01 Editorial.qxd Editorial Since our last issue, Ibérica has undergone four important changes intended to dynamize the management of manuscripts and increase citations, which we believe will improve the status of the journal in the long run. First, at the beginning of the year this Editorial Team incorporated the figure of ‘statistics advisor’ to help reviewers evaluate empirical data, and provide support for authors wishing to upgrade their research designs. We want to thank Dr. PASCUAL CANTOS GÓMEZ for his generosity in undertaking this responsibility and sharing his knowledge with all of us. Second, English has been chosen as the only lingua franca for publication, with a view to reaching a wider readership and facilitating the search for external reviewers. This decision was made by AELFE’s Executive Board on March 8, 2019, and approved in the General Assembly of Members on June 21, during the memorable AELFE conference held in Pamplona at the University of Navarra. Third, we have set up a new OJS journal-hosting platform that will soon be operative. We would like to thank AELFE’s President, ALEJANDRO CURADO FUENTES, and the Association’s webmaster, FRANCISCO RUIZ ROMERO, for their involvement and dedication. And last, but by no means least, we have the Executive Board’s permission to occasionally include around twelve regular articles per issue and thus reduce waiting times. The next goal on our horizon is the acquisition of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for future articles. In addition to the guest contribution, the present issue contains twelve articles, representing five major research strands that are of central interest to Ibérica’s readers: writing, LSP teaching, English-medium instruction (EMI), multimodality and translation. They cover a varied range of genres (e.g. business letters, academic dissertations from different educational levels, doctoral theses, research articles, lectures and websites) and methodologies (qualitative, quantitative, mixed). Our invited article, by LAURA ALBA-JUEZ AND LACHLAN MACKENZIE, examines the phenomenon of ‘fake news’, an issue of considerable concern in the digital media, within the perspective of professional journalistic discourse. To this end, the authors conduct a sociopragmatic analysis of political and scientific fake news samples in English and lay particular ibérica 38 (2019): 9-16 iSSN: 1139-7241 / e-iSSN: 2340-2784 9 00 IBERICA 38_01 Editorial.qxd 13/1/20 19:45 Página 9 emphasis on the role of emotion. They consider the status of fake news as a genre, and unveil its intricate pragmatic workings, which essentially consist in the induction of false inferences, the display of misleading images, and the manipulation of the main evaluative subsystems in Systemic Functional Linguistics: ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT, and GRADUATION. The multifaceted nature of writing is highlighted in five articles from different perspectives. JUN LEI and TIANMIN JIANG (article 1, “Chinese university faculty’s motivation and language choice for scholarly publishing”) address the motivation and language choices in scholarly publishing among more than 300 Chinese university faculty, and bring to light the complexity of the interactions involving interest and utility value, cost, self-perceived ability, language, discipline, and overseas experience. Another critical aspect of writing, that of students’ perceptions, is investigated by FEDERICO NAVARRO, FERNANDA URIBE GAJARDO, PABLO LOVERA FALCÓN and ENRIQUE SOLOGUREN INSúA (article 2, “Encuentros con la escritura en el ingreso a la educación superior : representaciones sociales de los estudiantes en seis áreas de conocimiento”). Their research delves into the social representations of academic writing teaching expressed by first-year university students from six areas of knowledge in a Chilean state university. Their results show that students deem the discursive and procedural features of ‘indistinctive genres’ (e.g. the essay) the hardest challenge, especially regarding the management of sources and the fulfilment of expectations from teachers and discourse communities, as well as the development of ideas throughout the text. The remaining three papers on writing focus on the expression of authorial stance and draw conclusions that lend themselves to useful pedagogical applications for the training of novice or insecure research writers. ESMAEEL ABDOLLAHZADEH’s (article 6, “A cross-cultural study of hedging in discussion sections by junior and senior academic writers”) scrutinizes the use of uncertainty markers in the discussion sections of master’s dissertations written by Iranian and English graduates in Applied Linguistics and in those of research articles written by professional academics from the same field. His data reveal remarkable differences in use of hedging depending on linguo-cultural background and seniority. For instance, graduates (English and Iranian alike) tend to resort to modal verbs more than professionals, who employ more accurate and reader-based hedges, evidentials and judgmental verbs. Except in the case of modal verbs, Iranian discussions are in general less frequently hedged than English ones, where more conversational hedges can be found. EDITORIAL ibérica 38 (2019): 9-1610 00 IBERICA 38_01 Editorial.qxd 13/1/20 19:45 Página 10 The master’s dissertation in Applied Linguistics is also the target genre of XUYAN QIU’s and XIAOHAO MA’s study of stance, but this time contrasted with the doctoral thesis and the research article (article 12, “Disciplinary enculturation and authorial stance: Comparison of stance features among master’s dissertations, doctoral theses, and research articles”). Their findings disclose different stance-taking practices according to the degree of disciplinary enculturation: the stance patterns of doctoral candidates are similar to those of expert writers, with more self-mentions, whereas master’s students make use of more hedges, boosters and attitude markers. Written stance outside academia is researched by FRANCISCA SUAU-JIMÉNEZ (article 7, “How hotel websites discursively adjust to customer preferences using online criticism”), whose combination of netnographic and metadiscursive surveys uncovers stance trends in a digital genre emblematic of tourism: the hotel website. She diachronically inquiries into the use of attitudinals and boosters in four hotel websites with 200 corresponding negative reviews from TripAdvisor, and concludes that these metadiscourse devices are crucial in the adjustments made by these websites to improve their description of services and indirectly manage customer dissatisfaction. Significant insights into curriculum development for LSP teaching are provided in the work by ALMUDENA BASANTA and LIEVE VANGEHUCHTEN (article 3, “Las cartas de presentación en los informes de RSC en Chile, España y México: en busca de un equilibrio entre People, Planet y Profit”) and in the article by MAHMOOD REZA ATAI and S. YAHYA HEJAZI (article 10, “Assessment of academic English language needs of Iranian post-graduate students of Psychology”). BASANTA and VANGEHUCHTEN offer a corpus-based study of the content and expression of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in business letters presenting the CSR reports of CEOs from three Spanish- speaking countries with different linguistic varieties and from different areas of CSR implementation, which show considerable variation in their motivating principles. This fact points to the need to introduce current, culture-specific key topics in the LSP curriculum. REZA ATAI and HEJAZI’s research, by contrast, concentrates on a more traditional method of needs analysis for curriculum development in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) education and course design. They set out to determine the English language needs of postgraduate psychology students by means of questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and observations in a population of over 300 informants including postgraduates, EAP instructors and content EDITORIAL ibérica 38 (2019): 9-16 11 00 IBERICA 38_01 Editorial.qxd 13/1/20 19:45 Página 11 teachers from seven major Iranian universities. Several skills and subskills are identified as important. The LSP panorama is completed with OLGA ROCÍO SERRANO’s article on teaching in a multimodal setting (article 3, “Selección conceptual, terminológica y estructuración de la historia de un microescenario virtual para el aprendizaje del francés de negocios”). She describes the process of composing a story for an initial macro-scenario for a virtual 3D simulation designed to teach the language used in French business contexts. After a first stage involving an Internet search and the assembly of specialized authentic texts, their qualitative and quantitative analysis with the aid of a lexicometric tool enables the author to spot and select the contents, notions, collocations, compounds and terminological combinations that are worth learning and facilitate the creation of a branching-structured story. Teacher education is the core topic of articles 4 and 5, respectively authored by ANA BOCANEGRA and HELEN BASTURKMEN (“Investigating the teacher education needs of experienced ESP teachers in Spanish universities”) and by AINTZANE DOIZ, DAVID LASAGABASTER and VÍCTOR PAVÓN (“The integration of language and content in English-medium instruction courses: Lecturers’ beliefs and practices”). By interviewing experienced ESP instructors in two Spanish universities, BOCANEGRA and BASTURKMEN explore their teacher education needs and pay attention to the subjects’ views of ESP teaching, the type of knowledge and skills they think are required, and the forms of support that would help them. Results allow the authors to detect five areas of need: course development, knowledge of the target discipline and of the language used in it, peer collaboration, and opportunities for professional growth. The other side of the coin is the education of content lecturers in EMI programmes, studied in depth by DOIZ, LASAGABASTER and PAVÓN. Their investigation discerns the challenges faced by these teachers, which pivot around the specificities of teaching in a foreign language, and stresses the benefits of collaboration with language teachers. Research on Multimodality is here represented by PATRIZIA ANESA’s dynamic qualitative approach to the hybridized semiotics of academic lecture slideshows (article 9, “Syncretic modality in slideshows in the era of digital humanities: Towards a reconceptualization of visuals?”). She draws on the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative for study materials and devises a rubric for operationalizing the grammar of visuals and hence understanding how meaning is created. Her findings indicate that semiotic resources develop EDITORIAL ibérica 38 (2019): 9-1612 00 IBERICA 38_01 Editorial.qxd 13/1/20 19:45 Página 12 syncretically, synergize to convey meanings, and have a reciprocal transformative function. The last topic in this issue is the teaching of translation, specifically the acquisition of translation competence. In article 11 (“La mejora de la competencia traductora de los estudiantes francófonos a través de las asignaturas de traducción francés-español”), JULIA ISABEL LOBATO PATRICIO details the outcomes of a project aimed to improve the translation competence of incoming French-speaking students registered in French translation courses at her university, and provides teaching tools for that purpose. The four book reviews we have included complement the research strands of writing and LSP pedagogies exposed so far. JINJING WANG evaluates Novice Writers and Scholarly Publication: Authors, Mentors, Gatekeepers, coedited by Pejman Habibie and Ken Hyland (2019). This is a book that presents not only experiences, opinions and suggestions from both Anglophone and EAL (English-as-an additional-language) scholars, but also empirical research on the challenges and practices of writing for publication. This serves to rebut myths and misconceptions, make the case for genre literacy and dissolve the ingrained native/non-native divide. Along similar lines, English for Research Publication Pur poses: Critical Plurilingual Pedagogies, authored by Karen Englander and James N. Corcoran (2019) and reviewed by VÍCTOR A. MELÉNDEZ GARCÍA, gives voice to the ‘academic peripheries’ and, among its pedagogical reflections, underlines the need for genre and critical language awareness and sustainable writing practices. Technology-assisted ESP learning is the central subject in Integrating Information and Communication Technologies in English for Specific Purposes, coedited by Rosa Muñoz-Luna and Lidia Taillefer (2017) and reviewed by SALVADOR MONTANER VILLALBA. After summarising the state of the art in technological innovation for didactic purposes, this volume emphasizes the authenticity of ESP teaching and learning contexts (i.e. the design of more practical interactive environments) through information and communication technologies (ICTs), as well as their multiple didactic implementations. Finally, XIANGDONG LI’s review of Optimizing the Process of Teaching English for Medical Purposes with the Use of Mobile Applications: A Memrise-based Study, by Maria Chojnacka (2017), spotlights the book’s innovative proposal about teaching and learning ESP via mobile-technology to encourage self-paced learner autonomy. From these pages, the whole of the Ibérica team warmly welcomes eleven colleagues who have become internal reviewers and thus members of the EDITORIAL ibérica 38 (2019): 9-16 13 00 IBERICA 38_01 Editorial.qxd 13/1/20 19:45 Página 13 Editorial Board this year: Larissa D’Angelo and Stefania Consonni (both from the Università degli Studi di Bergamo), Rosa Lorés Sanz and María Pilar Mur Dueñas (both from the Universidad de Zaragoza), Ismael Arinas Pellón (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Jerome Tessuto (Università degli Studi della Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’) and Gianluca Pontrandolfo (Università degli Studi di Trieste) joined us in early March, and since late June we have also counted on the expertise and commitment of Salvador Montaner Villalba (Universitat Politècnica de València), Stefania M. Maci (Università degli Studi di Bergamo), and Miguel Fernández Álvarez and Óscar O. Santos Sopena, both from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. As usual, I will close this fall editorial with heartfelt thanks to the scholars who have collaborated with Ibérica as external reviewers between January and June. They are, in alphabetical order: Marta Aguilar (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain) Manuel Alcántara Plá (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) Sara Álvarez Martínez (Université Grenoble-Alpes, France) Patrizia Anesa (Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy) Elisabet Arnó i Maciá (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain) Laura Aull (Wake Forest University, USA) Helen Basturkmen (University of Auckland, New Zealand) Marina Bondi (Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia) Sally Burgess (Universidad de La Laguna, Spain) Miguel Ángel Campos Pardillos (Universidad de Alicante, Spain) Tania Collet-Najem (University of Windsor, Canada) Isabel Corona Marzol (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) Emma Dafouz Milne (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain) Rosana Dolón Herrero (Universitat de València, Spain) Nuria Edo Marzá (Universitat Jaume I, Spain) Andreas Eriksson (Chalmers Tekniska Högskola/Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden) Inmaculada Fortanet Gómez (Universitat Jaume I, Spain) Claire Hardaker (University of Lancaster, UK) Isabel Herrando Rodrigo (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) Jill Jeffery (Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands) Kevin Jiang (Jilin University, China) Ricardo María Jiménez (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Spain) Penny Kinnear (University of Toronto, Canada) Becky Kwan (City University of Hong Kong, China) EDITORIAL ibérica 38 (2019): 9-1614 00 IBERICA 38_01 Editorial.qxd 13/1/20 19:45 Página 14 Enrique Lafuente Millán (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) Zak Lancaster (Wake Forest University, USA) Carmen Llamas Saíz (Universidad de Navarra, Spain) Xiaohao Ma (Jilin University, China) Guzmán Mancho Barés (Universitat de Lleida, Spain) Davide Mazzi (Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia) Salvador Montaner Villalba (Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain) Thomas Morton (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Universidad Internacional de la Rioja, Spain) Luo Na (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China) Lene Nordrum (Lunds Universitet, Sweden) Elena Oliete Aldea (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) Moisés Perales Escudero (Universidad de Quintana Roo, Mexico) Pascual Pérez Paredes (University of Cambridge, UK) Brigitte Planken (Radboud Universiteit, The Netherlands) Xuyan Qiu (The University of Hong Kong) Maria Grazia Sindoni (Università degli Studi di Messina, Italy) Jerome Tessuto (Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Italy) Victor Zhe Zhang (The University of Hong Kong) Wei Zhu (University of South Florida, USA) We hope this new issue inspires fresh research paths, contributes to bringing professional and academic communities of practice still closer, and keeps alive their interest in specialised communication. Carmen Sancho Guinda Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain) iberica@aelfe.org Editor-in-chief of Ibérica EDITORIAL ibérica 38 (2019): 9-16 15 00 IBERICA 38_01 Editorial.qxd 13/1/20 19:45 Página 15