01 Editorial.qxd Editorial The last volume (Ibérica no. 26) was a special issue co-edited with Juan Carlos Palmer-Silveira (Universitat Jaume I, Spain) and devoted to “Intercultural and International Business Communication”. This special issue gathered a selection of very interesting works and was honoured with contributions from leading international scholars whose works recurrently appear in book chapters and journal articles dealing with international business communication. My deepest thanks to Juan Carlos Palmer-Silveira for the work carried out and his help with the final edition of the volume. Additionally, I would like to highlight three other issues dealing with the international visibility and the quality of the journal: As you all probably remember, Ibérica was awarded a seal of excellence by the Spanish Foundation of Science and Technology (FECYT) in 2011. That seal was awarded for two years, completing the period last Spring 2013. Some months ago the FECYT initiated the process for the renewal of the seal of excellence and, therefore, we endeavoured to write the reports and fill in the documents required. The final outcome is already known and I am proud to announce that Ibérica has been entitled to renew its seal of excellence. The journal has met all the quality requirements and will be the holder of the seal of excellence for three years this time. Ibérica is the only journal in the field of Applied Linguistics or modern languages (Philology) that has been entitled to exhibit the 2013 renewed seal of excellence on its cover. On top of this, I am very pleased to announce that by the end of 2013 Ibérica was included in two new relevant lists: Academic Journals Database and Cabell’s Directory. As stated in their respective websites, Academic Journals Database is a universal index of periodical literature covering basic research from all fields of knowledge, and is particularly strong in medical research, humanities and social sciences. It contains full-text versions from most of the articles available (at present, 1.28 million articles available online from 5,800 internationally respected journals). Likewise, Cabell’s Directory contains a wealth of information designed to help researchers and academics match their manuscripts with the scholarly journals which are most likely to publish those manuscripts. Here, journals are indexed according to twenty-four different topic areas and Ibérica is included in the area of Education. ibérica 27 (2014): 9-14 iSSN: 1139-7241 / e-iSSN: 2340-2784 9 Ibérica welcomes two new members to its International Advisory Board. These are Maria Vittoria Calvi (from no. 26 onwards) and Maurizio Gotti (from this volume onwards). Maria Vittoria Calvi is familiar to Ibérica’s readers for her works on Spanish for specific purposes and, more particularly, her studies on the Spanish of Tourism, an area in which she is a leading figure worldwide. Maria Vittoria Calvi is, at present, Professor of Spanish Language and Translation at the Italian University of Milan, she has led several R&D projects on Spanish lexicography and Spanish for tourism and has published widely in these two particular areas. Her celebrated books Lengua y comunicación en el español del turismo (Arco Libros, 2006) and La lengua del turismo. Géneros discursivos y terminología (Peter Lang, 2011, coedited with Giovanna Mapelli) have been considered seminal for all those researchers in the field of tourism languages, particularly Spanish. Maria Vittoria Calvi is at present editor in chief of Cuadernos AISPI. Estudios de Lenguas y Literaturas Hispánicas, the recently founded (2013) scientific journal hosted by the Italian Hispanic Association (AISPI). Maurizio Gotti, who, incidentally, also opens this volume, is professor of English Language and Translation, Director of the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Communication, and Director of the Research Centre on Specialised Languages (CERLIS) at the Italian University of Bergamo. His main research areas are three: (i) the features and origins of specialized discourse, both in a synchronic and diachronic perspective; (ii) the history of the English language, English lexicology and lexicography; (iii) and (English) language teaching. He has published extensively in these research areas, particularly book chapters and journal articles and he is most familiar to Ibérica’s audience thanks to, perhaps, his work as editor of the volumes published by Peter Lang as part of the Linguistic Insights series. Maurizio Gotti’s contribution to this volume is a study of popularization discourse, and here, he approaches the construct of popularization from three interrelated perspectives: popularization as reformulation, popularization as recontextualization, and popularization as a socially relevant process. His analysis portrays a complex system that implies the adoption of an integrated approach covering: (a) the cognitive dimension of knowledge; (b) textual analysis; (c) critical discourse analysis; (d) media studies; (e) semiotics; and (f) interdisciplinarity. These five areas, so Gotti expects, will help to identify and describe the various aspects involved in the process of conveying specialist knowledge for information purposes – that is, popularization. EDITORIAL ibérica 27 (2014): 9-1410 Karen Bennett focuses on the supremacy of English in academia and how this has impacted other European academic discourses. More particularly, she first discusses “some of the cultural disjunctions that manifest themselves when the Anglo-Saxon academic model comes into contact with different knowledge traditions” (page 35); and then, she pays attention to the main language industries (STEAM and EAP courses, translations services, etc.) that are contributing to maintaining the epistemological diversity of worldwide knowledge. Webgenres and corporate discourse can also permeate some kind of cultural disjunctions, and these are the object of Fanny Domenec’s paper. The analysis of the British and American versions of two websites belonging to two American companies in the businesses of agricultural technology and oil production shows that company discourse is a reflection of social trends and, moreover, that local audiences have an impact on the rhetorical strategies employed by each company to convey information and reach a particular society. The language of wine is studied in the next two papers from rather different points of view and, thus, makes “winespeak” stand as a promising field of research within ESP genre analysis and lexicography, The “user needs paradigm” is the focus of Michele Van der Merwe and Pedro A. Fuertes- Olivera lexicographical analysis of two South-African dictionaries that deal with the lexis of wine and were published within a 40-year’s span. The authors first provide background information on specialised lexicography and then move on to offer an in-depth analysis of subject field labels as they are contained in both dictionaries. Next is Bozena Wislocka Breit’s contrastive study of wine tasting sheets. Here, the author makes use of Systematic Functional Linguistics and Appraisal Theory to examine the main features of wine tasting sheets and its characterization as a linguistic genre on its own. Her main conclusion is that the free and quasi literary style of English texts contrasts strongly with the sobriety of the Spanish tasting sheets. Together with Wislocka’s study, the next three articles also serve the purposes of genre and text analysis research. The contribution by Jason Miin-Hwa Lim, Chek-Kim Loi and Azirah Hashim deals with the ways hypotheses are formulated in Applied Linguistics dissertations. More particularly, the authors carry out a qualitative investigation of a corpus of experimental doctoral dissertations submitted to 32 American universities in EDITORIAL ibérica 27 (2014): 9-14 11 the past decade furnished with the data gathered from two specialist experienced American doctoral dissertation supervisors acting as specialist informants for this particular investigation. The piece of research carried out by Matthew Peacock aims at investigating the frequency, disciplinary variation, distribution and function of all modals contained in a corpus of 600 research articles from twelve different science and non-science disciplines. His most valuable conclusion is that modals play a relevant role in the construction of “stance” and, eventually, “identity” because modals are employed by scholars in their research writing to express “attitudes, value judgments, and assessments towards their suggestions, claims, and propositions, and thereby accomplish the important functions of claiming and confirming membership of their discourse community, and constructing identity” (page 161). Pascual Cantos Gómez sketches what he calls a “low-cost” technique that identifies a range of linguistic markers that discriminate among text- classification categories, and pursues the automatic classification of texts. A total of five categories and 75,000 words (that is, 15,000 words per category) comprise the ad-hoc compiled corpus and it is hoped that the discriminant function analysis performed contributes to the creation of new models and the reduction of computational costs. Last, María Alcantud-Díaz, Alicia Ricart Vayá and Carmen Gregori-Signes share their experience with a course of English for Tourism and bring to our attention “digital storytelling” as an innovative and promising tool to enhance language learning in ESP courses. This teaching/learning tool copes with some of the challenges set forth in the European Space for Higher Education and provides learners with opportunities to develop the competences required and contained in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages – particularly those regarding teamwork and use of ICTs. Besides these research articles, this volume contains the reviews on ten books that will be of most interest to Ibérica’s audience. Thanks to the detailed accounts offered by reviewers, readers will: • be provided with the theoretical and practical guidelines for developing courses in ESP (Elena Martín Monje); • be initiated in statistics for linguistic research (Juan Carlos Palmer- Silveira); EDITORIAL ibérica 27 (2014): 9-1412 • learn about research based on corpora and on meta-analysis, as well as applications in specialised languages (Maria-Lluïsa Gea- Valor); • reflect on the most relevant pedagogical issues pertaining to the teaching and learning of English for academic and occupational purposes (María Vázquez Amador); • rethink academic writing pedagogy in the European Higher Education area (Marta Aguilar); • update their knowledge on the contribution of corpora to Applied Linguistics, language researchers and ESP users (Pascual Pérez- Paredes); • explore the current aims, methods and trends in LSP research (Ana Roldán-Riejos); • gain awareness of how epistemic/attitudinal stance is realised and authorial voice expressed in written academic and professional genres (Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez); • increase their understanding of the developments in scientific discourse, research writing, and education against a globalizing scenario (Ruth Breeze); • learn about the publication of a new Spanish-English-Chinese dictionary for the olive oil industry (Miguel Casas Gómez). I would like to thank the members of the editorial board who have contributed to the ongoing work of the journal with their suggestions and thorough evaluations during this past semester. These have been (in alphabetic order): Amparo García-Carbonell, Carmen Sancho Guinda, Chelo Vargas, Elena Bárcena, Honesto Herrera, Inmaculada Álvarez de Mon, Javier Herráez, Joseba González Ardeo, Juan Carlos Palmer Silveira, Mª Ángeles Orts, Maria Enriqueta Cortés, Maria Kuteeva, Marisol Velasco, Marta Aguilar, Mercedes Eurrutia, Michael White, Ramón Plo, Rosa Gimenez, Victoria Guillén. Likewise, special thanks go to the invited external reviewers who have collaborated with the journal during this past year by assessing submitted manuscripts to ordinary volume issues. These have been, in alphabetic order, the following: Ana C. Lahuerta (Universidad de Oviedo), Ana Roldán-Riejos EDITORIAL ibérica 27 (2014): 9-14 13 (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Ángel Felices (Universidad de Granada), Antonio Lillo (Universidad de Alicante), Carmen Pérez-Llantada (Universidad de Zaragoza), Carmen Piqué-Noguera (Universitat de València), Carmen Rueda (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), Claudine Lecrivain (Universidad de Cádiz), David Levey (Universidad de Cádiz), Elena Martín Monje (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia), Elena Montiel Ponsoda (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Enric Llurda (Universitat de Lleida), Françoise Salager-Meyer (Universidad de Los Andes, Venezuela), Guadalupe Aguado (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Iliana Martínez (Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, Argentina), Javier Pérez Guerra (Universidad de Vigo), Laura Hidalgo Downing (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Laura Muresan (Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania), María Ángeles Zarco (Universidad de Cádiz), Marisa Carrió-Pastor (Universitat Politécnica de València), Nuria Edo Marzá (Universitat Jaume I), Pascual Pérez-Paredes (Universidad de Murcia), Philippa Mungra (University of Rome-La Sapienza1, Italy), Rosario Caballero (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha), Ruth Breeze (Universidad de Navarra), Silvia Molina Plaza (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Sonia Oliver del Olmo (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona), Tatiana Caziani (University of Palermo, Italy). Ana Bocanegra Valle Universidad de Cádiz (Spain) Editor of Ibérica EDITORIAL ibérica 27 (2014): 9-1414