disciplinary variations in the way negation was used alongside pronounce resources that expressed explicit authorial emphases to co-articulate the rhetorical effect in discourse. Pedagogical implications are raised as to the strengthening of students' rhetorical awareness of linguistic resources to achieve effective academic presentations and wide communication of disciplinary knowledge.

Researchers have acknowledged that English-medium Instruction (EMI) instructors' professional development (PD) is crucial for promoting high-quality student learning outcomes, resulting in an increasing number of EMI PD programs worldwide across a variety of academic fields. Much research on EMI PD has focused on how to support EMI teachers rather than who can serve as teacher developers. This paper presents a glocalized EMI PD program designed collaboratively by experienced ESP teachers and EMI instructors in Taiwan's higher education. The study focused on a cohort from the medical and healthcare faculty, revealing significant improvements in their EMI pedagogical knowledge and self-efficacy. These enhancements were evidenced by increased skills and understanding related to EMI. Additionally, it highlighted the positive outcomes of dispelling EMI misconceptions, increasing awareness of effective language use in teaching, as well as addressing the nuances of EMI pedagogy and self-efficacy. The above findings suggest that ESP teachers can be leveraged as legitimate designers of PD programs to effectively address EMI university instructors' needs, given their expertise in ESP, disciplinary literacy, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Therefore, this study serves as a valuable reference and springboard for the future development of EMI PD programs.

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.