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Editorial

This spring issue contains more articles than ever despite having been
assembled under most difficult circumstances, the COVID-19 pandemic. It
also starts a new period with the adoption of  English as the only language
for publication.

The contributions presented here belong to four major research strands:
Academic Writing, Corpus Linguistics, legal discourse, and the lingua franca
for specific purposes. Our guest article, by KEN HYLAND and FENG (KEVIN)
JIANG, attests to diachronic changes in academic prose over the past fifty
years and questions some of  the prescriptions and recommendations from
style manuals, namely those referring to demonstrative ‘this’, existential
‘there’ and first-person pronouns. Their multidisciplinary corpus-driven
analysis shows that the advice found in style manuals and writing guides does
not reflect current academic writing practices and that corpus evidence
should inform the work of  language and communication instructors. 

In this regard, articles 5-11, four of  which support their claims with corpus
data, seem to corroborate the need for specificity in the teaching and
appraisal of  Academic Writing, that is, to promote awareness of  and
adjustments to different disciplines, genres, and even national cultures. In her
contrastive study on the presence of  informal features in research articles
written by L1 English and L1 Chinese scholars across four disciplines, GAO
XIA (article 5) reports notable differences between cultures and fields:
Chinese researchers tend to write more formally than their English
colleagues and to use fewer first-person pronouns and pronominal
anaphora, but more imperatives and sentence-initial adverbials. As for
disciplinary variation, the highest use of  informality features is detected in
Physics, and the lowest in Applied Linguistics. 

Advancing into the cultural variable through qualitative methods, the next
two articles may suggest valuable pedagogical implications. YONGYAN LI and
XIAOHAO MA (article 6) delve into the current contextualised practices of
emerging EAP teachers to help graduate students develop the capabilities
necessary to engage in international academic communication. The
responses of  twenty participants from eighteen Chinese universities, located
in eleven cities all over the country, reveal the important role played by

ibérica 39 (2020): 9-14

iSSN: 1139-7241 / e-iSSN: 2340-2784

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factors as diverse as institutional leadership, goal orientation according to the
educational level (master’s versus doctorate, the latter more oriented towards
publication), or the use of  corpora and EAP textbooks. This focus on
variability in Academic Writing is narrowed down in WEI WANG’s
exploration (Article 7) into what really constitutes ‘disciplinary specificity’
and what the relationship between writing-for-the-disciplines and general
academic writing is. She adopts a learner-centred perspective and an in-depth
qualitative approach that enable her to document three learning trajectories
of  a business-specific genre, the case analysis, in an academic English for
business course at a Chinese university, and to examine how general
academic writing interferes with such learning.

Within this disciplinary approach and also carrying considerable pedagogical
potential, the following two studies trace authorial imprint in research
articles from four disciplines. JIHUA DONG and LOUISA BUCKINGHAM (article
8) apply the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework and a corpus-driven
approach in order to investigate the stance phrases preferred by agricultural
science and economics scholars to define their identity and exercise their
expert authority in academic discourse. In addition to refining and enriching
existing stance taxonomies, the authors find a more frequent use of
cognitive, attitude and hedging phrases among agricultural scholars, whereas
evidentiality phrases concentrate significantly in the economics corpus.
Similarly, but under a corpus-based perspective, YIN LING CHEUNG and
LOUWENA LAU (article 9) look into the use of  first-person pronouns as voice
markers and argument enhancers by English literature and computer science
scholars. Their results do not bear out the initial hypothesis that, in the
absence of  objective fact, literature writers build stronger authorial roles by
means of  first-person pronouns, so as to gain credibility and persuasiveness.
Rather, the findings appear to dissolve the traditional divide between hard
and soft sciences in this respect. 

With a yet more specialised gaze on the research article genre, THI NGOC
PHUONG LE AND MINH MAN PHAM (article 10) tackle prototypicality and
intra-disciplinary variation of  organisational patterns in Mechanical
Engineering, a field so far under-researched. They scrutinise the Results-
Discussion section in a small-sized corpus of  articles that employ different
research methods (experimental, theoretical and mixed) and conclude that
rhetorical complexity is affected by those three different disciplinary
contexts. A last research genre, the academic blog, is investigated by HANG
(JOANNA) ZOU and KEN HYLAND, who collect academics’ perceptions of  the

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challenge posed by the genre to engage with readers (in other words, to raise
their interest and persuade them) and find out about common rhetorical
practices. Drawing on more than twenty interviews with scholars from a
range of  disciplines and with varying degrees of  familiarity and experience
with blogs, the authors compare their informants’ impressions and blog-
writing routines with those held and conducted when writing research
articles. The conclusion is that the rhetorical practices in blogs exhibit a
mixture of  academic and disciplinary conventions. 

A reflection on the comparability of  corpora, supported with empirical data
and written by BELÉN LÓPEZ ARROYO (article 2), is followed by a pair of
articles offering corpus-based and corpus-driven characterisations of
outreach and professional discourses (articles 4 and 5, respectively). While
literature on the topic establishes similarity as the main requisite for corpus
comparability, this being broken down into the criteria of  proportion, genre,
domain and time, previous studies by LÓPEZ ARROYO demonstrate that these
do not suffice in some fields. In her view, the purpose of  use, together with
aspects such as content, format and genre style, should be taken into
account, as evinced by her corpus of  150 expert tasting notes from Spain
and the USA in English and Spanish and published in the same decades. 

Following this reflection, the corpus-based characterisation of  medical
cancer terms provided by ANTONIO JESúS LÁINEZ RAMOS-BOSSINI and
MARIBEL TERCEDOR SÁNCHEZ (article 3) discloses a generalised use of
specialised medical terms by patients sharing their concerns in online cancer
forums. The authors’ scrutiny of  a 60-million-word corpus with a three-step
method points to the fields of  Anatomy, Treatment, Hospital and Symptoms
as the chief  vocabulary sources and to a remarkable incidence of  dictionary-
defined medical terms. Next, ROSANA DOLÓN HERRERO (article 4) offers
insights as to how high-end hotel websites craft a sense of  belonging and
entitlement for their 4/5-star guests; that is to say, they create an in-group
similarity allowing them to embrace cultural otherness, which epitomizes the
tourist experience. With a corpus-driven approach and a blended framework
merging Critical Discourse Analysis (Bourdieu’s notion of  habitus and
Fairclough’s sociocultural approach) and Systemic Functional Linguistics
(Halliday’s account of  the transitivity system), the author addresses the
words ‘different’ and ‘distinct’ as markers of  otherness and privilege. 

Two articles represent legal discourse in this issue. The first, by JASMINA
ÐorĐević (article 12), describes a classroom experiment for determining the

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impact of  Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) on the
understanding of  modal verbs in Legal English and for assessing the level of
student motivation in an ESP course. Through a mixed method joining
quantitative and qualitative error analysis, questionnaires and group
discussion, the author confirms the hypothesis that CALL improves modal
verb understanding and motivation when chosen over conventional face-to-
face classroom learning environments. The second paper dealing with legal
discourse, by KRISDA CHAEMSAITHONG and YOONJEONG KIM (article 13),
integrates van Leeuwen’s social actor representation method into Halliday’s
transitivity analysis to peruse the polarised discursive practices of  the
prosecution and the defense in capital trials. It argues that aggravating and
mitigating factors are morally and normatively constructed in real time by the
interactants, whose reference and transitivity choices may incline verdicts
towards the death penalty.  

The status of  two vehicular languages for specific purposes, English and
Arabic, is the object of  research of  the last pair of  contributions. YAO YAO
and BERTHA DU-BABCOCK (article 14) highlight the increasingly important
role of  English in the workplace across Mainland China, especially in
multinational companies. Using online questionnaires and semi-structured
interviews with Chinese business professionals from state-owned, privately-
owned and multinational companies, they discovered that, although
communication in English has become a convention in the latter, the extent
of  its use depends upon various contextual factors, among which are the
type of  duty and the level of  linguistic proficiency. Lack of  cultural
sensitivity, moreover, may disrupt communication and lower promotion
chances inside the company. Analogously, the recent expansion of  Arabic
for Specific Purposes (ASP) drove MARCO GOLFETTO (article 15) to probe
into the motivations, professional orientations, needs and language learning
histories of  more than 200 Arabic majors enrolled in BA and MA degree
courses in Language and Cultural Mediation in Italy. Quantitatively and
qualitatively discussed, the findings of  his survey show that students’
interests are primarily instrumental and target very specific areas, such as
politics, diplomacy, administration, and the media. The study, in sum, paves
the way for future needs analyses of  ASP teaching and learning. 

The book reviews that complete the issue evaluate the volumes Comunicar en
la Universidad y en la Vida Profesional (by Ricardo-María Jiménez-Yáñez, 2020),
and Temas Actuales de Terminología y Estudios sobre el Léxico (co-edited by Miguel
Ángel Candel-Mora and Chelo Vargas-Sierra, 2017). Although both books

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are written in Spanish, they can reach a wide specialist audience and their
reviews in English clearly and accurately signal their strengths and weaker
points. From Jiménez-Yáñez’s work, INÉS JORDÁN MARQUÉS underlines its
progressively built organisation and its useful combination of  guidelines,
activities and theoretical input. Candel and Vargas’ work stands out, in
MIGUEL AYERBE LINARES’ judgement, for its ample diversity of  disciplinary
languages, and for its detailed description of  methodologies and challenges
in specialised translation. 

As ever, I will end this editorial by thanking all the external reviewers who
have so generously lent us their time and expertise. The scholars mentioned
below in alphabetical order collaborated with the journal from July to
December, 2019:

Francisco J. Alonso Almeida (Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria,
Spain)
Isabel Balteiro Fernández (Universidad de Alicante, Spain)
Marina Bondi (Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy)
Carla Botella Tejera (Universidad de Alicante, Spain)
Jiemin Bu (Foreign Language School, Zhejiang Guangsha College of
Applied Construction, China)
Louisa Buckingham (The University of  Auckland, New Zealand)
Carole Chaski (The Institute for Linguistic Evidence, Delaware, USA)
Viviana Cortés (Georgia State University, USA)
María Belén Díez Bedmar (Universidad de Jaén, Spain)
Jihua Dong (The University of  Auckland, New Zealand) 
Tatjana Ðurović (University of  Belgrade, Serbia)
Inmaculada Fortanet Gómez (Universitat Jaume I, Spain)
Rosa Giménez Moreno (Universitat de València, Spain)
Sarali Gintsburg (Universidad de Navarra, Spain)
Victoria Guillén Nieto (Universidad de Alicante, Spain)
Michael Hammond (University of  Warwick, UK)
Janet Ho (Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China)
Francisco Miguel Ivorra Pérez (Universitat de València, Spain)
Mirella Marotta Peramos (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
Lisa McGrath (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
Eva María Mestre i Mestre (Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain)
Nicolás Montalbán Martínez (Universidad de Murcia, Spain)
Adil Moustaui Sghir (Universidad de Navarra, Spain)
Noelia Navarro-Gil (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)

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Maria-Ionela Neagu (University of  Ploiesti, Romania)
Concepción Orna Montesinos (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain)
Carmen Pérez-Llantada Auría (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain)
Xuyan Qiu (The Open University of  Hong Kong, China)
Mercedes Querol Julián (Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Spain)
Ana María Roldán Riejos (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)
Michele Sala (Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy)
Julián Sancha Vázquez (Universidad de Cádiz, Spain)
Francisca Suau-Jiménez (Universitat de València, Spain)
Judith Turnbull (Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy)
Julia Valeiras-Jurado (Universiteit Gent, Belgium)
Rosana Villares Maldonado (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain)

On behalf  of  Ibérica’s staff, I also want to welcome two new members of  the
Editorial Board: ELISABET ARNÓ I MACIÁ (Universitat Politècnica de
Catalunya), formerly President of  AELFE, and GUZMÁN MANCHO BARÉS
(Universitat de Lleida), whose experience as researchers will be a priceless
asset to the journal. We all hope that this issue will enrich the panorama of
Languages for Specific Purposes by awakening new academic interests and
stimulating interconnections between our varied methodological approaches
and areas of  research. It is also our wish that the knowledge we disseminate
should foster reflection on communication strategies and contribute to their
improvement, especially during the present healthcare and social crisis and
its aftermath.

Carmen Sancho Guinda

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain)

iberica@aelfe.org

Editor-in-chief of Ibérica

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