Language Value June 2020, Volume 12, Number 1 pp. 148-153 http://www.languagevalue.uji.es ISSN 1989-7103 Language Value, ISSN 1989-7103 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.6035/LanguageV.2020.12.7 148 BOOK REVIEW Specialised English: New Directions in ESP and EAP Research and Practice Ken Hyland and Lillian L. C. Wong Routledge: London and New York, 2019 (1st ed.). 260 pages. ISBN: 978-1-138-58877-6 Reviewed by Gang Yao gang.yao@um.es Universidad de Murcia, Spain Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain The field of specialized English has expanded on an unprecedented scale. We have already seen that there is a plethora of research articles in specialized top journals like Journal of English for Academic Purposes and English for Specific Purposes, as well as influential volumes and handbooks: in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), publications like The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes edited by Paltridge and Starfield (2013), Introducing English for Specific Purposes by Anthony (2018); in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), publications such as the seminal collection Research Perspectives on English for Academic Purposes edited by Flowerdew and Peacock (2001), Introducing English for Academic Purposes by Charles and Pecorari (2016), and The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes edited by Hyland and Shaw (2016). The field, however, is moving so fast that many researchers and practitioners are unable to keep current with its developments and trends. Hyland and Wong‟s volume, therefore, seeks to contribute to the evolving and dynamic scholarship of specialized English by gathering cutting-edge chapters on current and international perspectives on specific varieties of English. It covers a wide range of recent issues of EAP and ESP, such as English as a lingua franca, workplace English, academic interaction, practitioner identity, data-driven learning, and critical thinking. In addition, diverse genres are included, among others, research articles, workplace talks, university tutorials, builders‟ diaries, and personal statements. mailto:gang.yao@um.es Specialised English: New Directions in ESP and EAP Research and Practice Language Value 12 (1), 148–153 http://www.languagevalue.uji.es 149 The volume contains 17 specially commissioned chapters by some of the world‟s leading experts. The chapters are grouped in a thematic way, covering key concepts of specialized English (Chapter 1-Chapter 6), textlinguistic analyses (Chapter 7-Chapter 12), and classroom practices (Chapter 13-Chapter 17). The first thematic module focuses on a series of current issues in specialized English language research and teaching. It starts with a chapter by Anna Mauranen where she looks at the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in the trend of globalization and language contact from macro-social, individual‟s cognitive, and micro-social perspectives. By exploring authentic data from corpora of spoken and written ELF in academic settings, the author shows that ELF as a dynamic and complex system brings about linguistic changes in English through the process of approximation and fixing. In Chapter 2, Jane Lockwood raises the conceptual issue of „workplace English‟ that oversimplifies the specialized and contextualized communicative needs. She thus proposes a multilayered analytical framework to unpack and theorize workplace English and suggests a specially tailored syllabus planning and assessment design. Vijay Bhatia in Chapter 3 argues that the application of critical genre analysis that focuses on interdiscursive performance (Bhatia, 2017) will benefit the curricular design of English for Professional Communication (EPC), thereby plugging the remaining gap between school practices and professional practices in the world of work. The fourth chapter by John Flowerdew provides some thought-provoking insights into the notion of power, which is closely related to different aspects of EAP, including institutions, EAP practitioners, the environment of English as a global lingua franca, disciplinary communities, pedagogy, and discourses. He concludes that EAP practitioners need to familiarize themselves with those different power relationships and adopt a critical and assertive approach in order to change the marginalized situation of EAP. Echoing Flowerdew‟s viewpoint, Alex Ding in Chapter 5 focuses on the peripheral and marginal role of EAP practitioners and examines the cause and effect relationship between “professional disarticulation” (Hadley, 2015: 57) and practitioner identity crisis. He argues that the status, development, and recognition of EAP practitioner identity are diminishing, due to the impact of neoliberalism, a lack of socialization and cultural capital, and some internal conflicts within the field. He concludes by advocating a collective consideration of the identities that EAP Book Review Language Value 12 (1), 148–153 http://www.languagevalue.uji.es 150 practitioners are willing to develop and commit to. The first section ends with a chapter by Lynne Flowerdew where she first raises several conceptual issues in both ELF and learner corpus research of disciplinary writing, such as native-speaker norms and comparability. By discussing four previous corpus studies of both fields, the author suggests that future research should seek to build bridges between the two fields and to find their similarities and differences. The second part of the volume concerns texts of various genres, including research articles, university tutorials, students‟ texts, and personal statements. Ken Hyland in Chapter 7 explores the use of interaction by disciplinary writers over the past 50 years. By implementing Hyland‟s (2005) model of stance and engagement, he attempts to uncover whether writers‟ commitment and attitude towards what they said, as well as their engagement with readers, have changed over time and across disciplines. His findings suggest that changes in stance and engagement do exist but are slow and barely noticed. In Chapter 8, Ian Bruce proposes a social genre/cognitive genre model in order to examine the expression of critical thinking through written text. The successful application of this model in two genre studies demonstrates that it is important to incorporate resources such as rhetorical moves, metadiscourse devices, metaphor, and engagement markers into the expression of critical thinking. Chapter 9 by Coxhead and Dang seeks to explore the usefulness of existing single-word and multi-word academic lists in preparing learners for the vocabulary used in university laboratory and tutorial scenes. The results show that Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) outperforms other single-word lists in terms of coverage and number of items and that the overlap of multi-word lists that consists of core items is useful. The study further provides suggestions for EAP pedagogy, materials, and course design. In Chapter 10, Janet Holmes shifts her attention to the workplace and especially focuses on how different levels of social constraints of the „culture order‟ (Holmes, 2017) affect workplace interaction. Her analysis based on recorded data foregrounds the sociopragmatic skills that newcomers should acquire for professional identity construction. The study ends by providing practical instruction to develop teaching and learning materials. Jean Parkinson in Chapter 11 calls scholarly attention to multimodal student texts, where visual elements are becoming increasingly common. Drawing upon prior studies, Parkinson explores the possible use of social semiotic and move analyses Specialised English: New Directions in ESP and EAP Research and Practice Language Value 12 (1), 148–153 http://www.languagevalue.uji.es 151 in student‟s multimodal texts. Finally, she suggests that ESP teachers raise student‟s awareness of rhetorical conventions in visual meaning, as well as coherence between visual and written meaning. Interested as well in students‟ texts, Ann Johns focuses on student‟s personal statement (PS) writing task in Chapter 12. By looking at the PS writing processes of three secondary students, she illustrates what the challenges in writing are and how the students meet them. She concludes the chapter by offering pedagogical suggestions to help students construct identity and explore accomplishments. The last section of the volume consists of five chapters that explore pedagogic practices both as general principles and specific classroom situations. It begins with Laurence Anthony‟s research which addresses some common issues when EAP instructors or learners implement data-driven learning (DDL) in classrooms, such as the construction of corpus and the interaction with it. He introduces a variety of corpus analysis tools and accompanying teaching strategies in order to integrate DDL effectively into classroom practices. In Chapter 14, Lilian Wong continues the topic of DDL and applies this approach to multidisciplinary thesis writing courses. The feedback from students and instructors suggests that while students tend to have a positive attitude towards the corpus-assisted writing resource, teachers seem to feel ambivalent about it. Jill Northcott in Chapter 15 investigates the academic feedback on student writing provided by EAP tutors and subject tutors, respectively. Her analysis found that there are some areas where both tutor groups can provide meaningful feedback, whereas in other areas one or the other tutor group is more qualified as feedback providers. This gap suggests the need for collaboration between EAP and subject tutors. In Chapter 16, Wingate and Ogiermann explore writing tutors‟ use of directives in relation to dialogic versus monologic teaching styles. The results, based on the analysis of ten academic tutorials, did not meet their expectations. The tutor with the dialogic approach was expected to use fewer directives and more mitigated devices than the tutor with the other approach. Further analysis suggests that the contradictory results were influenced by the sequential position of the directives in the dialogue. Following the same research topic as in Northcott‟s study (Chapter 15), in the final chapter (Chapter 17), Li and Cargill also explore the collaboration between EAP practitioners and subject experts, but in the setting of a Chinese university. They analyze and reflect on why the second Book Review Language Value 12 (1), 148–153 http://www.languagevalue.uji.es 152 author‟s attempt at facilitating an attitude of openness to collaboration at the said university is unsuccessful. The views from both discipline supervisors and students suggest implications for Chinese EAP teachers. Taken together, the chapters encompassed in this collection capture some of the most interesting and important developments in the field, contribute to expanding reader‟s knowledge of specialized varieties of English, and suggest avenues that could be explored in future studies. The chapters cover wide-ranging topics, theories, methods, and tools that are tailored to suit teachers‟ and learners‟ specific needs. It is noteworthy that although it explores the same focal field, this volume differs from other relevant publications in that it synthesizes the most up-to-date studies and authoritative discussions from established scholars of the field. Moreover, a special section of the volume is devoted to introducing approaches, tools, and practical advice for diverse classroom settings, which would be particularly appreciated by EAP/ ESP practitioners and teachers. Overall, the edited volume Specialised English: New Directions in ESP and EAP Research and Practice by Hyland and Wong brings together differing views on specialized English and provides fascinating insights into the theories and practices of EAP/ESP. It is an invaluable resource for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in EAP/ESP or applied linguistics in general, as well as pre- and in-service teachers and tutors of EAP/ESP. REFERENCES Anthony, L. 2018. Introducing English for Specific Purposes. London: Routledge. Bhatia, V. K. 2017. Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating Interdiscursive Performance in Professional Communication. London: Routledge. Charles, M. and Pecorari, D. 2016. Introducing English for Academic Purposes. London: Routledge. Flowerdew, J. and Peacock, M. (Eds.) 2001. Research Perspectives on English for Academic Purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Specialised English: New Directions in ESP and EAP Research and Practice Language Value 12 (1), 148–153 http://www.languagevalue.uji.es 153 Hadley, G. 2015. English for Academic Purposes in Neoliberal Universities: A Critical Grounded Theory. Heidelberg, London and New York: Springer. Holmes, J. 2017. “Leadership and change management: Examining gender, cultural and „hero leader‟ stereotypes”. In Cornelia, I. and S. Schnurr (Eds.) Challenging Leadership Stereotypes: Discourse and Power Management. Singapore: Springer, 15-43. Hyland, K. 2005. “Stance and engagement: a model of interaction in academic discourse”. Discourse Studies, 7 (2), 173–192. Hyland, K. and Shaw, P. (Eds.) 2016. The Routledge handbook of English for academic purposes. London: Routledge. Paltridge, B. and Starfield, S. (Eds.) 2013. The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Received: 05 June 2020 Accepted: 08 June 2020