Language Value
June 2020, Volume 12, Number 1 pp. 148-153
ISSN 1989-7103
BOOK REVIEW
Specialised English: New Directions in ESP and EAP Research and Practice
Ken Hyland and Lillian L. C. Wong
Routledge: London and New York, 2019 (1st ed.). 260 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-138-58877-6
Reviewed by Gang Yao
Universidad de Murcia, Spain
Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
The field of specialized English has expanded on an unprecedented scale. We have
already seen that there is a plethora of research articles in specialized top journals like
Journal of English for Academic Purposes and English for Specific Purposes, as well as
influential volumes and handbooks: in English for Specific Purposes
(ESP),
publications like The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes edited by Paltridge
and Starfield (2013), Introducing English for Specific Purposes by Anthony (2018); in
English for Academic Purposes (EAP), publications such as the seminal collection
Research Perspectives on English for Academic Purposes edited by Flowerdew and
Peacock (2001), Introducing English for Academic Purposes by Charles and Pecorari
(2016), and The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes edited by
Hyland and Shaw (2016).
The field, however, is moving so fast that many researchers and practitioners are unable
to keep current with its developments and trends. Hyland and Wong‟s volume,
therefore, seeks to contribute to the evolving and dynamic scholarship of specialized
English by gathering cutting-edge chapters on current and international perspectives on
specific varieties of English. It covers a wide range of recent issues of EAP and ESP,
such as English as a lingua franca, workplace English, academic interaction, practitioner
identity, data-driven learning, and critical thinking. In addition, diverse genres are
included, among others, research articles, workplace talks, university tutorials, builders‟
diaries, and personal statements.
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Specialised English: New Directions in ESP and EAP Research and Practice
The volume contains 17 specially commissioned chapters by some of the world‟s
leading experts. The chapters are grouped in a thematic way, covering key concepts of
specialized English (Chapter 1-Chapter 6), textlinguistic analyses (Chapter 7-Chapter
12), and classroom practices (Chapter 13-Chapter 17).
The first thematic module focuses on a series of current issues in specialized English
language research and teaching. It starts with a chapter by Anna Mauranen where she
looks at the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in the trend of globalization and
language contact from macro-social, individual‟s cognitive, and micro-social
perspectives. By exploring authentic data from corpora of spoken and written ELF in
academic settings, the author shows that ELF as a dynamic and complex system brings
about linguistic changes in English through the process of approximation and fixing. In
Chapter 2, Jane Lockwood raises the conceptual issue of „workplace English‟ that
oversimplifies the specialized and contextualized communicative needs. She thus
proposes a multilayered analytical framework to unpack and theorize workplace English
and suggests a specially tailored syllabus planning and assessment design. Vijay Bhatia
in Chapter 3 argues that the application of critical genre analysis that focuses on
interdiscursive performance (Bhatia, 2017) will benefit the curricular design of English
for Professional Communication (EPC), thereby plugging the remaining gap between
school practices and professional practices in the world of work.
The fourth chapter by John Flowerdew provides some thought-provoking insights into
the notion of power, which is closely related to different aspects of EAP, including
institutions, EAP practitioners, the environment of English as a global lingua franca,
disciplinary communities, pedagogy, and discourses. He concludes that EAP
practitioners need to familiarize themselves with those different power relationships and
adopt a critical and assertive approach in order to change the marginalized situation of
EAP. Echoing Flowerdew‟s viewpoint, Alex Ding in Chapter
5 focuses on the
peripheral and marginal role of EAP practitioners and examines the cause and effect
relationship between “professional disarticulation” (Hadley, 2015: 57) and practitioner
identity crisis. He argues that the status, development, and recognition of EAP
practitioner identity are diminishing, due to the impact of neoliberalism, a lack of
socialization and cultural capital, and some internal conflicts within the field. He
concludes by advocating a collective consideration of the identities that EAP
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Book Review
practitioners are willing to develop and commit to. The first section ends with a chapter
by Lynne Flowerdew where she first raises several conceptual issues in both ELF and
learner corpus research of disciplinary writing, such as native-speaker norms and
comparability. By discussing four previous corpus studies of both fields, the author
suggests that future research should seek to build bridges between the two fields and to
find their similarities and differences.
The second part of the volume concerns texts of various genres, including research
articles, university tutorials, students‟ texts, and personal statements. Ken Hyland in
Chapter 7 explores the use of interaction by disciplinary writers over the past 50 years.
By implementing Hyland‟s (2005) model of stance and engagement, he attempts to
uncover whether writers‟ commitment and attitude towards what they said, as well as
their engagement with readers, have changed over time and across disciplines. His
findings suggest that changes in stance and engagement do exist but are slow and barely
noticed. In Chapter 8, Ian Bruce proposes a social genre/cognitive genre model in order
to examine the expression of critical thinking through written text. The successful
application of this model in two genre studies demonstrates that it is important to
incorporate resources such as rhetorical moves, metadiscourse devices, metaphor, and
engagement markers into the expression of critical thinking. Chapter 9 by Coxhead and
Dang seeks to explore the usefulness of existing single-word and multi-word academic
lists in preparing learners for the vocabulary used in university laboratory and tutorial
scenes. The results show that Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) outperforms other
single-word lists in terms of coverage and number of items and that the overlap of
multi-word lists that consists of core items is useful. The study further provides
suggestions for EAP pedagogy, materials, and course design.
In Chapter 10, Janet Holmes shifts her attention to the workplace and especially focuses
on how different levels of social constraints of the „culture order‟ (Holmes, 2017) affect
workplace interaction. Her analysis based on recorded data foregrounds the
sociopragmatic skills that newcomers should acquire for professional identity
construction. The study ends by providing practical instruction to develop teaching and
learning materials. Jean Parkinson in Chapter 11 calls scholarly attention to multimodal
student texts, where visual elements are becoming increasingly common. Drawing upon
prior studies, Parkinson explores the possible use of social semiotic and move analyses
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in student‟s multimodal texts. Finally, she suggests that ESP teachers raise student‟s
awareness of rhetorical conventions in visual meaning, as well as coherence between
visual and written meaning. Interested as well in students‟ texts, Ann Johns focuses on
student‟s personal statement (PS) writing task in Chapter 12. By looking at the PS
writing processes of three secondary students, she illustrates what the challenges in
writing are and how the students meet them. She concludes the chapter by offering
pedagogical suggestions to help students construct identity and explore
accomplishments.
The last section of the volume consists of five chapters that explore pedagogic practices
both as general principles and specific classroom situations. It begins with Laurence
Anthony‟s research which addresses some common issues when EAP instructors or
learners implement data-driven learning (DDL) in classrooms, such as the construction
of corpus and the interaction with it. He introduces a variety of corpus analysis tools
and accompanying teaching strategies in order to integrate DDL effectively into
classroom practices. In Chapter 14, Lilian Wong continues the topic of DDL and applies
this approach to multidisciplinary thesis writing courses. The feedback from students
and instructors suggests that while students tend to have a positive attitude towards the
corpus-assisted writing resource, teachers seem to feel ambivalent about it.
Jill Northcott in Chapter 15 investigates the academic feedback on student writing
provided by EAP tutors and subject tutors, respectively. Her analysis found that there
are some areas where both tutor groups can provide meaningful feedback, whereas in
other areas one or the other tutor group is more qualified as feedback providers. This
gap suggests the need for collaboration between EAP and subject tutors. In Chapter 16,
Wingate and Ogiermann explore writing tutors‟ use of directives in relation to dialogic
versus monologic teaching styles. The results, based on the analysis of ten academic
tutorials, did not meet their expectations. The tutor with the dialogic approach was
expected to use fewer directives and more mitigated devices than the tutor with the
other approach. Further analysis suggests that the contradictory results were influenced
by the sequential position of the directives in the dialogue. Following the same research
topic as in Northcott‟s study (Chapter 15), in the final chapter (Chapter 17), Li and
Cargill also explore the collaboration between EAP practitioners and subject experts,
but in the setting of a Chinese university. They analyze and reflect on why the second
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author‟s attempt at facilitating an attitude of openness to collaboration at the said
university is unsuccessful. The views from both discipline supervisors and students
suggest implications for Chinese EAP teachers.
Taken together, the chapters encompassed in this collection capture some of the most
interesting and important developments in the field, contribute to expanding reader‟s
knowledge of specialized varieties of English, and suggest avenues that could be
explored in future studies. The chapters cover wide-ranging topics, theories, methods,
and tools that are tailored to suit teachers‟ and learners‟ specific needs. It is noteworthy
that although it explores the same focal field, this volume differs from other relevant
publications in that it synthesizes the most up-to-date studies and authoritative
discussions from established scholars of the field. Moreover, a special section of the
volume is devoted to introducing approaches, tools, and practical advice for diverse
classroom settings, which would be particularly appreciated by EAP/ ESP practitioners
and teachers.
Overall, the edited volume Specialised English: New Directions in ESP and EAP
Research and Practice by Hyland and Wong brings together differing views on
specialized English and provides fascinating insights into the theories and practices of
EAP/ESP. It is an invaluable resource for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate
students and researchers in EAP/ESP or applied linguistics in general, as well as pre-
and in-service teachers and tutors of EAP/ESP.
REFERENCES
Anthony, L. 2018. Introducing English for Specific Purposes. London: Routledge.
Bhatia, V. K. 2017. Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating Interdiscursive Performance
in Professional Communication. London: Routledge.
Charles, M. and Pecorari, D. 2016. Introducing English for Academic Purposes.
London: Routledge.
Flowerdew, J. and Peacock, M. (Eds.) 2001. Research Perspectives on English for
Academic Purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Hadley, G. 2015. English for Academic Purposes in Neoliberal Universities: A Critical
Grounded Theory. Heidelberg, London and New York: Springer.
Holmes, J. 2017. “Leadership and change management: Examining gender, cultural and
„hero leader‟ stereotypes”. In Cornelia, I. and S. Schnurr (Eds.) Challenging
Leadership Stereotypes: Discourse and Power Management. Singapore: Springer,
15-43.
Hyland, K. 2005. “Stance and engagement: a model of interaction in academic
discourse”. Discourse Studies, 7 (2), 173-192.
Hyland, K. and Shaw, P. (Eds.) 2016. The Routledge handbook of English for
academic purposes. London: Routledge.
Paltridge, B. and Starfield, S. (Eds.) 2013. The Handbook of English for Specific
Purposes. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Received: 05 June 2020
Accepted: 08 June 2020
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