English for Professional and Academic Purposes Utrecht Studies in Language and Communication 22 Series Editors Wolfgang Herrlitz Paul van den Hoven English for Professional and Academic Purposes Edited by Miguel F. Ruiz-Garrido Juan C. Palmer-Silveira Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Cover photo: Morguefile.com The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2955-2 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2956-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands Contents Current trends in English for Professional and Academic Purposes Miguel F. Ruiz-Garrido, Juan C. Palmer-Silveira and Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez 1 Section I. Discourse analysis of English for academic purposes Formality in academic writing: The use/non-use of phrasal verbs in two varieties of English Dushyanthi Mendis 11 The ‘dialectics of change’ as a facet of globalisation: Epistemic modality in academic writing Carmen Pérez-Llantada 25 Hidden influencers and the scholarly enterprise: A cross- cultural/linguistic study of acknowledgements in medical research articles Françoise Salager-Meyer, María Ángeles Alcaraz Ariza and Maryelis Pabón Berbesí 43 Researching into English for research publication purposes from an applied intercultural perspective Ana I. Moreno 57 Section II. Discourse analysis of professional English Research reports in academic and industrial research Philip Shaw 75 Information use and treatment adherence among patients with diabetes Ulla M. Connor, Elizabeth M. Goering, Marianne S. Matthias and Robert Mac Neill 89 “Check it out” – The construction of patient empowerment in health promotion leaflets Inger Askehave and Karen K. Zethsen 105 Who “we” are: The construction of American corporate identity in the Corporate Values Statement genre Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 121 Section III. EPAP pedagogy Evaluating and designing materials for the ESP classroom Ana Bocanegra-Valle 141 From text to task: Putting research on abstracts to work John M. Swales and Christine B. Feak 167 Approaching the essay genre: A study in comparative pedagogy Ruth Breeze 181 Academic writing in the disciplines: Practices in nursing, midwifery and social work Julio Gimenez 197 English language education for science and engineering students Thomas Orr 213 Notes on contributors 233 Current trends in English for Professional and Academic Purposes Miguel F. Ruiz-Garrido, Juan C. Palmer-Silveira and Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez 1 Introduction Specialised languages usually refer to the specific discourse used by professionals and specialists to communicate and transfer information and knowledge. There are as many specialised languages as there are professions. This is what has usually been known as Languages for Specific Purposes or, when applied to English, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), i.e., the special discourse used in specific settings by people sharing common purposes. It is not our aim to define the term or to carry out a historical review of the topic, as many authors have already done so in the last 50 years (e.g., Gunnarson, 1994; Dudley-Evans and St John, 1998; Engberg, 2006). Neither do we want to get involved in the debate over whether English for Academic Purposes (EAP) should be considered a subfield of ESP or if they are now two different areas of teaching and research within Applied Linguistics. That is the reason why we are continuing with the term English for Professional and Academic Purposes (EPAP) introduced by Alcaraz-Varó (2000) (the original term in Spanish being Inglés Profesional y Académico (IPA)), one of the most prestigious and prolific scholars in Spain. He rested his view on the opinion of Widdowson (1998: 4), who stated that “All language use is specific in a sense”, so that language serves a specific purpose wherever it is used. Therefore, we agree with Alcaraz-Varó (2000) in the sense that the term EPAP is much clearer and more specific to cover the domain we are dealing with here. The relevance of English in academic and professional settings began some decades ago, in the 1960s, and it has not decreased. Orr (2002: 1) said that ESP “is an exciting movement in English language education that is opening up rich opportunities for English teachers and researchers in new professional domains”. The spread of science and technology all over the world, together with the globalisation of the economy and the fact that the university world is becoming more international, has all helped to make the English language the current lingua franca of international communication. Despite the research carried out so far in the field, we still believe that much more ought to be conducted. As Orr (2002: 3) also points out: 2 Miguel F. Ruiz-Garrido et al. If systematic attention to actual needs continues to be its hallmark, ESP will clearly advance further in its study of specialized English discourse and in its development of effective methodologies to teach it. From the title of the book it can easily be inferred that our volume is concerned with two main areas: Academic Purposes and Professional Purposes. Following Ypsilandis and Kantaridou (2007: 69), EAP “refers mainly to the academic needs of students and of future professionals who would seek a career in the academic environment” and English for Professional Purposes (EPP) refers to “the actual needs of (future) professionals at work”. As this distinction is currently widely accepted by many scholars, it is also true that those two broad fields or categories also involve many different areas and fields of interest and research. EPAP can cover hundreds of research topics as well as put them into practice in hundreds of academic and professional settings. For example, Hewings (2002) showed that EAP, including EST (English for Science and Technology), was the most common field of research in the ESP Journal and, at the same time, he found that text and discourse analysis was the most common topic scholars wrote about in the period of time observed. Hewings (2002) concluded by highlighting some new trends for the future, such as geographical internationalisation of authorship, analysis of more specific contexts, continued influence of genre analysis or corpus analysis, and the effect of English as an international language. A few years later, in an editorial of the ESPj, Paltridge (2009: 1) stated that: ESP research is clearly not the property of the English-speaking world, nor is it taking place solely in English-speaking countries. In ESP, English is the property of its users, native and non-native speakers alike, something that was called for some years ago by Larry Smith (1987) in his discussions of the use of English as an international language. The present volume is a clear example of this international language and the geographical variation of authorship. Contributors are currently based in Europe, America and Asia, and they are a mixture of native and non-native speakers of English (if we can still maintain such a difference). Some years earlier, Dudley-Evans and St John (1998: 19) said that “ESP is essentially a materials- and teaching-led movement” closely interlinked with Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching. When looking deeper into the research trends or approaches in ESP, they refer especially to register analysis, rhetorical and discourse analysis, analysis of study skills, and analysis of learning needs. Similarly, and complementing Dudley-Evans and St John’s ideas, Ferguson (2007: 9) pointed out that: a key motif in ESP/EAP research has been “difference”: difference between academic disciplines, between professions, between genres and registers, between discursive practices; differences that, quite justifiably, have been explored in ever finer detail Current trends in English for Professional and Academic Purposes 3 drawing on ethnography, corpora and well as more traditional techniques of discourse analysis. Many of the approaches used in the research and teaching of EPAP are illustrated in the present volume. Although certain approaches, such as genre analysis (Swales, 1990; Swales and Feak, 1994) or contrastive rhetoric (Connor, 1996), are shown as relevant in the volume, other aspects such as corpus linguistics, textual analysis, rhetorical analysis, interculturality/cross- culturality or the use of ethnographic tools are not neglected. As for the fields of study, the contents of this book illustrate research on discourse and the teaching/learning process in different academic genres (research articles, acknowledgements or essays), and in some professional areas, such as business, health science, or science and engineering. Concerning the pedagogical implications and applications of the research, we have devoted one section to this issue, apart from the specific references to the teaching/learning ideas included in most of the articles in the book. Some authors state that the application of research findings to teaching seems to be relatively limited (Poncini, 2006; Bocanegra et al., 2007), so we considered it necessary to include some articles dealing exclusively with teaching and learning the language. This section includes suggestions and tips on how to create materials, how to teach the writing of abstracts or essays better, different genres in discipline-specific writing, or the description of successful practices and a programme on English for Science and Engineering. The group of researchers who lead the present project belong to the research group GRAPE (Group for Research on Academic and Professional English) and have been working on different EPAP projects for more than fifteen years. The selected contributors have different geographical origins, but all of them have proved to have an unquestionable level of scholarship in the ESP academic world. The aim of this book is to offer an overview of several topics within the domain of discourse analysis applied to English for professional and academic purposes. This volume is not intended to cover all the issues within ESP but to show current trends in the research being carried out on the field and to offer new ideas for the future. The chapters included in the present volume show diverse perspectives in specific English language research, from topical points of view (abstract writing, essay writing, health discourse, etc.) or from methodological standpoints (cross-cultural studies, contrastive rhetoric, corpus linguistics, etc.). English is an international language and is considered the language of communication in the academic and professional worlds, and our volume supports that idea by offering diverse cross-cultural and international perspectives on the topic. Therefore, the general aim of this volume is to show how the English language is analysed as both the discourse of and for effective communication in academic and professional settings. At the same time, it also seeks to find out