Illustration pour bannière

Shirley Carter-Thomas. New Directions in English for Specific Purposes Research Diane Belcher, Ann M. Johns, Brian Paltridge (Eds.). University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (2011). 282 pp., $30.95 paperback, ISBN: 978 0 472 03460 4. English for Specific Purposes, 2012, 31 (3), pp.213 – 214. ⟨10.1016/j.esp.2011.12.001⟩.

Date de publication
19 décembre 2012
Catégories
dans
Auteur
par Shirley Carter-Thomas

New Directions in English for Specific Purposes Research is an edited volume comprising eleven chapters by some of the best-known names in ESP research today and provides a broad panorama of the main issues and methodologies currently in use. As the editors Belcher, Johns and Paltridge underline in their introduction, ESP research has always been grounded in practice: “studying language, discourses, and contexts of use […] and then applying them to the pedagogical practice “(p. 1). In recent years ESP research has been enriched by advances in related academic domains, such as corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, genre analysis, rhetoric, critical discourse analysis and critical ethnography. One of the main arguments put forward in this volume is that researchers need to be aware of these developments and exploit all the tools at their disposal in order to form sound assessments of language and discourse contexts and provide relevant instruction for learners. After a brief introduction by the three editors, the book is then divided into two main sections: Issues in ESP Research (chapters 1-5) and Methodologies and ESP Research (chapters 6-11). It is completed by an afterword by John Swales and a useful index.