Research has increasingly pointed to a range of cognitive and social reasons behind ESL students' transgressive textual appropriation, defined as students' source use that contravenes acceptable borrowing practices. However, one aspect that has received little attention is the role of the immediate pedagogical context in this type of textual…

This paper reports on an analysis of meetings data which forms part of a broader study investigating the use of English as a lingua franca in international business meetings. This discourse analytic stage of research builds on an initial survey which explored the use of English for International Business (EIB) in a particular European…

The field of accountancy plays a vital role in the financial health of modern-day economies. It also attracts very large numbers of students, many for whom English is not their first language, who train in a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate programs at English-medium universities. Yet, surprisingly, the discourse of accountants has been…

Research has shown that reviewers' stances can impact the efficacy of peer response/review and subsequent revision. The purpose of this classroom-based study was to compare reviewer stances and writer perceptions of/and attitudes toward these stances prior to and after peer review training in an EFL writing class. Eighteen intermediate EFL writers…

Students need access to the disciplinary practices of engineering, but at the same time, these practices need to transform to the realities of the changing global environment and the profession. The site of this research is an engineering foundation programme for less advantaged students in South Africa and is thus perhaps well-positioned to look…

This paper investigates the differences in the discursive patterning of cases in Law and Management. It examines a corpus of 271 Law and Management cases and discusses the kind of information that these two disciplines call for and how discourses are constructed in discursive hierarchical patterns. A discursive hierarchical pattern is a model…

This paper reports a corpus-based lexical study of the most frequently used medical academic vocabulary in medical research articles (RAs). A Medical Academic Word List (MAWL), a word list of the most frequently used medical academic words in medical RAs, was compiled from a corpus containing 1 093 011 running words of medical RAs from online…

The interaction between learner characteristics, including learners' histories and goals of learning, and learners' analysis and production of target genres remains a topic of continuing interest in the genre-based literacy framework. This case study documented an L2 graduate student's individualized engagement with genre in both her reading and…

This paper investigates the influence of the English language on the work of management academics. They are seen as knowledge workers in the context of business and management, who have to be able to use the English language in such ways to pursue successfully and competently the main purpose of their work--the generation, dissemination and…

This article describes two complementary research projects into lexical patterning and frequency in general and academic English. The research suggests that treating current popularly used wordlists such as the General Service List (GSL) and the Academic Word List (AWL) as distinct constructs is of questionable merit. Rather, there are strong…

Within the broad background of English language education in Brazil, this paper intends to discuss two questions. Firstly, where and why a common misconception about ESP being identified as the teaching of reading only originated, and secondly, given the social role of English in the Brazilian context, whether an ESP approach can be seen as more…

This article investigates lexical gender in specialized communication. The key method of analysis is that of forms of address, professional titles, and "generic man" in a 10 million word corpus of written Business English. After a brief introduction and literature review on both gender in specialized communication and similar corpus-based views of…

This paper uses a corpus approach to investigate disciplinary variation in the construction of stance using nouns which are followed by "that" and a complement clause, "e.g. the argument that the Justices exhibit strategic behaviour..." Two corpora of theses written in English are examined: approximately 190,000 words in politics/international…

The present study analyzes 22 authentic business reports in an attempt to identify textual features that are typical of business reports as a genre. The analysis shows that there are certain characteristics which distinguish business reports from other related genres such as scientific reports, of which RAs are a typical example. There are also…

In order to examine the value of explicating genre and rhetorical rules for teaching, this study explores the level of consistency between the linear, deductive discourse pattern recommended for school writing and the actual structure of reading materials selected from seventh- and eighth-grade English language arts textbooks. We focus on 25…