New Challenges for Research on Language for Special Purposes


Book Description

This anthology consists of selected papers presented by European scholars at the 21st LSP-Conference 2017 on Interdisciplinary knowledge-making: challenges for LSP-research, held at NHH Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen, Norway. The multifarious aspects of LSP-research publication cover issues on terms and terminology, LSP-texts from a text linguistic approach, training in LSP-settings and translation of LSPtexts. The volume gives an up-to-date selection of the ongoing research endeavours in specialised communication in subject fields ranging from maritime accidents over healthcare and financial accounting to climate change.




English for Specific Purposes Instruction and Research


Book Description

This edited book focuses on current practices, challenges and innovations in the emerging field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). By combining diverse, empirically-proven and innovative ESP practices from all over the world with inspiring theoretical input and reflections from experienced practitioners, the authors in this volume examine both best-practice examples and ESP programmes which by various metrics are deemed to have failed. This book will be of interest to practitioners, teacher educators and researchers working in the field of ESP, as well as readers interested in language education and curriculum development more broadly.




Knowledge Communication


Book Description

Knowledge Communication as a research field emerges as a response to the communicative core challenges of the knowledge society. At ist center is the question of how to produce and transform specialized knowledge into interactions to gain value for this kind of knowledge. The field’s foundational concepts concern a transactional understanding of communication, an ideology of convergence between communicators and an appreciation of knowledge as construction. These stem from critical discussions of insights harvested from three parental disciplines: Language for Specific Purposes, Public Understanding of Science, and Knowledge Management. In their synthesis, these foundational concepts define Knowledge Communication as a means of strategic communication. In lieu of this, the research agenda of Knowledge Communication presents a novel prism through which to discern and investigate communicative core challenges of the knowledge society.




English for Research Publication Purposes


Book Description

Scholars who use English as an additional language confront challenges when disseminating their research in the global market of knowledge production dominated by English. English for Research Publication Purposes analyses the experiences and practices of these scholars across the globe and presents "critical plurilingual pedagogies" as a theoretically and empirically informed means of supporting them. This book: • Draws on an empirical study of a Latin American university’s effort to mount a course that provides support to emerging and established scholars who use English as an additional language; • Brings theoretically informed discussions of critical pedagogies, plurilingualism and identity affirmation to better serve plurilingual scholars who seek to publish their research in English-language journals; • Provides examples of classroom activities that can be adapted and adopted to local contexts and realities in a curriculum based on critical plurilingual pedagogies; • Proposes future directions for research into the internationally urgent, growing concerns of global scholars who produce English-medium academic knowledge for the world stage. Incisive and cutting-edge, English for Research Publication Purposes will be key reading for academics and upper-level students working in the areas of ESP, EAP, ERPP, and Applied Linguistics.




New Challenges for Language Testing


Book Description

The main focus of this volume is test development and accreditation requirements and needs. One of the major objectives here is to show the key aspects of the application of assessment in higher education and the systems of accreditation. Thanks to its unique perspective, it offers a different approach on various aspects of second language assessment. As universities are one of the best arenas for the analysis of language testing, the book thoroughly prepares higher education teachers to apply pilot studies and shows students’ responses to new testing techniques and accreditation requirements. It offers an enlightening guide for scholars with an academic interest in acquiring the basic principles of language testing and accreditation, providing real cases of how new ways of testing and accreditation can be useful to second language teachers and students. Readers will not only come to understand how to use new testing strategies, but also have the opportunity to see that the proposals described in each chapter may be useful to language assessment and motivation of students.




Aviation English


Book Description

Aviation English investigates the key issues related to the use of English for the purpose of communication in aviation and analyses the current research on language training, testing and assessment in the area of Aviation English. Based on a series of recent empirical studies in aviation communication and taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book: provides a description of Aviation English from a linguistic perspective lays the foundation for increased focus in the area of Aviation English and its assessment in the form of English Language Proficiency (ELP) tests critically assesses recent empirical research in the domain. This book makes an important contribution to the development of the field of Aviation English and will be of interest to researchers in the areas of applied linguistics, TESOL and English for Specific Purposes.




Academic Writing in a Second or Foreign Language


Book Description

It can be a challenge writing in a language that is not your native tongue. Constructing academic essays, dissertations and research articles in this second or foreign language is even more challenging, yet across the globe thousands of academics and students do so, some out of choice, some out of necessity. This book looks at a major issue within the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). It focuses on the issues confronting non-native-English-speaking academics, scholars and students, who face increasing pressure to write and publish in English, now widely acknowledged as the academic lingua franca. Questions of identity, access, pedagogy and empowerment naturally arise. This book looks at both student and professional academic writers, using qualitative text analysis, quantitative questionnaire data, corpus investigations and ethnographic approaches to searchingly examine issues central to the EAP field.




Language for Specific Purposes


Book Description

In the United States today there is lively discussion, both among educators and employers, about the best way to prepare students with high-level language and cross-cultural communication proficiency that will serve them both professionally and personally in the global environment of the twenty-first century. At the same time, courses in business language and medical language have become more popular among students. Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), which encompasses these kinds of courses, responds to this discussion and provides curricular models for language programs that build practical language skills specific to a profession or field. Contributions in the book reinforce those models with national survey results, demonstrating the demand for and benefits of LSP instruction. With ten original research-based chapters, this volume will be of interest to high school and university language educators, program directors, linguists, and anyone looking to design LSP courses or programs in any world language.




Human Language Technology. Challenges of the Information Society


Book Description

Half a centuryago not manypeople had realizedthat a new epoch in the history of homo sapiens had just started. The term “Information Society Age” seems an appropriate name for this epoch. Communication was without a doubt a lever of the conquest of the human race over the rest of the animate world. There is little doubt that the human racebegan when our predecessorsstarted to communicate with each other using language.This highly abstractmeans of communicationwas probably one of the major factors contributing to the evolutionary success of the human race within the animal world. Physically weak and imperfect, humans started to dominate the rest of the world through the creation of communication-based societies where individuals communicated initially to satisfy immediate needs, and then to create, accumulate and process knowledge for future use. The crucial step in the history of humanity was the invention of writing. It is worth noting that writing is a human invention, not a phenomenon resulting from natural evolution. Humans invented writing as a technique for recording speech as well as for storing and facilitating the dissemination of knowledge across the world. Humans continue to be born illiterate, and therefore teaching and conscious supervised learning is necessary to maintain this basic social skill.




A History of the German Language Through Texts


Book Description

Written in a lively and accessible style, the book looks at the history of German through a wide range of texts, from medical, legal and scientific writing to literature, everyday newspapers and adverts.