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Editorial

As Editor-in-Chief of this journal I am, fortunately, getting into the nice
habit of opening editorial notes reporting good news on the spread of
Ibérica’s research. Ulrich’s™ knowledgebase, an authoritative international
source of bibliographic references from academic and scholarly journals, is
already abstracting and indexing Ibérica on a regular basis. Also, from now
onwards four major Spanish databases need to be added to Ibérica’s second
page: DICE (“Difusión y Calidad Editorial de las Revistas Españolas de
Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas”), e-revist@s (“Plataforma Open
Access de Revistas Científicas Electrónicas Españolas y Latinoamericanas”),
ISOC (“Revistas de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades del CSIC”), and RESH
(“Revistas Españolas de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas del CSIC”). Such
databases are very relevant to researchers in Spanish universities given the
need for research recognition as a requirement to be granted tenure or in
order to be entitled to apply for research incentives.

Maria Vittoria Calvi, a Professor of Spanish language and translation at the
Italian University of Milan, opens this issue with a genre-based study of
discursive practices in the tourist industry. Professor Calvi is a renowned
scholar in the study of Spanish for Specific Purposes and has published
widely and successfully on the language of tourism in particular. Among her
latest publications are Lengua y comunicación en el español del turismo, published
by Arco Libros in 2006 and reviewed in Ibérica no. 16, and Las lenguas de
especialidad en español (Carocci, 2009). Calvi’s contribution to the present issue
offers extensive explanations and clear examples to support her genre-based
approach and will be of interest to those Ibérica readers in need of a
thoughtful taxonomy of relevant texts currently used in the tourist industry.

Besides Calvi’s contribution, and except for the pedagogically-oriented paper
by Andreu-Andrés and García-Casas, Ibérica 19 mainly deals with academic
discourse – from the rhetorical structure of architecture design statements
for dissemination (Poveda) to abstracting (Koltay), including the use of
modal verbs (Vázquez Orta) and the language of certain steps (Shehzad) in
research articles of varying disciplines, or the academic style of doctoral
theses (Hewitt & Felices Lago). An interview with Gilles Fauconnier and
nine reviews in all complete this issue.

Ibérica 19 (2010): 5-8
ISSN 1139-7241

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Andreu-Andrés and García-Casas discuss issues such as active learning,
team-working, teacher’s role or self-assessment to provide a detailed account
of how to implement problem-based learning in the ESP classroom. Results
obtained and rubrics designed through cooperative work will be very
valuable to those teachers faced with the task of providing training in oral
presentations as part of their course syllabus. A third contribution by
Vázquez Orta reports on the use of modal verbs as epistemic stance markers
in a corpus of Spanish and English Business Management research articles
with particular attention to the introduction and discussion sections. Data
obtained highlight important cross-cultural differences in the use of modal
verbs by English and Spanish writers. Next, Shehzad uses corpus-based
techniques to study how Computer Science professionals announce the
principal findings of a piece of research and state the value of their
published contribution. Given the data analysed, the author concludes by
suggesting that two such steps within the CARS model should be combined
so as to announce achievements and proclaim research significance. Also
within Swales’s CARS model, Hewitt and Felices-Lago argue that the format
and style of Ph.D. thesis vary across English and Spanish. Results “point to
intercultural variations in the structural preferences of different writing
cultures” (page 136) and, more precisely, bring to light that the Discussion
section is missing in most Spanish Ph.D. theses. Lastly, Koltay reflects on
information literacy and genre knowledge as they relate to abstracting and
their relevance to both linguists and information professionals.

In a third section to this issue, Roldán Riejos interviews Professor Gilles
Fauconnier, Professor and Chairman of the Cognitive Science Department
at the University of California San Diego (USA), and founder (together with
Mark Turner) of the cognitive theory of conceptual blending. Readers
wishing to know how cognition operates, particularly in relation to foreign
language learning, or how conceptual blending theory addresses the
construction of meaning, to name a few issues of concern, will find this
lively interview most illuminating.

Once more, Ibérica no. 19 is prolific in discussing and assessing some of the
latest publications on LSP research and LSP pedagogy. Álvarez de Mon,
Salager-Meyer and Mungra review three publications dealing with academic
discourse in a variety of ways: the language of research publications, the
discourse of case histories as used in Psychiatry, and the expression of
collective and individual discourse features. Next, Pérez-Llantada’s account
of John Swales’s educational life will lead Ibérica’s readers “into the heart of

EDITORIAL

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academia” (page 177) hand in hand with such an authoritative and key figure
for ESP research. In the fifth review, Martínez-Flor discusses the connection
between language and the socio-cultural contexts in which face-to-face
interaction takes place. After this, three lexicography-related reviews follow:
the use of the specialized lexicographical approach for dictionary making
(Fuertes-Olivera), an edited reprint of papers on lexicography (Edo Marzá),
and a proper dictionary of French-Spanish-French tourism terms (González
Rodríguez). Finally, the European Portfolio as applied to languages in the
academic and professional contexts is depicted by García Laborda.

I am pleased to announce that Carol Berkenkotter, a Professor in Rhetoric
and Communication at the Department of Humanities at the University of
Minnesota (USA), has kindly accepted to join Ibérica’s International Advisory
Board. Professor Berkenkotter, a leading scholar in genre theory, genre
analysis and the rhetoric of science and most known to Ibérica’s readers due
to her top-cited publication Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication:
Cognition, Culture, Power (with T.N. Huckin, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), is
frequently and extensively referenced in Ibérica’s research articles.

I would like to thank the assistance of invited external reviewers who have
assessed submitted manuscripts during this past semester: Honesto Herrera
Soler (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Rafael Alejo González
(Universidad de Extremadura), Magdalena Bielenia-Grajewska (University of
Gdańsk, Poland), Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez (Universitat Jaume I), Mª
Lluïsa Gea Valor (Universitat Jaume I), and Victor M. González Ruiz
(Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria).

Ana Bocanegra Valle
Universidad de Cádiz (Spain)

Editor of Ibérica

EDITORIAL

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