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There is a growing interest in the intersection of language use, language teaching and
Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The increasing number of papers
in relation to this subject recently submitted to AELFE conferences, held in Madrid,
Porto, and Granada, or the CILFE Conference held in Vilanova (Barcelona), confirm
this wide interest also within the area of LSP. This issue of Ibérica, Revista de la Asociación
Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos (Ibérica, Journal of the European Association of
Languages for Specific Purposes) collects a set of representative articles focused on this
emerging field within language analysis and language teaching. Four of the studies here
included come from the First International Conference on Internet and Language, held
at Universitat Jaume I de Castelló in 2003. The issue is complemented with two
additional papers directly submitted to the journal and related to this topic, a review
article on traditional methods in specialised lexicography and several book reviews.

Baron’s opening article takes the subject of ICT and language use beyond the scope of
language teaching. For her, the relevance of Internet and ICT has implications that may not
only affect how foreign languages are taught, but also the way in which we use and learn
our own language. Will written culture as we know it remain or will it be challenged and
transformed by technology and the new communication media? Will the tools to access
literacy change, and, if so, how? Will the notion of authorship be maintained? These are
some of the questions to which Baron’s work provides keen insight. It has to be noted that
to unfold some of her answers, the author first allocates the initial part of her article to
define the parameters of written culture and its historical evolution. Baron then compares
these parameters with the new paradigm which Internet and ICT are generating.

Alejo’s study is an example of LSP discourse analysis research focused on a specific
digital genre (i.e. commercial websites). The author uses systematic linguistic insight
to describe the peculiarities of metadiscourse in this type of digital texts produced
and distributed in the World Wide Web. His conclusions show that (a) traditional
linguistic analysis has to incorporate new elements and variables when studying texts
in the Internet if research is to produce relevant explanations of the way language is
used in this communication medium; and (b) that links have developed a salient
metadiscursive role in the Internet which demands further study since these devices
have become an essential feature of many digital texts

Soler, Rueda and Arnó’s paper focuses on how the Internet may be exploited for
language teaching. For this purpose, they have carried out both qualitative and

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Editorial

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quantitative research on the subject, describing how students do have a significant
interest in combining the net with their language learning process. Complementarily, the
authors explore the way in which the Internet and ICT may be applied to enhance
foreign language learning autonomy in the context of English for Academic Purposes.

With Yus’s linguistic-cognitive approach this issue of Ibérica takes a more theoretical
perspective on the study of language use in the net. Here the author carefully shows
the apparently contradictory tension between an increasingly globalised world thanks
to the Internet and ICT where, however, at the same time a more “glocalised” use of
the net is growing. Yus finally resorts to an epidemiological model of cultural
dissemination to account for virtual communities and comes with what he himself
considers may be viewed by others as a too individualistic vision of such groups; he,
however, defends his position in the final paragraphs of his paper.

Ancarno’s work represents a different line of research, which does not focus on digital
texts on their own. Instead she makes use of a mixed corpus of texts where electronic and
traditional genres are compared. In this study, she examines the digital genre of emails in
relation to their antecedent: personal letters. To narrow the large variation and diversity
that could be found in such genres, she focuses on emails and letters in the specific context
of academic communication. Ancarno then subdivides her corpus so as to be able to (a)
draw differences between the two genres, and (b) detect significant variations between
native and non-native speakers of English in these communication situations.

The last paper in this volume, written by Bolaños, Rodríguez, Bolaños and Losada,
brings as back to the approach previously undertaken in this issue in Alejo’s study. In
this case, however, the authors analyse corporate websites from computer companies
instead of commercial in general, narrowing the genre to a specific group of
companies. As in Alejo’s research, the authors here also conclude that in order to
properly describe a digital genre the linguist has to resort to complementary variables
beyond the traditional linguistic items, thus incorporating the use of images and links
in the core of this study, among several other relevant pragmatic features.

These set of articles attest the increasing interest of linguists in general and LSP
practitioners in particular in the outstanding status of Internet and ICT in our 21st century
society. All these papers provide suggestive ground on which to build further analyses
which may help us better understand how language is being used in our new technological
world, how foreign languages may be better taught and how language itself is being
changed under the pressing force of the Internet and its collateral technological allies.

Santiago Posteguillo Gómez
Castelló, January 2005

EDITORIAL

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