Appunti completi Lingua inglese

Lez 2 – Introducing ESP 1-5

English for Specific Purposes refers to the teaching and learning of English as a second or foreign language where the goal of the learners is to use English in a particular domain. Its teaching is motivated by the large need to communicate across languages in areas such as commerce and technology.

• EOP = English for Occupational Purpose
• EVP = English for Vocational Purpose
• EMP = English for Medical Purpose
• EBP = English for Business Purpose
• ELP = English for Legal Purpose
• ESCP = English for Sociocultural Purpose

• The content and aims of the course are oriented to the specific needs of the learners.
• The focus is on language, skills and genres appropriate to specific activities the learners need to carry out English.
• Typically, students are adults, in a homogeneous group (in terms of learning goals, not language proficiency).
• Key issue is how to identify learner needs, the nature of the genres that learners need to be able to produce as well as participate in and how we can know our learners have been able to do this successfully (and, if not, what we can do to help them to do this).

The history of ESP

John Swales’ movement history in ESP begins in the early 60s. Much of the research cited in the review for international or local journals was published or not in a language other than English. Sometimes, it’s difficult to make clear-cut decisions about trends in research or which articles to cite.

ESP has been a practitioners’ movement, devoted to establishing the needs and relevant discourse features for a targeted group of students.

From text-based counts to “rhetorical devices”

In the years following World War II, Swales began Episodes in ESP. At that time, the central focus of ESP research was English for science and technology (EST) in academic contexts, an interest that remains strong to this day.

In the first years of this period, research tended to be descriptive. Swales’ first example in Episodes was devoted to counting grammatical features across genres (textbooks and journal articles), in an attempt to determine some general sentence-level characteristics of EST.

However, as Swales noted, this approach was soon overridden, as influential EST researchers, John Lackstrom, Larry Selinker, and Louis P. Trimble began to dominate the field.

For these North American authors from what was called the Washington School, the relationships between EST grammar or lexicon and the authors’ rhetorical purposes in texts were central.

Their Grammar and Technical English (1972), republished and discussed in Episodes, had a major impact. Joined by Mary Todd Trimble, Louis Trimble, and Karl Drobnic (1978), they edited a collection that also focused upon science and technology. Along with chapters on curriculum design, this publication included sections on contrastive discourse analyses for Spanish, Macedonian, and Japanese, investigating both lexical and grammatical EST features.

In addition to contrastive analysis studies, a chapter in the volume called Purpose, device, and level in rhetorical theory was contributed by a Washington School colleague, Robert Bley-Vroman. There, the author laid out the goals of ESP rhetorical theory as establishing a correspondence of purpose with device, with “device” referring to “the linguistic means by which the author achieves his end.”

Washington School work represented an important turning point for ESP, with rhetorical concerns, particularly as they were inferred from “devices” within the text, becoming a central research focus.

Lez 3 – The more recent past: 1981–1990

Broadening the scope/introducing central concepts

A second historical period in ESP is bounded by the work of John Swales, whose seminal Aspects of Article Introductions first appeared in the United Kingdom in 1981.

The approach described there became widely recognized when it appeared in augmented form in Genre Analysis (1990), initiating a research boom that has yet to end. ESP leaders were also making an effort to expand the movement’s horizons.

The editors of ESPJ, John Swales and Ann Johns, expressed their concerns that ESP continued to be limited and was therefore considered irrelevant by most of the TESOL community. However, they promised to broaden the journal’s scope, limiting the scope and interest in ESP principally to English for Science and Technology in an academic context. As a result, many TESOL professionals, working in content-based instruction and vocational ESL, do not think of themselves as part of ESP. They attempt through this journal and elsewhere to break from ESP’s self-imposed limit in order to return to Strevens’ original broad definition of ESP (1977), which included English for academic purposes, English for occupational purposes (also called VESL).

The 1981–1990 period may have been the most inclusive in terms of topics for published research and pedagogical practice.

During this period, special issues of the journal were devoted to:

• Teacher training;
• Vocational ESP;
• Interlanguage;
• And to training of international teaching assistants.

The research into student needs had become increasingly empirical, triangulated, and complex over time.

In 1986 Jacobson, also breaking new ground, concentrated upon the strategic, rather than grammatical or discourse competence needs of students in a physics lab.

In an Italian setting of 1988, Tarantino used a face-to-face questionnaire interview to measure the macro- and micro-level needs of 53 EST researchers and students.

Lez 3 – Introducing ESPP – The initial phase (part II)

Probably, the most famous of the studies in this period was the first volume published in 1981 by TARONE & other colleagues, “The ESP Journal”, established by Grace Burkhart at the American University in Washington DC and reprinted in Episodes in ESP, 1988.

They focused on one arguably central characteristic of scientific prose, syntactic voice, argued that about 25% of verbs in research articles are in the passive.

Tarone & her colleagues were testing hypotheses about functions of a specific grammatical feature as it influenced rhetorical decision among a narrow range of research articles in astrophysics.

A new characteristic was the involvement, in this 1981 study, of an expert as “specialist informant”.

Through Washington School first and then with Tarone’s work were set two influential approaches in ESP methodology identified by Selinker, in 1988, in his research overview: “consultation with subject-specialist informants” and “rhetorical/grammatical analyses” of specific types of texts, generally in science and technology disciplines.

The definition of ESP research topics and texts found in Tarone a strong influential reference and, then, remains central.

Lez 4 – Linguistic devices and their rhetorical purpose

The interest in linguistic “devices” brought Adams and Smith to explore that L2 speakers may have difficulties with distinguishing between objective statements of fact and author-marked observations in written texts.

Though computers were not widely employed between 1981 and 1990, researchers studied the technologies available. Betty Lou Dubois studied the use of slides in biomedical speeches and later, in 1985, the design and presentation of posters at biomedical meetings.

Zac and Dudley-Evans examined 2 features of the telex: word omission and word abbreviation, suggesting how they might be taught in Business English.

Research involving computers did appear in Murray’s study of his “new medium of communication” in a business environment.

Other, less common, topics in ESP research

The ESPJ also touched on topics that were common in the more “general” ESL/EFL areas, such as error analysis; other subjects, such as learning strategies, became increasingly important to research in the early 21st century.

• In 1990, Adamson employed a case study approach to 15 ESL students, investigating effective and ineffective strategies (e.g. note-taking and using dictionaries) that were applied to academic classrooms, concluding that English for academic purpose is best taught along with academic content.

Central ESP concepts: Genre and rhetorical moves

The term genre began to appear in the ESP literature, often as linguistic “devices” were contrasted among text types.

The issue of genre “volatility”, important to current research and theory, was raised by Tinberg, who found differences in rhetorical purposes between examples of two texts within the same genre, resulting from competing constraints on the author to stay within the bounds of the general community’s genre, while at the same time developing a strong and persuasive argument within the smaller community of his/her paradigm.

The other key term which has become central to ESP research is rhetorical moves, discussed in Swales’ Aspects of Article Introductions.

It gained particular popularity in Britain during this period and in other parts of the world after the publication of Genre Analysis in 1990.

During this second historical period, from the initial publication of English for Specific Purposes and Aspects of Article Introductions in the early 1980s to the appearance of Genre Analysis (1990), the two major terms in the field, genre and rhetorical moves, were introduced and discussed; and many of the current topics and research approaches were already in place.

What was missing, among other things, was the sophisticated use of the computer for gathering corpus data, topics relating to additional ESP areas and critical, and contextualized methodological approaches.

Despite the varied topics, ESP research continued to operate within a narrow topical range, as the principal interest of researchers often focused on English for academic purposes, particularly science and technology (EST) at the post-secondary or graduate level.

Lez 5 – The modern age: 1990-2011

The instruction and importance of new international journals

During this period, two new journals appeared, both included research articles published in ESPJ: The Journal of Second Language Writing (JSLW) by Ilona Leki and Tony Silva, focused on the writing processes or student errors.

In 2001 a large number of articles in ESPJ and elsewhere on academic texts, students and contexts appeared and Liz Hamp-Lyons and Ken Hyland established the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP) with many examples of ESP related articles.

These new 2 together with ESPJ are central to an understanding of ESP research in the 21st century as academics are now required to publish in international journals in order to be promoted in their home institutions. Dominance of genre in ESP research, since Swales’ Genre Analysis (1990) initiated a remarkably productive topic for scholars.

Swales also introduced nomenclature that has become integral to ESP research and parlance. His Other Floors, Other Voices (1998) brought “textography” into the ESP lexicon, as he studied the interactions of texts and contexts in 3 distinct discourse communities, using written work, interviews, observations and other data. Genre offers possibilities for increasingly complex discussions of text, context, writer, audience, language, & other issues, it may continue to intrigue researchers and ESP practitioners for many years to come.

What makes these two international journals central to an understanding of ESP research is that academics are now required to publish in international journals in order to be promoted in their institution. Thus, ESP, as well as other international publications, have experienced a rapid increase in international submissions.

Final thoughts

ESP has come a long way in terms of research practices since its inception in the 1960s, but genre, a topic initiated in 1981, remains with us.

In addition, other topics and methodologies have opened the way for learner-centred approaches, advocated by Hutchinson and Waters, and later, by Tardy. There will probably be further interest in classroom-based research and in studies in less popular academic locales, such as secondary and vocational schools or in regions where English is the lingua franca.

Perhaps, unfortunately, for the needs of local students and international scholars, research may become more centralized in international journals, though online publications may mitigate some of these issues.

Tourism translation (lezione 6) 6-16

This chapter considers how to promote tourism across languages and cultures and how persuasion is produced in tourism communication, focusing on cultural contexts.

Tourism can be defined as a cross-cultural dialogic process in which both tourists and promoters of tourism participate. On the one hand, promoting tourism reflects the socio-cultural features of the environment that has brought a tourist product; on the other hand, also the way tourists perceive the marketing message is important, since they belong to certain socio-cultural contexts.

The history of leisure travel

Leisure travel has an ancient history. It started as early as 1500 BC in ancient Egypt when privileged groups of the population travelled to the pyramids out of pleasure. In ancient Greek and Rome, social elites spent their holidays at countryside and seaside resorts, away from the main towns and cities.

The Middle Ages saw the emergence of travelling for religious purposes. Wealthy people began to travel to go on pilgrimages through Europe to seek spiritual help and guidance.

During the seventeenth century, upper class young men travelled to foreign places to increase their cultural knowledge, but also to affirm their social status.

The introduction of a widespread railway system in the mid-nineteenth century allowed more people to travel and paved the way for the era of mass tourism, which developed even more in the 1900s due to the rise of large multinational airlines.

Industry persuasion

The aim of tourism advertising is to create perceptions, beliefs, impressions, ideas and expectations that satisfy the ideas in mind of potential tourists. These mental representations are referred to in Tourism Studies as “tourism image”. This image is created through the verbal, visual and auditory elements of tourism advertisements and makes tourists notice that they have unsatisfied needs (push factors) that can be fulfilled by tourism products (pull factors).

Defining tourism promotional materials (TPM)

Tourism promotional materials (TPM) are described as a collection of media, such as brochures, leaflets, posters, flyers, postcards and websites that are used to increase the selling of tourism products. Today, the Internet has become the main channel for the promotion of tourism due to its speed, accessibility, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. More and more potential tourists do research online to seek for info-promotional materials on tourist destinations and products.

The language of tourism promotion (lezione 7)

Language informs tourists about what must be seen and experienced and gives an anticipation of the intense pleasure through a variety of non-tourist technologies such as brochures, magazines, TV and films.

Tourist Promotion Materials are considered persuasive texts. Their dominant function is to induce behavioural responses, by persuading, attracting attention and arousing interest. They often rely on some specific expressive elements, such as alliteration, metaphors and puns, in order to communicate in a creative manner. The language of tourism promotion gives the idea of novelty and strangeness through the use of specific lexical terms such as “primitive”, “simple”, “natural”, “different”, “colorful”, “exotic”, “unique”...

Another form of tourist language is the “language of authenticity” to give the impression of authenticity and to make the tourist feel that he or she is part of an authentic experience.

The tourist industry also exploits the “language of recreation” to sell the idea of play regardless of where the action happens.

The tourist experience must be one that allows people to escape from daily routine and to move to a “different” world, where they can do whatever they want, free from temporal constraint.

Tourism promotion is a form of persuasive communication aimed at encouraging people to visit destinations, stay in hotels, and purchase holidays. Tourism Promotional Materials (TPMs), such as brochures, leaflets, posters and websites, are created by professional copywriters whose task is to influence how people think, feel and act.

Although tourism promotion has always relied heavily on language, scholarly interest in this topic emerged only recently. The pioneering work was Graham Dann’s The Language of Tourism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective (1996), which argued that tourism possesses a discourse of its own. Dann combined linguistic and sociological approaches to analyse the rhetorical techniques used in tourism promotion. Later studies by Cappelli (2006), Francesconi (2007) and Manca (2016) further investigated the linguistic mechanisms of persuasion in tourism communication.

TPMs perform three main textual functions

• Operative (persuasive): Encouraging action.
• Informative: Providing practical information.
• Expressive: Using creative language such as metaphors, puns and alliterations.

Tourism promotion relies on three interconnected perspectives

1. Differentiation

The language of differentiation creates a balance between familiarity and novelty.

Destinations are presented as unique, exotic and different through words such as: primitive, natural, unique, colourful, exotic, remote, timeless, traditional, original and authentic.

2. Authentication

The language of authentication creates the impression of authenticity and allows tourists to feel they are experiencing something genuine. It reflects the tourist’s quest for authentic experiences.

3. Recreation

The language of recreation promotes play, leisure, relaxation and escape from everyday life.

Together, differentiation, authentication and recreation make tourism communication persuasive.

Three important dimensions