This article highlights aspects of an interdisciplinary (chemistry-applied linguistics) English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course- and materials-development project. The project was aimed at raising genre awareness among chemistry students and faculty, in addition to improving students' disciplinary reading and writing. As part of the project,…

Although the influence of learner beliefs on performance and satisfaction in particular instructional contexts is uncontested, empirical studies have so far concentrated on students in various geographical rather than discipline-specific settings. Starting from the premise that tertiary sector ESP students may have more in common than their choice…

This study investigates whether the integration of ICT in education can facilitate teaching and learning. An example of such integration is computer assisted language learning (CALL) of English technical vocabulary by undergraduate physics students in Rwanda. The study draws on theories of cognitive load and multimedia learning to explore learning…

Genre-based approaches are widely used in academic writing courses for graduate students. Yet, despite numerous studies of academic discourses and genres, there is still little research focusing on the learner in ESP genre-based instruction, and further consideration of individual learners' responses to genre pedagogy is needed. This article…

The global high-tech industry is characterized by extreme competitiveness, innovation, and widespread use of English. Consequently, Taiwanese high-tech companies require engineers that are talented in both their engineering and English abilities. In response to the lack of knowledge regarding the English skills needed by engineers in Taiwan's…

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…

Several previous studies have investigated the use of questions to facilitate interactions in academic lectures in tertiary education. However, the issue of how disciplinary cultures influence the patterns of questions in lectures has received little attention. Therefore, this study aims to examine the interdisciplinary differences in professors'…

The framework of genre systems (Bazerman, 1994; Bhatia, 2004; Swales, 2004) offers an opportunity to illuminate the ways in which students enculturate into their disciplinary cultures (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995). To explore the ways in which genre chains are constructed through engagement in specific tasks, this study investigates two…

EAP practitioners in advanced courses have often focused on assisting junior scholars who are non-native speakers of English with their attempts to publish in English. Today, however, university administrators increasingly rely on post-publication data such as citation records. We therefore suggest that identifying heavily cited and largely…

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…

This paper reports on the feasibility and value of an approach to teaching EAP writing in which students construct and examine their own individual, discipline-specific corpora. The approach was trialed in multidisciplinary classes of advanced-level students (mostly graduates). The course consisted of six weekly 2-h sessions. Data were collected…

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…

With the increasing use of integrated tasks in assessing writing, more and more research studies have been conducted to examine the construct validity of such tasks. Previous studies have largely focused on reading-writing tasks, while relatively little is known about graph-writing tasks. This study examines second language (L2) writers'…

This study reports findings from a micro-ethnographic analysis of the academic literacy socialization of six multilingual students in the field of education as they progressed through their first-year of doctoral education. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the academic socialization processes that these multilingual students…