The effectiveness of preparing English language learners for workplace technical writing in various fields (e.g. engineering, business), has been widely contested by both social learning theories and research investigating university–workplace transition of novice employees. In this paper, we present a needs analysis conducted in the workplace that addressed socio-contextual elements with the understanding

Teaching materials developed in-house are commonly used in EAP courses; however, research on their linguistic content, which can have important pedagogical implications, is scarce. This study examines the occurrence and repetition of general academic vocabulary, operationalised as the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014), in the printed teaching materials developed in-house and used

With the rise of English as the language of global communication, English is increasingly being adopted as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) in countries where it is not the first language. When implementing EMI, a primary concern is students' lack of English proficiency and the impact this has on teaching content (Bradford, 2016; Hu & Lei, 2014; Kim, Kim & Kweon, 2018; Macaro et al., 2018). One country

This study accounts for the results obtained from a teaching innovation project called SubESPSKills (Subtitling tasks in the English for Specific Purposes class to improve written production skills) with a control and experimental group of undergraduates taking a course on Business English. The study was conducted during the 2018–2019 academic year at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Among

This paper studies engagement in English-medium research articles across two disciplines, linguistics and economics, and two linguacultural backgrounds, Anglophone and Czech, in order to explore how disciplinary and linguacultural considerations affect the choice, frequency and distribution of engagement markers in the construal of persuasive academic discourse. The contrastive analysis applying Hyland

This paper outlines a project involving the construction of a corpus-based list which provides a large-scale selection of multi-word units that occur in academic English. Using the most up-to-date, reliable methods, the goal was to produce a large-scale resource which could either be studied directly or used as a reference for practitioners to create further resources. The paper details the procedures

This article reports a corpus-aided analysis of stance adverbs within published judicial opinions from the 12 geographically-apportioned districts of the United States (US) Federal Courts of Appeals. The study first analyzes stance adverbs previously investigated in US Supreme Court decisions in order to more comprehensively explore these interactional features across multiple levels of the judicial

Post-secondary students across the curriculum are commonly required to integrate source text material into their academic writing. While writing from multiple sources occurs frequently in higher education (Rosenfeld et al., 2001) and is a cognitively demanding task, few studies have investigated the types of source integration used by L1 and L2 writers entering post-secondary, first-year composition

The artist's statement is a unique genre that provides a written description of an artist's creative work. Usually produced by the artists themselves, the artist's statement accompanies exhibitions, funding applications, or more recently the work presented on an artist's website. In the educational context, it provides important support for the assessment of student work. In order to find out more

In this paper we focus on teachers' use of discourse functions as transmitters and builders of content knowledge in the context of English-medium instruction (EMI) at the university level. Couched within the construct of Cognitive Discourse Function (CDF) (Dalton-Puffer, 2016), we analyze 6 two-hour lessons delivered by three lecturers in history. In line with the competences set out by the Spanish

Studies on author identity and relations in academic writing have mostly focused on research articles and relatively few studies have attended to the construction of identity in texts where there is a more obvious unequal relationship between author and reader. This paper reports on a study of interpersonal relationships constructed in an occluded genre, the manuscript review, and compares writer–reader

Genre analysis has provided many insights into the structure of research articles, but engineering articles have often been grouped with the hard sciences, obscuring their distinctive features. This study reports the development of a research-based curriculum for engineering writing in an English as a lingua franca context, including a published textbook and ancillary materials, during eight years

Nowadays, it is very difficult to find pure genres in the real world of discourse. Professional writers often appropriate and exploit generic resources to invade other genres in discourse construction in order to achieve social and private intentions. One of the most dominant genres that have invaded other genres is the promotional genre. However, little research has investigated this genre from an

Empirical research writing is one of the primary means of disseminating knowledge in academia. It is through this particular form of knowledge dissemination that a rich body of scientific knowledge about a given phenomenon is accumulated. This paper explores patterns of variation in the language of this specific sub-register of academic writing, as reflected in the use of words in different sections

Randomised controlled trials are considered the gold standard for assessing the effectiveness of treatments. Since the 1990s, there have been growing concerns about the objectivity of RCT reporting, leading to the creation of The Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Statement. Although this document provides a medical perspective on the reporting requirements, it does not provide explicit

Despite the growth of interest in the phenomenon of shell-nounhood in academic discourse, research has been primarily concerned with published research articles. This contrasts with the limited attention that it has received in the study of disciplinary student writing. This study explores discipline specificity in student writing through an in-depth multifaceted analysis of two frequent shell nouns

The case analysis, a prominent genre within business administration and information systems (IS) programs, is challenging for students because of competing demands to perform both academic/learner and professional/mock-consultant roles. We examine case analysis student writing that sits in the middle of the pedagogical to professional continuum (Gardner, 2012), where the academic-professional tension

This study contributes to the emerging line of research on the linguistic realizations of rhetorical functions in disciplinary writing by presenting a list of phrase-frames identified from the Corpus of Social Science Research Article Introductions (COSSRAI) aligned with the rhetorical move-steps that they occurred in. COSSRAI contains the introduction sections of 600 research articles published in

The business world is fast entering a virtual environment where technology is applied in all areas to improve efficiency. For example, web-based synchronous chat has become a popular way of communication for customer support. However, we note that business managers and customers bemoan the amount of time taken to serve customers via webchat, caused in some part perhaps by the textual route to get to

Leveraging state-of-the-art scientometric and analytical techniques, this paper provides a diachronic, quantitative, systematic overview of English-for-specific-purposes (ESP) research, as represented by the publications cited in two flagship journals of the field from 1980 to 2018. A co-citation analysis of 1092 main articles and their 25,147 unique references have identified 11 major clusters of

This paper investigates the impact of language background and writing expertise on textual priming patterns with a focus on textual position and semantic association of the multi-word sequence according to… in English research papers. Comparisons were made on the usages of according to…in four corpora of English research papers, covering writing by Chinese-speaking learners of English (L2 learners)

This paper presents a three-part methodology for identifying special-purposes words to teach in data-driven learning (DDL) vocabulary activities. Previous methods have focused on either identifying important words for an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) context or identifying learner vocabulary gaps—and little or no research has addressed how to determine whether specific words are well suited to

Evaluating historical sources for reliability, an aspect of sourcing, is a key feature of historical reasoning. While well-studied among proficient and L1 students, the performance of L2 students and the role of their English proficiency is not as well understood. This study examines the oral and written historical reasoning of undergraduate L2 students when evaluating historical sources for reliability

This paper explores whether hedges and boosters are used differently in discussion sections of research articles adopting one of the two qualitative approaches: narrative inquiry and grounded theory. Based on 30 SSCI-indexed journal articles in the field of education, both similarities and variations between the two paradigms were identified regarding the ways propositions are modified. Generally,

Research articles in English are read and composed by individuals from many lingua-cultural backgrounds; this diversity in the users of English as an academic lingua franca is likely to increase further with the rise of open access (OA) publishing. In the light of this, a pertinent question is how gender is constructed in international research articles. This study examines OA articles (N = 1003) with

This study investigates the rhetorical strategies of successful applicants to the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) grants program. Using a move-step analysis, I analyzed 50 personal statements and 50 statements of grant purpose written by applicants between 2012 and 2016. Also incorporated are six Fulbright faculty-raters’ views of these statements through think-alouds and semi-structured

Ensuring newly arrived migrants gain fluency in the language of their host country has challenged governments worldwide. Whilst many governments provide settlement and language programs for migrants, a critical site for language development and cultural integration is the workplace itself. However very few studies have explored how different worksites and job types in the new globalised economy may

A paucity of authentic language data has made the teaching of certain spoken genres which occur in formal professional settings a challenging task in the Sri Lankan L2 classroom. The Welcome Address (WA), an integral part of the agenda of many Sri Lankan professional events, is one such hitherto unexplored genre. The aim of this study was to identify lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features of the

Readers now scan keyword-generated search results from online databases to select articles rather than browse tables of contents, increasing the importance of titles in isolation. We aimed to describe clinical research titles in a corpus from two of the four most prestigious general medicine journals plus two high-ranked specialty journals published in 2017. The 2017 corpus was compared to a comparable

Academic blogs are becoming increasingly frequent, visible and important in both disciplinary and ‘outreach’ communication, offering a space for scholars and interested publics to discuss and evaluate research. Like the more traditional book review, blog responses require writers to engage and assess the ideas presented in another, public, text, but bloggers face criticism from both lay and academic

This paper presents findings from a systemic-functional investigation of the causal language used in high- and low-graded essays (HGEs and LGEs) in a university-level CLIL course on the topic of International Relations. The essay task-type, referred to here as the Concept Application assignment, requires writers to apply concepts, such as “Security Dilemma” or “Balance of Power”, to explain a present-day

Rhetorical moves are discoursal units that perform communicative functions in a given genre. They have been manually identified in many previous studies taking a corpus-based approach, and these studies have provided important contributions to discourse structure theories. However, manual analysis has restricted the scale and quantity of texts under investigation and the identification of moves is

Medical research articles increasingly employ language to emphasise or promote positive aspects of the research (e.g. robust, novel, innovative, unprecedented). This phenomenon, referred to as ‘hype’, may bias readers' judgements, impede their ability to find true effects or alienate readers. The present study explores why authors choose to hype, and, in doing so, extends prior work documenting the

The present paper describes the construction of a text generator (the CDG: Cheese Descriptions Generator), prompted by the need to assist Spanish-speaking professionals in the dairy industry in writing promotional cheese descriptions in English, the current lingua franca in business. This tool aims to bridge the gap between descriptive studies on second language writing and applications in real life

Technical legal vocabulary creates a significant learning burden for initiates to legal English, the lingua franca of international commerce and the language of law schools within the U.S. This study, focusing on spoken texts, sought to identify and describe technical legal vocabulary used in one first-year, foundational law school course: Contracts. A keyword list based on course transcripts was created

Genre analysis is a powerful pedagogy to foster doctoral students' awareness of academic writing conventions and variation. Nonetheless, concerns remain about the risks of promoting rhetorical ‘painting by numbers’, with writers glumly surrendering agency and authorial voice. Recent reappraisals of genre pedagogy encourage fostering genre manipulation, innovation, and play. We examine whether genre

The ESP Journal, the first peer-reviewed international journal in our field, was launched in 1980, thus making it 40 years old in 2020. This short article explores the years immediately before 1980 and attempts to explain the factors that led to the emergence of the journal. These included major ESP projects funded mainly in OPEC countries, the role of the British Council, the first major generation

Academics and research students around the world have increasingly come under pressure to publish in high-ranking English-medium international journals. At the same time, it has been widely recognised that English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) pedagogical support can be crucial to the publication success of those scholars and students who use English as an Additional Language (EAL). There

Among the significant tasks faced by academic writers are establishing their expertise in negotiating their new research findings, and resolving tensions between current knowledge and previous claims. These little-explored areas contrast with the attention devoted to examining basic moves and steps in different parts of research articles. The present article implements Hunston's (1993) conceptualization

The current research project was designed according to the conceptualization that vocabulary knowledge is multidimensional (Jaen, 2007; Qian & Schedl, 2004) and the learning of grammatical and collocational patterns should be considered as important as, if not more important than, the acquisition of semantic knowledge of single words. The purposes of the project were to (1) propose a method of extracting

Good listening comprehension contributes greatly to academic performance. One factor in developing good listening comprehension is knowing the functions of lexical bundles. While some research has been done on lexical bundles, their functions in academic lectures have not been extensively investigated. Drawing on an 8.8-million-word corpus of academic lectures across four disciplines, we investigated

Medical students with English as an additional language often face difficulties in acquiring English medical terminology derived from Greek and Latin morphemes. To address this problem, this study used a corpus-based approach to identify the most commonly occurring medical morphemes in four sources: Stedman's list of medical morphemes; the Cengage list of general English morphemes; the Center for Development

Companies around the world now routinely provide financial information in English for the global investment community. In the interest of greater transparency, companies may also publish a policy that articulates how they intend to communicate with investors in terms of content, timing, and channels. This paper aims to explore the language of investor relations communication policies of Japanese and

Recently there has been a trend towards English-medium instruction (EMI) with increasing numbers of programs taught in English (Wächter & Maiworm, 2014). At the same time, there has been a long tradition of ESP courses aiming at preparing students for effective academic and professional communication. In an increasingly internationalized context, it is necessary to reappraise current ESP courses in

As a consequence of globalisation, small to medium-sized companies are increasingly seeking to promote their products further afield than their home markets. This entails cross-linguistic communication needs, and results in the emergence of text types not thus far addressed in the literature. One such case is that of the herbal tea promotional text (HTPT), in which a herbal tea is described and evaluated

The internationalization of academic production has changed the publishing culture in all corners of the world with increasing participation of scholars from semi-peripheral countries in international journals (Belcher, 2007). While there has been growing interest in how multilingual scholars see this internationalization process, little is known about Brazil. To address this gap, a survey was distributed

The worldwide use of English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF) has led to increased research of BELF that seeks to elucidate its complexities, and the multiple competencies of its users that contribute to its success. As much of previous BELF research has focused on verbal communication, little is known of how nonverbal conduct contributes to facilitating shared understanding in the business context

This study investigates lexical bundles (LBs), a particular type of frequently occurring multiword sequence, in the academic writing of native and nonnative English-speaking first-year university students. The study extends the functional analysis of LBs in the literature by investigating the evaluative prosody and semantic preference of LBs in the same semantic domains that are employed by novice

The global rise in academic scholarship and pressure to publish in high-impact English-medium journals has led to an increased focus on multilingual scholars and the obstacles they face when communicating across academic and professional domains. Although preparing research for scholarly publication is challenging for most academics, multilingual scholars face the added demands of communicating their

It has been shown that language learners can benefit from a discovery-based learning process whereby they construct as well as consult their own specialist corpora and vocabulary portfolios, for the purposes of translator training (Castagnoli 2006), for general English (Smith 2011) and for academic English learning (Charles 2012; Smith 2015). In the present study, a cohort of 94 international students

This research is motivated by John Swales' genre analysis of academic texts and rhetorical studies of visuals in scientific texts. Swales' approach still generates insights into the rhetorical structure of research genres across disciplines, yet few studies explore their nonverbal aspects. Rhetorical studies of visuals examine images and ignore links with surrounding texts and may overlook ways that

This study reports on provision to assist students in the health sciences develop knowledge and skill in locating, evaluating, and synthesising sources to use as supporting evidence for the argument essays they are required to produce for first year courses at a university in New Zealand. Students were provided with support in the form of documents, tutorials, online discussion and structured assignment

Interpreting research findings in doctoral thesis discussions is a demanding rhetorical task for writers, as it requires them to both make propositions of their own findings and engage with previous scholarship by evaluating others' findings in a way that their academic discourse community finds acceptable. Although many studies have examined thesis writers' use of evaluative language, they have often

A large proportion of all graduates study engineering disciplines, and the number of master theses completed far outstrips that of doctoral-level works. However, engineering disciplines in general and their master theses in particular have received comparatively little attention from applied linguistics, leaving writing instructors with sparse guidance when preparing courses for MSc students in engineering

This study offers timely empirical evidence of the magnitude of the language effect on the performance of different language user groups, namely English as a Foreign Language (EFL), English as a Second Language (ESL), and English as a Native Language (ENL) in an accounting program instructed in English, an area that has been under researched. Informed by Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), this study develops

Academics from Pacific Rim expanding circle countries are increasingly expected to produce English language research articles. Writing for reputable journals requires an understanding of these journal editors' expectations. This paper describes one way in which editors' expectations have been demonstrated interactively to staff and post-graduate students at an Indonesian university. The exercise comprises

Despite recent discussions about the involvement of English for academic purposes (EAP) teachers in research practices, very little is known about how they themselves view and experience this matter. Thus, the present study was designed to explore the current state of Iranian EAP teachers' research reading and doing practices as well as the research trajectories they have followed during their EAP

Research articles serve not just to inform but also to convince. Consequently, authors may be inclined to employ language to ‘sell’ aspects of their study. Such language may undermine objective and disinterested interpretation and bias readers’ evaluation of new knowledge. Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are a type of study that aims to minimise bias when testing treatments and, in medicine, RCTs

This ethnographically oriented study followed the writing experiences of four students on an international masters programme in Finland. Gathering a range of data, the study set out to examine what counts as good writing on a programme with a very diverse student body in which English is used as a lingua franca. Both teachers and students emphasised the importance of arguing one's ‘own point of view’