{"title":"Multimodal genre analysis of video abstracts: Exploring rhetorical structure, hybridization, and innovation","authors":"Sara Nezami Nav , Stephanie Link","doi":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.11.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.11.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Video Abstracts (VAs) are designed to summarize research and enhance research visibility. Despite some efforts to understand their generic structure and rhetorical strategies, the evolving multimodal nature of VAs—particularly in relation to authors' communicative intentions—remains underexplored. This lack of research raises critical questions about the communicative functions of VAs and their stability as a new genre. Inspired by literature on transcription of video genres and multimodal discourse analysis, this exploratory study analyzes the rhetorical structure and modal affordances of three VA formats–Graphical VAs, Whiteboard VAs, and Talking-researcher VAs–—using insights gathered from interviews with their creators. The results identify both traditional and novel features of VAs’ rhetorical structure, aligning VAs with research and non-research genres. Additionally, each VA format uses modes creatively to communicate research to a hybrid audience of scientists and nonscientists, enabling researchers to establish new communicative intentions but resulting in instability of the genre. We discuss implications for understanding their multimodal, meaning-making affordances as essential for fostering genre innovation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47809,"journal":{"name":"English for Specific Purposes","volume":"78 ","pages":"Pages 17-32"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143162073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Authorial identity construction through implicit stance-taking in the introduction of research articles","authors":"Yajing Wu","doi":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.12.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.12.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Stance is an important resource for the construction of authorial identity. However, much attention has been paid to explicit self-mentions (e.g., <em>I/we</em>), and very little is known about how authorial identities are constructed through implicit stance resources across disciplines. Drawing upon an adapted stance model from Hyland (2005a), this research explores authorial identities constructed through implicit stance resources in 120 introductions of research articles from both soft (i.e., philosophy and linguistics) and hard (i.e., bioscience and materials science) disciplines by using mixed methods. Findings show that: (1) In the construction of opinion holders, with the exception of linguistics, all disciplines tend to employ certainty-indicating boosters rather than fact-asserting boosters to express their opinions; authors of soft disciplines tend to employ commitment hedges, while authors of hard disciplines tend to employ accuracy-oriented hedges. (2) In the construction of evaluators, all disciplines predominantly employ assessment markers and rarely use emotional markers; authors of linguistics use less significance markers than those of hard disciplines to highlight the research value. These nuanced findings are beneficial for teaching students to construct discipline-recognized authorial identities in academic writing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47809,"journal":{"name":"English for Specific Purposes","volume":"78 ","pages":"Pages 88-108"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143162290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"","authors":"John M. Swales","doi":"10.1016/j.esp.2025.02.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esp.2025.02.001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47809,"journal":{"name":"English for Specific Purposes","volume":"78 ","pages":"Pages 180-182"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143428836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lexical coverage in science popularization discourse: The case of popular science news from Scientific American","authors":"Hong Yu , Ju Wen","doi":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.10.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.10.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Science popularization discourse offers valuable reading materials for second language (L2) learners in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) contexts. However, the lexical demands of these materials remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, this study examines the lexical profile of <em>Scientific American</em> (SA), one of the most widely read popular science publications. Based on a corpus of popular science news collected from the SA website, we analyzed its lexical demand in terms of Nation's (2018) BNC/COCA word frequency lists and West's (1953) General Service List of English Words (GSL) plus Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL). Our results indicate that to achieve minimal comprehension of popular science news published in SA, learners should be familiar with approximately 5,000 word families, while optimal comprehension requires knowledge of around 10,000 word families, including proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds, and acronyms. Notably, the GSL covers 77.55% and the AWL covers 7.08% coverage of the SA corpus, suggesting that our SA corpus has a higher coverage of general English words and a lower coverage of academic English words than university-level academic written texts. These findings highlight the potential value of popular science news in supporting academic reading, particularly for beginning EAP learners who may find these materials less lexically demanding than research articles. Pedagogical implications for incorporating popular science news into EAP courses are also provided.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47809,"journal":{"name":"English for Specific Purposes","volume":"77 ","pages":"Pages 45-55"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142446268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Guiding and engaging the audience: Visual metadiscourse in PowerPoint slides of Three Minute Thesis presentations","authors":"Yuanyuan Ma, Feng Kevin Jiang","doi":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.10.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.10.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A compelling academic presentation extends beyond the mere linguistic strategies of the presenter. The effective use of diverse multimodal elements in the presentation slides also merits considerable attention. Therefore, this research explores the way presenters use visual components to turn passive listeners into active participants in the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) presentation. For this purpose, this study developed a framework to analyse visual metadiscourse based on Hyland's (2005) model of metadiscourse and visual grammar by Kress and van Leeuwen (2021), exploring the interactive and interactional functions of visual metadiscourse. The realization resources of each visual metadiscourse marker were identified based on 240 PowerPoint slides. This research emphasizes the critical role of visual metadiscourse for presenters in facilitating the guidance and engagement of a heterogeneous listener. The findings of this research could significantly contribute to improving visual literacy for researchers to cater to the need to design various digital genres in academic and professional settings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47809,"journal":{"name":"English for Specific Purposes","volume":"77 ","pages":"Pages 56-70"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142535298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Seyyed Ehsan Golparvar , Guangwei Hu , Seyedeh Elaheh Seyedi
{"title":"Cohesion in the discussion section of research articles: A cross-disciplinary investigation","authors":"Seyyed Ehsan Golparvar , Guangwei Hu , Seyedeh Elaheh Seyedi","doi":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.08.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.08.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Despite its prominence and functionality in academic writing, cohesion is under-researched in academic genres, including research articles (RAs). Moreover, there is little cross-disciplinary research on cohesion in academic discourse. Thus, this study aimed to investigate cohesion in the discussion section of RAs at sentence, paragraph and text levels, across three disciplines (i.e., applied linguistics, chemistry, and economics). To this end, 24 indices of local, global, and text cohesion were analyzed in a corpus of 300 discussion sections (100 from each discipline). MANOVAs identified significant cross-disciplinary variations in local, global, and text cohesion. Specifically, indices of local cohesion were generally higher in applied linguistics discussions, but measures of global, and text cohesion were mostly higher in chemistry and economics texts, respectively. Random forest modeling revealed that negative connectives were the most powerful classifiers of applied linguistics discussions, whereas adjacent sentence overlap noun synonyms and positive connectives were the best predictors of chemistry and economics discussions, respectively. These results are discussed with a view to offering theoretical and pedagogical implications for English-for-specific-purposes researchers and practitioners.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47809,"journal":{"name":"English for Specific Purposes","volume":"77 ","pages":"Pages 1-19"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889490624000413/pdfft?md5=e8797ff05476b73331d2a26726b72b5e&pid=1-s2.0-S0889490624000413-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142230671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Verbal-visual skill-building and perceptional changes in English presentation","authors":"Wen-Chun Chen","doi":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.10.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.10.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Oral presentations in English are emphasized in higher education, yet verbal and visual communication often lack balance in academic training. Mastery of visual aids is as crucial as verbal expression, especially for nonnative English speakers. This research proposed a skill-building pedagogy to optimize dual-channel communication, involving 19 college students from a Southern Taiwanese University. A progressive instructional design incorporated English for Specific Academic Purposes, visual communication, and tech-tool applications. Verbal fluency and visual use were assessed to evaluate learning outcomes; perceptional changes were revealed. Data collection included presentation footage, surveys, and interviews. Results showed significant improvements in verbal fluency and visual mastery after multimodal reinforcement. Students' awareness and confidence grew with skill development, significantly changing their preparation stage perceptions. Presentation language, visualization skills, and technological tools empowered nonnative English speakers to overcome linguistic constraints through practice and feedback. This research highlighted the need for comprehensive training programs that empirically demonstrate how verbal and visual resources enhance each other during presentations. The findings validated that deliberate learning and conscious preparation in oral speech and visual techniques optimize communication. Enhancing English learners' multimodal expression skills prepares them for academic and professional success.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47809,"journal":{"name":"English for Specific Purposes","volume":"77 ","pages":"Pages 71-85"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142535299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Artificial Intelligence for Academic Purposes (AIAP): Integrating AI literacy into an EAP module","authors":"Thu Ngan Ngo , David Hastie","doi":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.09.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.09.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>With the rise of generative AI (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT and their growing relevance in academic contexts, the need for AI literacy has become imperative, particularly for international students in EAP programs. The study addresses the gap in practical guidance for incorporating AI literacy by developing and implementing a 10-week AI-integrated EAP module at a pathway college in Scotland based on a novel framework termed AI for Academic Purposes (AIAP). Utilising a mixed-methods approach, the research investigates the impact of this module on international students' attitudes, confidence, and purposes of using AI tools. Results of this study indicate significant improvements in students' ability to critically evaluate GenAI output, confidence in using a greater variety of AI tools, understanding of ethical AI use, and an expansion in the purposes for which students use AI tools. The integration of AI literacy with traditional EAP skills was found to meet students' academic needs effectively. This study provides a replicable model for integrating AI literacy into EAP courses, offering a holistic educational approach that aligns technological proficiency with ethical awareness.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47809,"journal":{"name":"English for Specific Purposes","volume":"77 ","pages":"Pages 20-38"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142357615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Genre learning from the EAP class to undergraduate research symposiums","authors":"Xiaoqiong You , Xiaoye You","doi":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.10.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.10.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses have provided undergraduate students with a supporting structure for their research. After leaving these courses, students may write their senior theses or write for research journals or research symposiums. What genre knowledge and writing expertise will they gain through these activities and how? This paper examines the genre learning of a group of Chinese university students as they participated in three undergraduate research symposiums (URSs). The study reveals that they furthered genre knowledge across five domains—subject matter knowledge, formal genre knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, process knowledge, and genre awareness. They achieved these gains as they searched for appropriate research questions and analytical models, annotated and modelled Chinese research articles, experimented with new genre forms critically across lingua-cultural differences, negotiated with non-disciplinary raters and shifting rating criteria of the URSs, and managed their affect productively. Given the affordances of URSs, we conclude the study by suggesting ways to strengthen the ties between the EAP curriculum and URSs.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47809,"journal":{"name":"English for Specific Purposes","volume":"77 ","pages":"Pages 86-99"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142535300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"","authors":"An Cheng","doi":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.12.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.esp.2024.12.005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47809,"journal":{"name":"English for Specific Purposes","volume":"78 ","pages":"Pages 85-87"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2024-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143162070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}