Research And Practice In Professional Discourse

This book offers a broad overview of research and practice in professional discourse. Major developments and future directions based on current strengths are also highlighted.

Winner of the Association for Business Communication’s Distinguished Publication on Business Communication Award 2016 This edited volume offers a collection of original chapters focusing on the Ins and Outs of professional discourse research. Drawing on insights from LSP, ethnography and discourse analysis, it covers a wide range of issues, ranging from gaining access and collecting data to feeding results back in the form of recommendations to practitioners.

This edited book engages with the richly interdisciplinary field of business and professional communication, aiming to reconcile the prescriptive ambitions of the US-centred business communication tradition with the more descriptive approach favoured in discourse studies and applied linguistics. A follow-up to the award-winning book The Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), this volume brings together scholars and their recent work from wide-ranging business and professional settings to engage with the question of what counts as good data. The authors focus on four key themes - authenticity, triangulation, background and relevance - to shine a light on business and professional discourse as essential contextual and intertextual. This book will be of interest to scholars working in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and business communication, but also other social scientists interested in a range of perspectives on oral, written and digital language use in workplace settings.

Using a wide range of examples, this book examines the discourse of professional writing and its important role in society.

Internationally, there is increasing research and interest in the processes of the production and reception of texts for specific purposes and in the historical development of genres and registers within Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP), psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and the sociology of science. Studies of professional communication have traditionally been biased towards the written medium and have been carried out with little, if any, connection to LSP. Disciplinary boundaries and interest groupings have thus kept these different approaches to the study of professional communication and interaction separate. The editors of this volume unite these different perspectives and approaches and bring together recent research from linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, anthropology and sociology to provide an up-to-date analysis of different varieties of professional discourse and their historical development. Chapters written by leading exponents in the field deal with the core theoretical issue of how language, written genres and spoken discourse are constructed as a successive and continuous interplay between language and social realities. The volume includes chapters on the moral construction of discourse in the social care profession, the discourse of dispute negotiation, narrative accounts in clinical research, doctor-patient interaction, legal and other kinds of institutional discourse. A key text for students of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics at both advanced, undergraduate and MA levels.

This book combines an authoritative examination of the field of discourse-based research with practical guidance on research design and development. The book is not prescriptive but instead invites expansive, innovative thinking about what discourse is, why it matters to people at particular sites and how it can be investigated. The authors identify a set of questions that, they argue, are crucial for understanding discourse. Part I of the book explores the implications of these questions, providing a comprehensive survey of relevant scholars, theories, concepts and methodologies. Part II addresses these implications, setting out a multi-perspectival approach to resourcing and integrating micro and macro perspectives in the description, interpretation and explanation of data. Part III offers wide-ranging resources to support further reflection and future research. Ultimately, this book offers a new research approach for students, researchers and practitioners in Applied Linguistics to encourage and support research that can be truly impactful through its relevance to social and professional practice.

This book provides insights into the ways in which legal professionals participate in their day-to-day activities, and critically focuses on how language is used and exploited in everyday professional discourse. It is organised into two parts dealing with topic areas of legal discourse (written and spoken) relevant to professional practice and communication. The innovative research landscape offered by this book covers diverse and complex features of legal discourse construction where socially informed aspects of language use are negotiated by professional practices. Such features provide the wide scope for the critical study of legal language as a tool for social action, and set up a descriptive and interpretive framework for engaging with representations of legal discourses and genres where authority, power, ideology, as well as areas of hybridity, intertextuality, interdiscursivity and recontextualization are involved in legal discourse. This book brings together scholars from a wide academic spectrum around the globe with an interest in the intricacies of language and law as they play out in the real world. The book, therefore, offers both a resource and a stimulus to the wider readership.

Using a wide range of professional genres such as research papers, business reports, performance commentaries, guidebooks and legal documents, this study focuses on the discourse of professional writing, employing analytic paradigms from systemic-functional linguistics, pragmatics, text analysis, sociology and anthropological linguistics. Kenneth Kong argues that while professions use different sets of practices, their use of language displays many universals. This is demonstrated through the analysis of data from a broad cross-section of professional settings such as medicine, law, business, mass media and engineering. This examination of professional discourse, and its important role in society, will be of interest to researchers in applied linguistics, to professionals who want to understand the role of language in their work, and to teachers of English for specific purposes.

Professional Discourse gives a broad and multifaceted perspective on discourse in the professions. For each of these professions, the book explores the dual relationship between discourse and context, outlining how professional discourse is continuously reconstructed in relation to changing contextual frameworks. The case studies discussed in the book are based on authentic texts and spoken data, collected within different environments and related to different domains. The book includes discussion of both theory and methodology, thus providing tools for exercises and future studies. The reader is introduced to a variety of analytical approaches, that of textlinguistics, pragmatics, genre studies, sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics and sociology, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. The book gives theoretically grounded and systematically investigated answers to questions of relevance for advanced learners, practitioners and academic scholars.

Internationally, there is increasing research and interest in the processes of the production and reception of texts for specific purposes and in the historical development of genres and registers within Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP), psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and the sociology of science. Studies of professional communication have traditionally been biased towards the written medium and have been carried out with little, if any, connection to LSP. Disciplinary boundaries and interest groupings have thus kept these different approaches to the study of professional communication and interaction separate. The editors of this volume unite these different perspectives and approaches and bring together recent research from linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, anthropology and sociology to provide an up-to-date analysis of different varieties of professional discourse and their historical development. Chapters written by leading exponents in the field deal with the core theoretical issue of how language, written genres and spoken discourse are constructed as a successive and continuous interplay between language and social realities. The volume includes chapters on the moral construction of discourse in the social care profession, the discourse of dispute negotiation, narrative accounts in clinical research, doctor-patient interaction, legal and other kinds of institutional discourse. A key text for students of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics at both advanced, undergraduate and MA levels.