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At a time when scholars are increasingly expected to participate in public knowledge dissemination, social media platforms like Twitter hold great promise for engaging both experts and non-experts. However, it remains unclear in what ways academic tweets are shaped by disciplinary concerns and how this might, in turn, impact audience engagement. Our paper reports an early-stage corpus-driven analysis of 4,000 English tweets from 40 scholars’ Twitter accounts across four disciplinary groups: Arts and Humanities (AH), Social Sciences (SS), Life Sciences (LS), and Physical Sciences (PS). Engagement rates (Tardy, 2023), multimodal elements, tweet types, and interaction markers were quantitatively calculated using corpus and computational methods and qualitatively analysed through close reading. Our findings revealed some disciplinary variation in the corpus: specifically, LS used more multimodal elements than SS on Twitter; SS used fewer interactional markers than LS and PS on Twitter. We further found that LS also has the highest number of threads and the longest threads, often to unfold their multimodal information. Despite being the least multimodal and interactive disciplinary group, SS has the highest engagement rate. Our analysis suggests that explicit evaluation and critique plays an important role in eliciting responses on Twitter, particularly with regard to current social or political issues —a finding that resonates with previous research on science communication and popularization (Orpin, 2019). The findings can be applied in science communication training to raise disciplinary awareness in shaping one’s social media presence.

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Genre studies have tended to focus on academic contexts, with little attention to professional settings. Against this backdrop, this study set out to conduct a corpus-based genre analysis of letters of regularization written to land institutions in Ghana. The study adopted a textual analysis, informed by the ESP approach to genres, and supplemented it with a corpus-based analysis to examine 40 letters of regularization. The analyses revealed that the most frequent move in the letters of regularization was the ‘Purpose of the letter’. Although the ‘Reason for the application’ move was not obligatory, it took much textual space in the letters. As regards lexicogrammatical features, politeness was embedded and expressed in ‘if clauses’ to mitigate direct impositions on the reader. Additionally, gratitude was mainly construed as a quality and as a process in the letters. Based on these findings, the study offers implications for further research and practice.

In a world in which major technological advances have considerably boosted the use of the web as a communication tool, the analysis of digital press releases to disseminate information on the case-related activity of judicial courts and project their social and institutional identity far and wide is useful to understand an evolving continuum of professional discursive practices (re-)shaped within institutional and media (public relations) communication strategies. Drawing from the criteria of genre categorizations (Swales, 2004; Bhatia, 2004; Askehave & Swales, 2001) along with computer-mediated analysis of texts (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992; Askehave & Nielsen, 2005; Caballero, 2008; Villanueva et al., 2008; Garzone, 2012) and metapragmatic strategies of press releases (Jacobs, 1999) in a randomised corpus of web-based European Court of Justice institutional press releases, I first place the sampled texts into their context of use, and then look at the generic structure used to realise the moves with communicative purposes, in both qualitative and quantitative analyses of data. Context and structure underlying the communicative genre are then mapped onto the role and function of intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Fairclough, 1992, 2003; Bhatia 2004, 2017) alongside recontextualization (Linell, 1998; Sarangi & Brookers-Howell, 2006). The findings show that the genre typifies the rhetorical activities and purposes of release writers as they come across to the media and the wider audiences in the ongoing context of institutionalised communication, and the ways the genre effectively replicates other forms of discourses and genres at different levels of organisational structure.

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The concept of metadiscourse – the ways in which writers and speakers interact through their use of language with readers and listeners (also referred to as metalanguage and metapragmatics) – has received considerable attention in applied linguistics in recent years, particularly in the study of academic discourse. Conceptualised within the applied linguistics context of developing optimal descriptions of genres as a basis for a genre-based pedagogy, this article first reviews some of the different approaches to metadiscourse, highlighting how the concept is construed in different ways by different researchers. The article then discusses a number of problematic issues in metadiscourse research: metadiscourse as textual or interpersonal; the size of the linguistic unit in metadiscourse research; the multi-functionality of metadiscourse items; and the issue of representativeness in corpus research on metadiscourse. The second part of the article focuses on the concept of signalling nouns (SNs) (abstract nouns which carry particular pragmatic meanings in discourse), a feature of discourse not usually included under the rubric of metadiscourse. It is argued, however, that SNs represent an important resource for making writers’ (or speakers’) intended meanings clear. In this second part of the article, a first section introduces the notion of SN and a second section discusses how SNs might be incorporated into a model of metadiscourse. A final section of the paper concludes with a summary and some comments on pedagogic application.

Metaphor is a critical component of being an architect: it mediates the various stages involved in architectural design, motivates a large part of the jargon used in the discipline, and is consistently used as a rhetorical strategy in many of the genres articulating architectural communication. Given its importance in architectural practice and discourse, the teaching of metaphor should be included in the syllabi of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses taught at polytechnic schools. The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, I describe how various metaphors inform architects’ practice – from the first design phase to the post-construction assessment distributed in one of the most popular genres in the community; that is, the architectural review. Drawing insights from cognitive and genre research into the role of metaphor in the discipline, I then suggest ways in which metaphorical competence can be fostered in ESP courses aiming at facilitating the students’ gradual enculturation process into their future community of practice.

This study explores the rhetorical structure of introductions that are followed by an independent Literature Review (L) section. It is motivated by an increasing use or even the prevalent use of both the introduction and L sections in the opening phase of empirical research articles in many disciplines and the lack of systematic genre-based investigation of introductions with a following L section. Based on a detailed examination of 30 introductions with a subsequent L section in Applied Linguistics, this study found that they generally can be classified into two categories according to their communicative functions and structures. They are the traditional CARS type that largely follows the classic “Create a Research Space” (CARS) model and the innovative Two-move Orientation type. Some featured elements used in the introductions with a subsequent L are identified and the “Two-move Orientation” approach is formulated for the rhetorical structure of this new type of introductions. The interesting links between introduction and L are also suggested. The study contributes to our understanding of the structure and function of this important part-genre in a new generic context (that is, introductions being followed by an independent L section) and illuminates the current genre-based teaching of introduction writing.

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the functioning of if-conditionals in medical editorials (MEDs). As previous genre-based studies of medical discourse genres have shown, MEDs need to address at least three different types of readers and are thus a research-oriented, socio-political and praxis-oriented genre. Medical editorialists therefore need to customize their argumentative strategies in order to reach and convince these distinct readerships. Our aim is to adopt a syntactic perspective on rhetorical purpose, by focusing on a syntactic pattern which has a potentially important role to play in the construction of argument: the if-conditional. By examining the syntactic variants of the structure in MEDs we demonstrate the correspondence between seemingly minor constructional variants and the rhetorical aims of the genre in question. A comparison between the research article and MED usages moreover helps us to identify the form-function pairings specific to the editorials and in this way pinpoint how the if-conditional forms are used to serve the specific argument strategies of the MED genre.

The main goal of this study is the application of Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) developed in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics to wine tasting sheets. Firstly, whether this text type meets the defining requirements specified by Swales (1990) for the discursive genre will be verified. 110 tasting sheets in Spanish and English extracted from the Internet have been grouped into four corpora corresponding to the country of origin of the wine: Spain, Australia, California and New Zealand. An analysis undertaken with WordSmith Tools has demonstrated the positive polarization of all the texts and the existence of cultural differences reflected in the use of fruit-related terms, adjectives oenological terms and “oenological culturemes” (Wislocka Breit, 2012). An unforeseen result of the study was the strong contrast observed between the free and literary manner of the English and the concise style of Spanish tasting sheets.

In this paper I offer a brief personal reflection on what strikes me as the main features of this period, focusing on increased specialization, the coming to dominance of genre and corpus analyses, the opening up of teaching paradigms related to social participation, identity and learner experience, and the growth of non-Anglo practitioners in research and publishing.

Reception histories are retrospectives; they look back at publications and ask who has cited them, how often, when, where and why. This paper takes an influential 1996 paper on genre analysis and examines how it has played out intertextually over the 15 years or so since its publication. The main sources used have been Google Scholar and the Web of Science. The quantitative results show that it has been primarily, but not exclusively, cited in ESP publications. The more qualitative aspect of this investigation reveals that its value for most later commentators lies in its review-article potential to act as an interpretive frame for subsequent work. The paper ends with a discussion of whether today we should accept just “three traditions” for genre analysis and its pedagogical applications or look further afield.

The last 20 years have seen increasing interest in the way in which meaning is made in different professional and academic disciplines. Central to this issue is the notion of disciplinary values, that is, qualities which define what is prized or stigmatised by different professional communities. In the present paper, the notion of disciplinary values is used to examine the way legal writers communicate meaning in different genres. To this end, six adjective/adverb sets which have a prominent place in legal discourse (“clear/ly”, “important/ly”, “reasonable/ly”, “appropriate/ly”, “correct/ly” and “proper/ly”) are identified. Their collocates and semantic preferences are studied in four 500,000-word corpora consisting of texts from the area of commercial law: academic journal articles, case law, legislation, and legal documents. Although the frequency and use of “clear/ly” and “important/ly” appear not to differ greatly from those found in other corpora of written and academic written texts such as the British National Corpus (BNC) and the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE), “reasonable/ly”, “appropriate/ly”, “correct/ly” and “proper/ly” were found to be salient in some or all of the subcorpora. The reasons for this are then analysed within the framework of disciplinary values. These words appear to convey attributes that have particular importance in the legal profession, reflecting disciplinary values that cross the boundaries between various written genres.

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) are two disciplines whose importance has been growing lately. This is due to the ever-increasing interest in the language that describes the most recent developments in varying disciplines and the need to communicate in and understand that language. One of the means for the spreading of those new developments in the different technologies is through research articles inspecialised journals. These impose certain rules that must be fulfilled by all researchers who want to see their papers published. Much literature has been written about this, covering most linguistic areas (see, for instance, Bazerman, 1988; Bhatia, 1993; Dudley-Evans, 1994; Fortanet, 2002). Many articles contrast different genres but rarely distinguish different sub-areas within a genre (Bridgman & Carlson, 1984; Malcolm, 1987; Hyland, 1988; Neff Van Aertselaer, 2006). In the present case, we will consider texts within the discipline of Economics. The aim of this paper is to show a structural, grammatical and metatextual analysis of ten articles recently published in very prestigious specialised publications, covering the most important areas of study in Economics. We conclude by making a contrastive rhetorical analysis of the four sub-genres analysed here. These are: Applied Economy, Quantitative Economy, Financial Economy, and Management and Business.

This paper describes three different examples of the use of textographies in the researching and teaching of writing. The first is an examination of the exegeses that art and design students write in their masters degrees. In the second example, a group of teachers looked at the writing section of Chinese College English tests. The third example describes a course in which second language students carry out an analysis of the kinds of writing that is required of them in their academic studies. Each of the projects aims to go “beyond the text” (Freedman, 1999) in order to gain an understanding of why the texts are written as they are.

The concept of metadiscourse – the ways in which writers and speakers interact through their use of language with readers and listeners (also referred to as metalanguage and metapragmatics) – has received considerable attention in applied linguistics in recent years, particularly in the study of academic discourse. Conceptualised within the applied linguistics context of developing optimal descriptions of genres as a basis for a genre-based pedagogy, this article first reviews some of the different approaches to metadiscourse, highlighting how the concept is construed in different ways by different researchers. The article then discusses a number of problematic issues in metadiscourse research: metadiscourse as textual or interpersonal; the size of the linguistic unit in metadiscourse research; the multi-functionality of metadiscourse items; and the issue of representativeness in corpus research on metadiscourse. The second part of the article focuses on the concept of signalling nouns (SNs) (abstract nouns which carry particular pragmatic meanings in discourse), a feature of discourse not usually included under the rubric of metadiscourse. It is argued, however, that SNs represent an important resource for making writers’ (or speakers’) intended meanings clear. In this second part of the article, a first section introduces the notion of SN and a second section discusses how SNs might be incorporated into a model of metadiscourse. A final section of the paper concludes with a summary and some comments on pedagogic application

This paper reports on a genre-based contrastive analysis of the textual organization of biomedical texts. In order to provide the maximum educational value to our research, our corpus is made up of 100 biomedical texts divided as follows: 25 Letters to the Editor, 25 Cartas al director, 25 Editorials and 25 Editoriales. Following Paltridge's approach, based on simple keys to symbolize the main parts of discourse in the environmental area, we developed a similar analysis to work with the rhetorical structure of the texts of another area, i.e. Medicine. After studying the informational structure of the texts and analyzing the results, we found striking differences when comparing the discourse organization in texts of various sub-genres. This shows that each genre has unique linguistic patterns which are not shared with the rest.

The paper examines the abstract genre from the perspectives of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) practitioners and information professionals. It aims to determine specific interdisciplinary interests in the abstract, and to explore areas of collaboration in terms of research and pedagogical practices. A focus group (FG) comprising information professionals from the Division of Information Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, convened for a discussion on the subject of abstracts and abstracting. Two major issues that have significant implications for ESP practices emerged during the discussion. While differences in terms of approach to and objectives of the abstract genre are apparent between information professionals and language professionals, the demands for specific cognitive processes involved in abstracting proved to be similar. This area of similarity provides grounds for awareness raising and collaboration between the two disciplines. While ESP practitioners need to consider adding the dimension of information science to the rhetorical and linguistic scaffolding that they have been providing to novice-writers, information professionals can contribute useful insights about the qualities of abstracts that have the greatest impact in meeting the end-users' needs in information search.

Metaphor is a critical component of being an architect: it mediates the various stages involved in architectural design, motivates a large part of the jargon used in the discipline, and is consistently used as a rhetorical strategy in many of the genres articulating architectural communication. Given its importance in architectural practice and discourse, the teaching of metaphor should be included in the syllabi of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses taught at polytechnic schools. The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, I describe how various metaphors inform architects' practice - from the first design phase to the post-construction assessment distributed in one of the most popular genres in the community; that is, the architectural review. Drawing insights from cognitive and genre research into the role of metaphor in the discipline, I then suggest ways in which metaphorical competence can be fostered in ESP courses aiming at facilitating the students' gradual enculturation process into their future community of practice

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the functioning of if-conditionals in medical editorials (MEDs). As previous genre-based studies of medical discourse genres have shown, MEDs need to address at least three different types of readers and are thus a research-oriented, socio-political and praxisoriented genre. Medical editorialists therefore need to customize their argumentative strategies in order to reach and convince these distinct readerships. Our aim is to adopt a syntactic perspective on rhetorical purpose, by focusing on a syntactic pattern which has a potentially important role to play in the construction of argument: the if-conditional. By examining the syntactic variants of the structure in MEDs we demonstrate the correspondence between seemingly minor constructional variants and the rhetorical aims of the genre in question. A comparison between the research article and MED usages moreover helps us to identify the form-function pairings specific to the editorials and in this way pinpoint how the if-conditional forms are used to serve the specific argument strategies of the MED genre

The development of communicative approaches and strategies in specialized discourse has led to revising notions of representative and significant language . Particularly in the work with academic genres, in science and technology (EST) settings such as our own institution, the need for determining these factors is ever growing. The application of empirical resources such as specific language corpora, in fact, becomes convenient. In this paper, the aim is to specify the type of corpus linguistic representativeness and significance sought in the case of teaching English to our groups of Computer Science students. In that scope, we present data and samples on which to base our suggestions and claims regarding the exploitation of textual material.

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper examines the abstract genre from the perspectives of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) practitioners and information professionals. It aims to determine specific interdisciplinary interests in the abstract, and to explore areas of collaboration in terms of research and pedagogical practices. A focus group (FG) comprising information professionals from the Division of Information Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, convened for a discussion on the subject of abstracts and abstracting. Two major issues that have significant implications for ESP practices emerged during the discussion. While differences in terms of approach to and objectives of the abstract genre are apparent between information professionals and language professionals, the demands for specific cognitive processes involved in abstracting proved to be similar. This area of similarity provides grounds for awareness raising and collaboration between the two disciplines. While ESP practitioners need to consider adding the dimension of information science to the rhetorical and linguistic scaffolding that they have been providing to novice-writers, information professionals can contribute useful insights about the qualities of abstracts that have the greatest impact in meeting the end-users' needs in information search