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,…

In the last 20 years, critical approaches to language and literacy education have established themselves as an academic field, with an abundance of empirical studies applying Critical Literacy principles in classes and curricula at schools and universities. Noticeably absent from the contexts of implementation are courses in Business English and…

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…

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…

Evaluations of prior scholarship play a crucial role in the literature review (LR) of a research article by showing how the boundary of an area of inquiry can be further advanced by the writer's work. Yet, many inexperienced writers find evaluating others' work a major challenge. Although the task has received some attention in research and…

This article examines the stance options used by writers responding to a data description task in the discipline of Statistics. Based on a small learner corpus, it uses inductive qualitative content analysis to explore both the content propositions that students included in their writing, and the ways in which they expressed evaluative stance…

Cooperative learning has frequently been used in language classrooms, from in-class task-based group work to group presentations. Research suggests that cooperative learning provides mutual support, as well as successful and effective learning outcomes of tasks. The present research addressed a number of problems discovered in group oral…

In this paper I use two case studies to show how corpus linguistics can be used to help in the teaching of business English. Senior managers in global companies often find themselves having to do their job in a foreign language. Given that language is one of the key tools of management, the senior managers are normally very keen to develop a…

This study aims to evaluate the selection of metaphors in a published business English textbook using findings from a specialised corpus of written business English. While most scholars agree that metaphors should be included in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) syllabuses as a potentially problematic area in successful language learning, it is…

This paper quantifies differences in speaking rates in a first and second language, and examines the effects of slower rates on the speakers' abilities to convey information. The participants were 14 fluent (CEF B2/C1) English L2 speakers who held the same oral presentation twice, once in English and once in their native Swedish. The temporal…

A key challenge facing professional communication teachers is the need to bridge the gap between the culture of the classroom and the reality of the workplace. One area of difference between the two contexts is the way in which collaborative activities surrounding the construction of written text are enacted. Differences in collaborative practices…

Publishing research papers in English journals is now a requirement for many scientists in developing countries. Writing journal papers in English, the lingua franca of the scientific world, however, often places an additional burden on non-native speaking scientists in EFL settings due to their lack of English proficiency. With these concerns in…

This paper concerns the teaching of English to learners who are studying, or will soon study, engineering and who are expected to do at least part of their studying through textbooks written in English. Such students, especially in universities in developing countries, often find themselves very poorly equipped by their secondary education for…

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…