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CURRENT AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES RESEARCH Sue Sta

CURRENT AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES RESEARCH Sue Starfield Pub. linguistiques | Revue française de linguistique appliquée 2014/1 - Vol. XIX pages 9 à 14 ISSN 1386-1204 Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-de-linguistique-appliquee-2014-1-page-9.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pour citer cet article : -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Starfield Sue, « Current and Future Directions in English for Specific Purposes Research », Revue française de linguistique appliquée, 2014/1 Vol. XIX, p. 9-14. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Pub. linguistiques. © Pub. linguistiques. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit. Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - - Paltridge Brian - 129.78.233.210 - 20/06/2014 02h01. © Pub. linguistiques Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - - Paltridge Brian - 129.78.233.210 - 20/06/2014 02h01. © Pub. linguistiques Rev. franç. de linguistique appliquée, 2014, XIX-1 (9-14) Current and Future Directions in English for Specific Purposes Research Sue Starfield, University of New South Wales & Brian Paltridge, University of Sydney In this introduction to the Revue française de linguistique appliquée we provide an overview of current and future directions in English for specific purposes (ESP) research. We do this by discussing themes that have emerged in a number of publications we have been involved in over the past few years which have dealt with this topic. First, in a chapter we wrote for the Routledge Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning (Paltridge & Starfield 2011) we reviewed developments in the field, mostly as seen through the pages of the journal English for Specific Purposes an international peer-reviewed journal which we were co-editing at that time. As we pointed out in that chapter, research into the language and discourse of specific purpose genres has been important in the field since the early days of the journal. The article by Elaine Tarone and her colleagues (Tarone et al. 1981) that appeared in the first volume of the journal is an example of just this. In this article, Tarone and her colleagues use the word genre for the first time in ESP published research, at the very same time that John Swales (1981) published his seminal research into the discourse structure of research article introductions in the Aston ESP Research Reports. As we all know, genre has become a significant notion in the area of ESP research, both with the publication of Swales’s (1990) book Genre Analysis and the very many genre-oriented publications that have followed on from this (see Paltridge 2013, 2014 for reviews of this work). ESP genre studies, in more recent years however have aimed to go beyond descriptions of texts, to exploring the social action of genres, their socially situated nature and the role the genre is playing in the particular setting. Genre studies have also increasingly looked at the multimodal nature of texts, especially with the increase in digital genres which students and practitioners need to be able to engage in, in contemporary academic and workplace settings (see Prior 2013). A further development in ESP research that we discuss in that chapter is the use of computers to assist in research into specific purpose language use. These corpus-based studies have helped us to better understand the nature of specific purpose language use by virtue of the sheer sweep and scale with which this kind of research can now be carried out. A number of corpora that have been developed in recent years have greatly facilitated this research. A number of these are open access. These include the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/), the British Academic Spoken English corpus (www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collect/base/) and the British Academic Written English corpus (www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collect/ bawe). The Michigan corpus contains data from a wide range of spoken academic genres as well as information on speaker attributes and characteristics of the speech events that are contained in the data. The British Academic Spoken English corpus includes recordings of conference presentations, lectures and seminars, interviews with academic staff, as well as tagged transcripts of some of the data. The British Academic Written English corpus includes Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - - Paltridge Brian - 129.78.233.210 - 20/06/2014 02h01. © Pub. linguistiques Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - - Paltridge Brian - 129.78.233.210 - 20/06/2014 02h01. © Pub. linguistiques Sue Starfield & Brian Paltridge 10 contextual information on the data such as the gender and year of study of the student who wrote the text, details of the course the assignment was set for, and the grade that was awarded to the text. This kind of information is extremely useful to ESP researchers as it enables them to go beyond word counts and frequencies to providing a more contextualised understanding of the findings of their research (see Nesi (2013) for a review of corpus-based studies in the area of English for specific purposes). The research that is currently being published in English for Specific Purposes is especially international in character. In 2013, for example, authors who published in the journal were from Austria, Australia, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Japan, Korea, Rwanda, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the US and the UK. The first issue of the journal for 2014, further, was a special issue on ESP research carried out in Asia, with authors from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Iran and Taiwan. That issue also contained articles by authors from Vietnam, New Zealand and Australia. The regions which downloaded articles from English for Specific Purposes in 2012 (the most recent year available) were, in descending order: Asia, Europe, North America, Australasia, the Middle East, Africa and South America. So, when in 1991, Ann Johns and Tony Dudley-Evans said that English for specific purposes is both international in scope as well as being specific in purpose, they were as much talking about its future as they were about the status of ESP at that particular time. This is especially the case with the increase in the use of English as the lingua franca of international research. Often, in these settings English is the native language of neither group of users but it is the language they will most likely use to communicate with each other. This is most certainly the case with the journal English for Specific Purposes where the majority of its current authors and a very large number of its readers are no longer from the English-speaking ‘centre’ (see Jenkins 2014, Mauranen 2012, Nickerson 2013, Seidlhofer 2011 for reviews of research in the area of English as the lingua franca). There has also been, in recent years, an increased attention given in ESP research to advanced academic literacies and students’ multiple literacy needs in their present and future lives. This has included research into writing for publication and thesis and dissertation writing in a second language. These two areas have become especially important with the ever increasing globalisation of higher education, the continued dominance of English as the language of scientific communication and the growing pressure on academics for whom English is not their native language to publish in English language journals. This research draws our attention to the challenges that many ‘off-network’ writers face in doing this. These challenges, further, are not only linguistic as second language writers attempt to balance the desire to gain international recognition through publication in English with choices that reflect their own value systems and ideologies that may reflect their desire to resist the global dominance of English (see Flowerdew 2013 for a review of research in the area of writing for publication; Thompson 2013 for research into thesis and dissertation writing; Starfield 2013 for critical perspectives on writing for academic publication). Identity has also become an important topic in ESP research. Kanno and Norton (2003) and Norton and Toohey (2011) discuss identity in relation to learners’ imagined communities, arguing that their desired memberships of these communities influence their motivation for learning and the investment they make in the learning. Indeed as Norton and Toohey (2011) argue, these imagined communities may have “a stronger impact on their investment in language learning” (p. 422) than the contexts in which they are currently engaged. Belcher and Lukkarila (2011) argue that teachers need to learn more about their learners’ imagined communities and ‘who they want to become’ - that is, their imagined identities - if they really want to help them achieve their long term, rather than just their short term, language learning goals. A focus on identity in ESP teaching and learning, thus, has an important role to play in bringing about social change which is, for many, a goal of language uploads/s1/ current-and-future-directions-in-english.pdf