Special Issue: Intercultural discourse in domain-specific English

This monographic issue focuses on intercultural communication in specialist fields and its realizations in English for specific purposes. The concept of interculturality on which this issue is built is rooted in discourse, in line with recent research on interaction in specialized domains. Indeed, language is approached here as inseparable from a given socio-cultural configuration – not merely consistent with it, but deeply involved in its construction of reality and its representations. From single phrases to generic patterns, linguistic constructs encode a culture-bound world view. The analysis of discourse often shows that texts are not only where cultures are built, but also where at times they are distorted, rejected or ignored

Concordancing and the Teaching of the Vocabulary of Academic English

El proyecto descrito en este artículo ha utilizado el programa de concordancia Microconcord, con el Microconcord Corpus of Academic Texts (1993) con el fin de ofrecer a aquellos alumnos que no estén familiarizados con el lenguaje del discurso académico algunos de los elementos más frecuentes y significativos del vocabulario del Inglés académico. El proyecto ha desarrollado una serie de materiales para su uso en el aula y para el aprendizaje independiente, indicado tanto para hablantes nativos de inglés como para estudiantes no nativos de inglés. Los materiales abordan de forma detallada palabras muy frecuentes comunes a todos los campos del aprendizaje académico, y no intentan incluir términos especializados o técnicos asociados a disciplinas específicas. Los participantes en el proyecto están convencidos del valor que tiene la concordancia en el desarrollo de materiales didácticos centrados en el vocabulario y la gramática, y de la línea entre ellos. El presente artículo describe el enfoque utilizado y examina la lógica de ese enfoque.The project described in this article has used the concordancing program, Microconcord, with the Microconcord Corpus of Academic Texts (1993) to introduce students unfamiliar with the language of academic discourse to some of the most important, frequent and significant items of the vocabulary of academic English. The project has developed materials for classroom use and independent learning intended for native speakers of English as well as students of non-English speaking background. The materials deal in detail with frequently used words which are common to all fields of academic learning, not attempting to include specialized or technical vocabulary items associated with specific disciplines. Those working on the project are convinced of the value of concordancing in the development of teaching materials focusing on vocabulary and grammar and the line between them. This article describes the approach used and deals with the rationale behind that approach

Introduction: Discourse, expertise, and the management of risk in health care settings

This special issue identifies three interrelated constructs-discourse, expertise, and the definition and management of risk-located in various health care sites: genetic counseling, nursing, and medical practice. The articles highlight the relation between the management of risk situations and the nature of expertise displayed or achieved by practitioners and their patients or clients. Professional expertise is differentiated and multifaceted, concerning not only the exercise of discipline-specific professional practices and behaviors but also intimately related to the management of discoursal practices. The articles suggest that health care outcomes can be related closely to the quality of the discoursal encounters between professional practitioners and their patients or clients, among professional practitioners themselves, or both. The research we present evidences differentiated goals and outcomes from a range of professional encounters. It focuses especially on the resource of discoursal strategies drawn on in the achievement of discoursal and professional goals by both professional and lay participants

Taking the curriculum to task

About the book: Task-based learning in teaching is where an activity has been designed to help achieve a particular learning goal. This volume brings together a series of studies by different researchers on the impact of tasks in second language teaching, testing and development. It reviews a number of issues which include recent research into task-based learning: the effect of tasks on speaking, listening and oral interaction, the role of the teacher in exploiting tasks and the nature of the task based curriculum. Contents: 1. Introduction - Martin Bygate, Peter Skehan and Merrill Swain. PART 1: TASKS AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING 2. Effects of task repetition on the structure and control of oral language - Martin Bygate 3. Non-reciprocal tasks, comprehension and second language acquisition - Rod Ellis 4. Rules and routines: A consideration of their role in the task-based language production of native and non-native speakers - Pauline Foster. PART 2: STUDIES OF TASKS IN LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS 5. Focus on form through collaborative dialogue: Exploring task effects - Merrill Swain and Sharon Lapkin 6. Guiding relationships between form and meaning during task performance: The role of the teacher - Virginia Samuda. 7. 'A case of exercising': Effects of immediate task repetition on learners performance - Tony Lynch and Joan Maclean. PART 3: TASK-BASED APPROACHES TO TESTING 8. Tasks and language performance assessment- Peter Skehan 9. Influences on performance in task-based oral assessments - Gillian Wigglesworth 10. Task-based assessments: Charactersitics and validity evidence - Micheline Chalhoub-Deville. Afterword: Taking the Curriculum to Task - Christopher N. Candlin. Features: Looks at the impact of tasks on second language processing, speaking, listening and oral interaction. Presents a broad range of approaches to task-based teaching, learning and testing. Includes a review of recent research into task-based learning

Introduction: Trading between reflexivity and relevance: new challenges for applied linguistics

The basis for this special issue was a colloquium on professional discourse held within a conference at the University of Gent in August 2000 on the theme of Text and Talk in the Workplace. The colloquium itself was a truly interdisciplinary event, not just marked by the dialogic structure of the contributions by authors and commentators, but also by the fact that the commentator team included professional practitioners with their own particular perspectives. In this special issue we have retained the deliberations from these main papers and commentaries, but these have been supplemented with additional material. It is not the purpose of this editorial to replicate what the invited papers and the associated commentaries already attempt: they provide descriptions and analyses of three workplace-based projects. Other readers from their own distinct perspectives will engage with the issues presented here differently. We view our editorial task as chiefly to consolidate the common issues shared, but not necessarily resolved, by the papers and the commentaries

Making applied linguistics matter [Editorial]

Editorial. The article discusses the challenges of writing an inaugural editorial for a new journal, and the challenges that are even greater when the new journal is to join an already established pool populated with a number of journals with applied linguistics in their titles. Readers and potential authors have expectations of some kind of manifesto, a statement of intellectual commitment by the editors. Followers of a periodical will expect to be both reassured and surprised by its research agenda; The launch of the "Journal of Applied Linguistics" is a further example of both sustainability and of future growth in research. The issue reflects diverse themes and theoretical and methodological perspectives and differentiated presentations

Categorization and explanation of risk: a discourse analytical perspective

Categorization -- generally understood as definition of situations (including events, actions, roles/identities, knowledge claims etc) in everyday and professional/institutional settings -- is a meaning-making activity, deeply embodied in human experience and understanding. Language and discourse play a significant part in how we categorize events and things in discipline-specific ways. Contributors to this Special Issue of Health, Risk & Society approach risk categorization and its explanatory status in a range of healthcare settings -- genetics, cancer, HIV/AIDS, hormone replacement therapy -- from a discourse analytical perspective (broadly defined as language and interaction in context-specific environments). Research practice -- what we choose to study, how we select our data sites and analytic frameworks and how we formulate our findings -- constitutes categorization work par excellence and so remains a candidate project in reflexivity

Presencing in the context of enhancing patient well-being in nursing care

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Health care communication : a problematic site for applied linguistics research

In this chapter, we address, selectively, how applied linguists and those concerned with discourse analysis in particular, have recently approached the study of health care communication, especially in intercultural contexts, and relate these approaches to studies undertaken by researchers in other academic disciplines such as the sociology of medicine and by health care practitioners in the course of their own work. At issue will be questions concerning selected sites and themes, the degree of distinctiveness of research methodologies and different understandings of what counts as data, and questions concerning reflexivity and practical relevance in terms of the use to which findings can be put. Appreciating areas of difference and similarity is a necessary basis for establishing the desirable, but potentially problematic, partnerships among academic disciplines and between such disciplines and the work of professional practitioners, both in research and in professional development. As a sample site in the delivery of health care in the framework of cultural and linguistic diversity, we identify nursing, and use this site and its practices to advocate the collaboration of applied linguists, professional practitioners, and researchers from other areas of social science in the exploration of health care communication in multilingual/multicultural contexts and elsewhere.21 page(s

Constructing risk across timescales and trajectories: gay men’s stories of sexual encounters

This paper explores the way risk is constructed in the stories gay men tell of their sexual experiences. It focuses on how tellers use such stories to portray themselves both as rational actors and as legitimate members of their social groups by reconstructing the 'orderliness' of sexual encounters. An analysis of a corpus of stories derived from a diary study of gay male sexual behaviour in Hong Kong using current theories of discourse analysis reveals how narrators organize their experiences along two primary vectors of engagement: a sequential vector along which the trajectory of the sexual encounter is presented as a chain of occurrences, each occurrence contingent upon previous ones and warranting subsequent ones, and a hierarchical vector along which processes perceived on longer timescales are portrayed as exerting pressure on the ways processes on shorter timescales unfold. Examining how men portray these vectors in their accounts of risk behaviour can help us better understand both the situatedness of risk behaviour and the ways it is linked to larger social practices, identity projects and community histories