English for Specific Purposes最新文献

This commentary on "Just wanna give you guys a bit of an update": Insider perspectives on business presentations in Hong Kong (2013) explores the significance of the paper written by Stephen Evans, its influence on the study of business English, and its main contributions to business communication and presentations, including a number of highlights for future research projects.

This paper provides an overview of research results by Pamela Rogerson-Revell in ‘Participation and performance in international business meetings’ (2008). The role of English as a lingua franca and the challenges of participants in a specific context of international meetings is briefly described.

A co-author comments on their previously published article on the writing of audit reports in Hong Kong. A combination of linguistic and contextual approaches to genre analysis can yield more insightful findings than a single approach. An expert informant can provide a further level of triangulation in genre analysis. The production of audit reports is a collaborative operation. Hong Kong auditors in the study make great use of templates to write their texts. Individual writing is needed for high stakes part of the reports. Pedagogical implications of the study are highlighted.

This commentary attempts to offer a practitioner's perspective on what is multicommunication today and how it might be addressed in the classroom to assist in future-proofing the learners' multi-communicating skills.

How limitations are acknowledged and discussed has a profound impact on the extent the research is evaluated and accepted by its intended readers. However, little attention has been drawn to the presentation of limitations in the EAP literature. This study seeks to remedy the oversight by exploring how this discursive practice is mediated by metadiscourse, how limitations are rhetorically contextualized and how much these rhetorical investments differ between PhD dissertations and research articles in applied linguistics. A corpus-based analysis of 100 PhD dissertations and 200 published articles in applied linguistics shows that PhD dissertation writers make more use of frame markers but less use of code glosses, evidentials, and hedges in the acknowledgment of limitations than published writers do in limitations steps. It is also found that limitations pertaining to the overall quality of research and writers’ competence are far more often self-reported in PhD dissertations than in research articles, and PhD dissertation writers tend to attribute the limitations to situational constraints in research context and unmanageable complexity of research subjects. The results support the two-genre perspective (El-Dakhs, 2018; Kawase, 2015) and demonstrate that discussing limitations is a strategically self-critical but promotional effort in conclusion sections.

The idea for this article owes much to the work of Vijay Bhatia who at the time was working just up the road from me in Hong Kong. I was fortunate to be able to hear firsthand the typology he had developed to classify forms of intertextuality. Whenever I come across an area of applied linguistics that is new to me, I am eager to apply it to my own data. This both helps me to better understand it and analyse how it is realised. My article was a first attempt to quantify the forms of intertextuality found in two corpora of email discourse flows that I had collected from two professionals working in different industries in Hong Kong, merchandising and information technology. I made adjustments to Bhatia’s typology which are detailed in the paper and set about identifying the forms of intertextuality. Given that all texts are intertextual, there was nothing surprising about finding forms of intertextuality in every email. What was of significance was that the quantities of the different forms varied across the two professionals due to the nature of their work suggesting that patterns of use are profession-specific.

Academic writing is often referred to as “formal,” but the teaching and assessment of formality can be challenging as formality has been conceptualized in many ways. The goal of this study is to explore the elusive construct of formality in the context of academic writing, especially with regard to what formality means to academic writing instructors. We used instructors’ perceptions of formality (i) to identify relationships between the use of linguistic features in academic texts and perceptions of formality and (ii) to determine the extent to which the situational characteristics of texts (e.g., differences in audience, purpose, and discipline) are related to perceptions of formality. Specifically, we asked 72 academic writing instructors to rate the formality level of 60 short academic text excerpts on a five-point scale. The excerpts were sampled from two publication types (university textbooks, journal articles) in three disciplines (psychology, biology, history). Overall, the results indicate that perceptions of formality can be explained by both linguistic features and situational characteristics. As linguistic features and situational characteristics are intertwined, differences in perceptions of formality seem to be functionally motivated. Implications for the teaching of academic writing are discussed.

The study reported in Gimenez's (2014) article investigated multi-communication (MC) practices at four multinationals based in London, UK. Following previous studies, the article defined MC as “the act of holding multiple conversations at the same time” (Gimenez, 2014: 2), expanding the coverage of the term ‘conversation’ to include not only face-to-face but also electronically mediated communication (e.g., talk over the telephone, email, instant messaging [IM]). The study also expanded on previous research by examining the underpinning role of digital media in workplace interactions, and revealed a set of interactional skills, such as ‘thematic threading’, ‘presence allocation’, ‘media packaging’ and ‘audience profiling’, needed to communicate effectively in the contemporary workplace. It also revealed a preference for efficiency rather than effectiveness, highlighting that efficiency “has become a more relevant feature of business communication in today's highly technicalised workplaces” (p. 3). Based on its findings, the article suggested applications for the business English (BE) class, featuring a number of technology-enhanced tasks that aim at helping students to feel prepared for the communication demands of the contemporary workplace.

A key feature of scientific writing is the use of shell noun phrases to turn human experiences into abstract entities. This paper reports on a diachronic study of shell noun phrases in 120 chemical engineering research articles over a span of 40 years, focusing on their lexico-grammatical patterns, functional categories and alternative expressions. A corpus-based analysis revealed a significant decline of cataphoric shell noun constructions, a substantial decline in discourse and cognition shell noun phrases and concomitant changes in the frequencies of alternative constructions (i.e., reporting clauses). These observed patterns of shell noun use can be explained by the joint influences of a general move toward greater authorial visibility in the academic writing of hard disciplines, disciplinary developments specific to chemical engineering, the informalization of academic discourse in response to the perceived need for knowledge and identity negotiation, and the functional interrelationships among various linguistic resources. They demonstrate that diachronic changes to academic writing are contextually embedded and respond to discipline-internal developments, shifting epistemologies, larger social changes, and the versatility of linguistic resources.