As is the worldwide trend, scientists in China face strong and increasing pressure to publish their research in international peer-reviewed journals written in English. There is an acute need for graduate students to develop the required language skills alongside their scientific expertise, in spite of the distinct division currently existing…

In a recent article in ESP, Matsuda and Tardy (2007) investigate the role of voice in academic writing via a simulated blind manuscript review process. Based on their findings, they claim that voice does play a role in such writing, and call for further research into the issue of the reader's construction of authorial identity. Matsuda and Tardy's…

Despite the impact of the ESP genre-based framework of teaching discipline-specific writing to L2 learners, especially to L2 graduate students, the writing performance of learners in such a framework is still not fully explored. In this paper, I analyze three article introductions written by a Chinese-speaking graduate student in electrical…

ESP genre research has generated numerous descriptions and explanations of discipline-specific genre exemplars and has produced various pedagogical proposals. However, what learners learn from these genre descriptions and the resulting pedagogical proposals and how they develop as learners and writers of genres in ESP genre-based writing pedagogy…

Discipline-specific approaches to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) tend to overlook the purposes of the disciplines themselves and the issue of transferability from academic to professional contexts. This becomes problematic in the context of the "new knowledge economy" and emergent pedagogies in higher education, which are increasingly focused…

Addresses the socio-pragmatic phenomenon of academic conflict from a cross-cultural and diachronic perspective. It is examined by combining a quantitative approach and a qualitative discoursal analysis of its salient rhetorical features in corpus of Spanish, French, and English medical articles published between 1930 and 1995. (VWL)

Discusses the use of law reports in English for academic legal purposes (EALP) instruction. Examines problems with using reports in the EALP classroom and focuses on the more widely available newspaper law reports. Offers a description that draws on Martin's (1992) context of culture in order to identify important social and cultural factors and…

Discuses the use of metaphor in business and economics, both in the subject itself and in language for specific purposes instruction. Investigates how variation in economic aggregates is put across in discourse and concludes that the concept of growth plays a key role in this respect. (Author/VWL)

Argues that particular patterns of language are associated with host-guest interaction, and that this language, corresponding to the different stages of he arrival-departure hospitality cycle, may be termed "hospitality language." Investigates hospitality practices and defines hospitality language in the context of Great Britain and discusses…

Describes an approach to teaching first-year law students in an English for academic purposes course on how to write the academic genre of the legal problem answer. Offers students rhetorical tools to translate legal reasoning moves into effective written response to legal problems. The dovetailing of language and content involved considerable…

Considers the role of interactive lecturing styles within the context of the Edinburgh University MBA program. Examples show a variety of ways of including student oral participation within the lecture framework. (Author/VWL)

Investigated extended effects of an English for academic purposes genre-based reading course on eight adult non-native speakers. Using student interviews collected one year after instruction, examined whether the class genres were connected to students' subsequent reading requirements and interests, what students remembered about genres taught in…

Explores competing pressures toward English for specific purposes accommodation to institutional exigencies and to a critical response to those exigencies. Discussion focuses on the design and implementation of an English for academic purposes course for a master's of Architecture students at a U.S. university. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the roles of "just," a lexical item that is among the most frequent in distinguishing academic speech data from roughly comparable written data in the Michigan Corpus of Academic English. Concordance analysis showed that "just" frequently co-occurs with metadiscourse and hedging; a closer functional analysis in selected speech events…

Describes initiatives to develop a new English for academic purposes listening test for incoming graduate students to the University of Michigan's English language institute. (Author/VWL)