This case study discusses the development and use of an oral performance assessment instrument intended to evaluate Filipino agents' customer service transactions with callers from the United States (US). The design and applications of the instrument were based on a longitudinal, qualitative observation of language training and customer service…

This article reports on a research process where focussed reflection on pharmacist-patient simulations led to meta-pragmatic awareness and directions for pedagogical practice. The research participants were third-year EAL pharmacy students, who were practising being pharmacists, and pharmacy staff members, who played the part of patients. Analysis…

The purpose of the present study is to shed some light on the subtle interplay between oral and written academic genres in the context of graduate student academic presentations. The analysis was based on a corpus of successful TESOL graduate student academic presentations (n = 20) with a focus on the genre identity roles students encode in their…

In order for discourse to be considered idiomatic, it needs to exhibit features like fluency and pragmatically appropriate language use. Advances in corpus linguistics make it possible to examine idiomaticity from the perspective of recurrent word combinations. One approach to capture such word combinations is by the automatic retrieval of lexical…

Using the academic writing sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus as data and building on previous research, this study strives to identify the most frequently-used multi-word constructions (MWCs) of various types (e.g., idioms, lexical bundles, and phrasal/prepositional verbs) in general…

Email has revolutionised the way in which professionals work and companies operate, and yet has received surprisingly little scholarly attention in English for Specific Purposes and has an unexpectedly muted presence in many Business English textbooks. The dearth of research into email use in globalised business settings may be one of the factors…

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight important or relevant points in lectures. Despite the established usefulness of discourse organizational cues for lecture comprehension and note-taking, very little is known about the marking of relevance in this genre. The current overview of…

There has been increasing interest in the possible applications of corpora to both linguistic research and pedagogy. This study takes a corpus-based, genre-analytic approach to discipline-specific materials development. Combining corpus analysis with genre analysis makes it possible to develop teaching materials that are not only authentic but…

Language and communication skills are among the greatest challenges that non-native-English speaking international medical graduates (IMGs) face in English medical consultations. Especially when patients use unfamiliar everyday expressions or attach different meanings to medical terminology, the communicative burden on doctor-patient communication…

Writing the Discussion section of a laboratory report or dissertation is difficult for students to master. It involves complex causal, conditional and purposive argument; this argument guides the reader from acceptance of the relatively uncontroversial data to acceptance of the writer's knowledge claim. Students benefit therefore if they are…

This study examined the applicability of the construct transfer climate in EAP education. In an EAP setting, transfer climate can be viewed as the support for learning transfer from an EAP course that students perceive in mainstream academic courses. The research question was as follows: What can a transfer climate perspective reveal about…

This article describes the design and implementation of a business proposal module for final-year science students at a tertiary institution in Hong Kong. It is argued that in the needs analysis process, the present situation analysis (PSA), that is, personal information about the learners and factors which may affect their learning, is just as if…

This paper investigates spoken directive language use in office hour consultation contexts by international teaching assistants (ITAs) in training, individually and in comparison with practicing academic professionals. The purpose is to inform instruction in advanced spoken English for academic purposes, to contribute to intercultural pragmatics…

The process of disciplinary socialisation has been linked to a gradual mastery of a discipline's genres. This article takes a view of genre, as indexing a wide range of often implicit understandings about knowledge creation and use within a discipline, and as fully rhetorical. Within such a framework, novice and near-expert examples of one…

This paper reports the findings of a study which forms part of a larger-scale research project investigating the use of English in the documents of the European Union (EU). The documents of the EU show various features of texts written for legal, business and other specific purposes. Moreover, the translation services of the EU institutions often…