Multilingual scholars located outside of Anglophone contexts face growing pressure to publish in English. Evidence from a longitudinal "text-ethnographic" study exploring how 50 psychology and education scholars in southern and central Europe are responding to such pressure indicates that individual linguistic and rhetorical competence alone are…

English has come to be widely used for the specific purpose of advertising to reach international target groups in various countries. However, few studies to date have investigated the use--and effects of--English in advertising in Eastern European countries. This study investigated the effect of English in advertisements from Polish glossy…

This paper gives a detailed account of an analysis carried out at the French National Skiing and Mountaineering School from August 2008 to June 2009 to assess the language needs of French mountain guides. A targeted literature review highlighted two main points to be taken into account in the design of this language needs analysis: target…

With the increasing number of business professionals operating globally, knowledge of successful English lingua franca in business contexts (BELF) has become an important element in overall business know-how. Here, we report on a research project focusing on everyday BELF communication at work. It consists of an extensive survey, and related…

This article examines the role of written and spoken English vis-a-vis written Chinese, Cantonese and Putonghua in the four key service industries that have driven Hong Kong's economy in the past decade. The study forms part of a long-standing and continuing investigation into the impact of Hong Kong's transition from British colony to Chinese…

The international business community relies heavily on English Lingua Franca (ELF) as a shared means of communication, and English business language programmes thus feature prominently within the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Business ESP programmes, however, have little focus on active listening, which previous research has…

English is unquestionably the world language of academia--yet its most notable characteristic, being predominantly used by non-native speakers, has not seriously been taken on board in ESP descriptive studies. The project English as an academic lingua franca (ELFA) based at the University of Helsinki investigates academic discourses, branching out…

The constant and continuous need for the university to work towards producing graduates who meet and exceed the requirements of their chosen industry has prompted the effort to gather feedback from those industries. The effort by researchers of an engineering-based university in the East Coast Region of Malaysia to collect information on the…

By means of an analysis of the genre of the audit report, this study highlights the respective roles of linguistic and contextual analysis in genre analysis, if the results are to be of maximum use in ESP course design. On the one hand, based on a corpus of current and authentic written auditors' reports produced in a large international Hong Kong…

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…

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…

This article reports on an examination of the communication needs of a group of Thai civil engineering students. Twenty-five stakeholders helped identify the communication needs of the students by participating in individual interviews. These included employers, civil engineers, civil engineering lecturers, ex-civil engineering students of the…

The notion that academic writing is not only a conventional entity but also carries the representation of the writer has been supported by several researchers. Few studies have explored identity representation in language across two written cultures, such as English and Spanish, although Spanish might be a language of interest for non-native…