Target language competence of EFL teachers is an important aspect of EFL teaching and teacher expertise, and a case of ESP which is often not acknowledged as such. This paper presents a target language needs analysis for EFL teachers, carried out in Slovenia between 2003 and 2005. A survey of the literature shows that such studies are rare, even…

Lexical bundles--recurrent sequences of words--are important building blocks of discourse in spoken and written registers. Previous research has shown that lexical bundles are especially prevalent in university classroom teaching, where they serve three major discourse functions: stance expressions, discourse organizers, and referential…

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…

Using the tools of corpus linguistics, genre analysts are now able to easily identify the common linguistic features of the moves and strategies of genres. Such analyses produce large amounts of linguistic data which must be presented to language learners in a meaningful context. One proposed method of doing so is by hyperlinking the data to form…

In the global workplace, there has been tremendous growth in business processing outsourcing (BPO). Many industries are establishing call centers, back offices and other offshore enterprises in developing countries in an attempt to reduce costs. This development has far-reaching implications for language in these offshore destinations. Despite…

Acquisition of academic literacy is often a difficult process for students, and in South Africa this is compounded by the fact that education for most secondary school pupils takes place in a second language at under-resourced schools. This article describes the scaffolding of an academic literacy course designed for South African students from…

We conducted a lexical study on the word frequency and the text coverage of the 570 word families from Coxhead's Academic Word List (AWL) in medical research articles (RAs) based on a corpus of 50 medical RAs written in English with 190425 running words. By computer analysis, we found that the text coverage of the AWL words accounted for around…

This paper focuses on textual issues in the reporting of action research. There exists a large body of text-analytical work on research reports from various fields, examining for example the organisation and rhetorical purpose of research articles or sections thereof. However, less has been done on the specific issues of reporting action research,…

Based on a questionnaire to academic staff, this article examines the reading and writing tasks assigned to undergraduate science students at a South African university. The article finds that although academic staff in science value clearly written and well-organised writing, few see it as their task to induct students into this literacy. Instead…

This article adopts conversation analysis (CA) techniques to examine the way in which participants in service telephone calls to bookshops negotiate their requests. The study, which is based on data from NS and NNS corpora, concentrates particularly on the reason-for-call sequence--the part of the telephone call opening in which the business of…

Training legal English specialists is one area in which cooperation between discipline and language specialists is particularly valuable. Seven short excerpts from a short training course run jointly by teachers of English for legal purposes and legal specialists are presented and analysed to illustrate the contribution an ESP oriented approach,…

Notwithstanding the voluminous literature devoted to research genres, more investigation needs to be conducted to demonstrate the pedagogical significance of studying linguistic features in relation to communicative functions. Motivated by a concern for the pedagogical applicability of genre analysis, this paper investigates the extent to which…

This study investigates the phraseological patterning that occurs in reporting clauses used to make references to others' research. It examines finite reporting clauses with "that"-clause complement and draws upon two corpora of theses written by native speakers in contrasting disciplines: approximately 190,000 words in politics/international…

The last decade has witnessed increasing interest in email communication. Research in this area has focused on stylistic conventions, the role of email in the communication patterns of a company and the link between emails and corporate culture. Most of the studies so far published have concentrated on simple, one-way emails. However, evidence…

This paper argues for the integration of the lexical approach with a data-driven corpus-based methodology in English teaching for technical students, particularly students of Engineering. It presents the findings of the author's computer-aided research, which aimed to establish a frequency-based corpus of student engineering lexis. The Student…