34.2227, Confs: 45th GERAS International Conference. Language Use in Specialized Contexts from an ESP Perspective

Tue Jul 18 09:05:04 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2227. Tue Jul 18 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.2227, Confs: 45th GERAS International Conference. Language Use in Specialized Contexts from an ESP Perspective

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Date: 13-Jul-2023
From: Séverine Wozniak [severine.wozniak at univ-lyon2.fr]
Subject: 45th GERAS International Conference. Language Use in Specialized Contexts from an ESP Perspective

45th GERAS International Conference. Language Use in Specialized
Contexts from an ESP Perspective
Short Title: GERAS45

Date: 21-Mar-2024 - 23-Mar-2024
Location: Winterthur, Switzerland
Contact: Marlies Whitehouse
Contact Email: marlies.whitehouse at zhaw.ch

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics

Meeting Description:

45th GERAS International Conference

One of the defining characteristics of English for specific purposes
(ESP) is a strong, transdisciplinary tradition in the observation of
language use in specialized contexts. The expression “language use”
has traditionally been employed by scholars in order to emphasize that
what people say or write is closely related to the purposes or the
functions of communication. Many ESP studies also highlight the fact
that the way people actually use a language is somewhat different from
the way they think they use it and is even more different from how
they think they should use it. As Brown and Yule (1983) claimed,
language use is equivalent to “discourse”, a concept based on systemic
relations between text and context. The early studies of language use
in specialized contexts, genre and register studies in particular,
mainly focused on text, context being to a point relegated to the
background, as a set of influential factors leading to disciplinary or
professionally-based variation patterns. Since those early studies,
context has gradually been given a more prominent role in what counts
as specialized language use. For example, coherence and cohesion,
defined by Halliday and Hasan (1976), have proved powerful concepts
helping contemporary scholars provide ample evidence that text and
context constitute a unified language system instantiated by text.
Triangulated approaches (Angouri 2010), providing thick descriptions
of language use through detailed analyses of contextual data, have
also evidenced the centrality of context in how we actually use a
language. Corpus approaches to language use, although they are
fundamentally “textual”, have provided further evidence of context
playing a prominent role. For example, the building of small
specialized corpora (Koester 2010) sometimes representing extremely
specialized discourse varieties, are typically sampled from contextual
parameters such as specialized domains or specialized actions and
social roles. The latest explorations of specialized milieus and
cultures, as well as the epistemological approach to those concepts,
are also likely to reinforce the inextricable links between text and
context as they are likely to highlight the unified nature of language
use in specialized settings.

An increasing number of academic and professional contexts are global,
academic, or business organizations where language use is, in reality,
multilingual. The phenomenon has led to a myriad of small-scale and
large-scale studies showing that English is very often used as a
lingua franca (Cogo 2018). Those studies provide us with insights not
only into the contextual factors of language choice, but also on the
specific nature of English, as illustrated by the “lingua franca
core”, a set of key L2 characteristics whether in speech or writing.

Language use is also multimodal. Research into this facet of language
use in academic and professional contexts regularly invites scholars
to consider language use as part of a more general communication
system in which text, images, videos, even gestures, jointly
contribute to the achievement of communicative purposes. This stream
of studies not only renews what we know about the tenets of effective
communication in specialized settings, but also invites us to rethink
the way language use, or literacy, is actually transmitted to learners
of all kinds, whether they are university students (Dressen-Hammouda
and Wigham 2022) or professionals seeking to improve their
communicative skills in the global workplace (Whitehouse 2023).

Due to the multifaceted nature of language use in academic and
professional contexts, the conference welcomes theoretical approaches,
practical approaches, and a combination of both.

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