01 Editorial.qxd Editorial This volume celebrates the 20th anniversary of AELFE, the Association that publishes this journal. To endorse this volume with the label of “special”, the International Advisory Board was invited to contribute to the anniversary and share their views on the evolution of Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) throughout these past 20 years; a cosy corner with a retrospective flavour for comfortable reading. The resulting contributions have been gathered alphabetically in the first section of Ibérica no. 24 and pave the way for academic reflection and discussion. Together with this, an opening note from the President of our Association attempts to summarize 20 years of intense activity and profound changes by showing the main highlights of this period and sharing the achievements of AELFE in promoting knowledge and research on LSP. In the opening paper, Vijay K. Bhatia offers a reflection on genre analysis, critical genre analysis and interdiscursivity to focus on how most academics and professional experts construct, interpret and use professional genres. The second note contains Ken Hyland’s impressions and experiences over the past 20 years of LSP teaching and research – a period in the life of AELFE that Professor Hyland finds “short but distinguished” (page 30). In the third note, Chris Kennedy describes a number of key ESP projects and focuses on the spread of English as a global language and its influence on the development of ESP programmes and projects. In the following note, Françoise Salager-Meyer portraits the birth and rise of the open access movement as well as its benefits, problems and solutions. After this, Mike Scott reflects on the development of corpus linguistics software and the directions corpus research may follow in the near future. Next, John Skelton and Jan Whetstone bring to our attention the past and present of English for Medical Purposes and Academic Medicine, “two separate research and educational traditions which have developed more or less independently” (page 99). In the seventh note John Swales develops the reception history of an influential paper by Hyon (1996) to examine its influence on genre analysis and how this work has played out intertextually since its publication. Then, Sven Tarp reviews specialised lexicography during the past two decades to claim, firstly, a lack of interest in theory in favour of practical products and, secondly, the need for further developments in terms of quality. Finally, Bernd Voss shares some personal reflections on LSP, ibérica 24 (2012): 13-16 iSSN 1139-7241 13 language learning and teaching in Higher Education in Germany with the hope that “these more personal observations may trigger off some reactions and reflections by readers on their own backgrounds and situations” (page 130). The second section of Ibérica no. 24 contains six research articles and the first two deal with English for Publication Purposes. In the first contribution Pilar Mur Dueñas discusses the “text histories” of a number of Finance Spanish researchers and how they endeavour to have their papers eventually published in English-medium international journals. In her text, Mur Dueñas claims a place for the contribution of Intercultural Rhetoric and ethnographic studies in providing evidence on the different writing processes of this particular group of scholars given their specific cultural contexts. In line with this, Ana I. Moreno, Jesús Rey-Rocha, Sally Burgess, Irene López-Navarro and Itesh Sachdev analyse the perceived difficulty of Spanish researchers when writing research articles in English. In particular, Moreno and colleagues focus on the impact of proficiency in English versus researchers’ publication experience to conclude, among others, that: (i) the Discussion section is perceived as having the greatest increased difficulty when writing in English (as an L2) across all knowledge areas; and (ii) it is not until Spanish researchers have published on average at least 37 RAs in English-medium journals as corresponding author over the preceding ten years that the difficulty they experience writing their RA discussions in English (as L2) decreases noticeably. The next two research articles in this section deal with the analysis of patent writing and research article abstracts from a genre-based perspective. In the first place, Carmen Sancho-Guinda depicts patents as a genre that competes with other situated genres such as projects or grants in making the case for explicit instruction. In her study of 333 patents passed by the US Patents and Trademarks Office for almost a decade, Sancho-Guinda deconstructs three recurrent myths about patent writing and advocates a pedagogy for patent writing, particularly among the disciplinary communities involved in patenting processes. In the second place, Carmen Piqué-Noguera pays attention to business research article abstracts as a written genre with a view to raising rhetorical awareness among scholars. In so doing, Piqué-Noguera compares the structure and content of a corpus of abstracts compiled from two relevant publications in the field of business, highlights the specific mission that abstracts fulfil in academic writing, and suggests the need for more specific journal guidelines in this regard. EDITORIAL ibérica 24 (2012): 13-1614 The next two contributions are of a rather different nature. Isabel Balteiro and Miguel Ángel Campos bring to our attention the false anglicisms that are present in the Spanish language of fashion and beauty. Thanks to a corpus of texts extracted from fashion magazines and news (both in print and digital form), these scholars analyse 36 false anglicisms, their behaviour and their occurrence also as compared with their condition in other languages such as Italian, French, German or Portuguese. The last research article in this section refers to ESP current classroom practices in Iran. Here, Peyman Rajabi, Gholam Reza Kiany and Parviz Maftoon investigate the underlying effects of an ESP in-service teacher training program on the beliefs and instructional practices of 120 Iranian ESP teachers as well as on the students’ achievements regarding their exposure to a particular group of teachers (untrained or trained in such program). In section 3, Maria Kuteeva interviews Anna Mauranen, professor of English at the University of Helsinki, after her plenary speech on science blogging at the 5th Swedish LSP Symposium organised by the Centre for Academic English at Stockholm University. Indeed, Ibérica’s audience will welcome Mauranen’s views on professional and academic writing, corpus- based research, Lingua Franca English or research in the field of the humanities. The last section contains nine reviews of books dealing with numerous subjects that may throw some light on the respective issues to both experienced and novice researchers: content and language integrated learning from a cultural perspective (Mancho-Barés); a practical guide for assessing writing (Barahona-Fuentes); current issues in research, teaching, professional applications and ICTs (Orts); genre-based and terminological approaches to the Spanish language of tourism (Sánchez-Reyes & Torregrosa); the language of nursing and its writing practices in the academic context (Pérez-Llantada); internet-mediated communication or “cyberpragmatics” (Berbeira-Gardón); the language of architecture and civil engineering (Orna-Montesinos); specialised English lexicology and lexicography (Edo Marzá); or specialized translation with a closer attention to terminology (Solís Becerra). I would like to thank the members of the editorial board who have contributed with their detailed assessments throughout this year’s first semester. These are, in alphabetic order: Inmaculada Álvarez de Mon (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Alejandro Curado (Universidad de EDITORIAL ibérica 24 (2012): 13-16 15 Extremadura), Mª Enriqueta Cortés (Universidad de Almería), Rosa Giménez (Universitat de València), Victoria Guillén (Universidad de Alicante), Honesto Herrera (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Mª Ángeles Orts (Universidad de Murcia), Juan Carlos Palmer (Universitat Jaume I), Ramón Plo (Universidad de Zaragoza), Carmen Sancho Guinda (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). Likewise, special thanks go to those invited external reviewers who have promptly and efficiently assessed submitted manuscripts during this year’s first semester: Pilar Mur (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain), Marisol Velasco (Universidad de Valladolid, Spain), Isabel Santamaría (Universidad de Alicante, Spain), Ana Cristina Lahuerta (Universidad de Oviedo, Spain), Françoise Salager-Meyer (Universidad de Los Andes, Venezuela), Ana Belén Martínez (Universidad de Córdoba, Spain), Marisa Carrió (Universitat Politècnica de Valéncia, Spain), Amparo García Carbonell (Universitat Politècnica de Valéncia, Spain), Camino Rea (Universidad de Murcia, Spain), María Kuteeva (Stockholm University, Sweden), Karen Bennett (University of Coimbra, Portugal), Hélder Fanha Martins (ISCAL, Portugal), Miguel Ángel Campos (Universidad de Alicante, Spain), Isabel García Izquierdo (Universitat Jaume I, Spain), Tomás Conde (Universidad del País Vasco, Spain). Ana Bocanegra Valle Editor of Ibérica Universidad de Cádiz (Spain) ana.bocanegra@uca.es EDITORIAL ibérica 24 (2012): 13-1616