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.
This book provides a unique orientation to the present, past, and future of the field of business communication by collecting reflective essays from some of its most influential scholars, teachers, and leaders. Through a series of essays that bridge personal narrative and critical analysis, this book mentors a new generation of students, teachers, and professionals as they encounter the challenges and opportunities of business communication and shape the future of the field. The authors—all influential figures and award winners—describe their personal histories with the field and discuss how major aspects have evolved over time. The essays examine the pathways through which scholars encounter the discipline, the professional challenges they face, the evolving content of the business communication curriculum, the development of business communication programs and institutions, the value of an entrepreneurial mindset for career development, and the relationships between research, teaching, and professional practice. They offer stories about a diversity of paths for achieving personal and professional success and invite readers to think about what lessons they can apply to their own career advancement and satisfaction. In total, this collection provides both a living history of the field and a series of real-world examples of business communication at its finest. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of business communication and can be used as a supplemental text for courses in business communication, professional communication, and communication career preparation.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media provides an accessible and comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research in media linguistics. This handbook analyzes both language theory and practice, demonstrating the vital role of this research in understanding language use in society. With over thirty chapters contributed by leading academics from around the world, this handbook: addresses issues of language use, form, structure, ideology, practice, and culture in the context of both traditional and new communication media; investigates mediated language use in public spheres, organizations, and personal communication, including newspaper journalism, broadcasting, and social media; examines the interplay of language and media from both linguistic and media perspectives, discussing auditory and visual media and graphic modes, as well as language and gender, multilingualism, and language change; analyzes the advantages and shortcomings of current approaches within media linguistics research and outlines avenues for future research. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media is a must-have survey of this key field, and is essential reading for those interested in media linguistics.
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 showcases various methodological approaches to the analysis of organizational talk and text. Arguing that organizations are discursive constructions that are communicatively constituted, the authors use the analysis of transcripts of audio-recordings of naturally-occurring workplace talk and authentic written texts to demonstrate what applied linguistics has to offer to scholarly research into organizations as well as management practice and training. The authors discuss the theoretical underpinnings of discursive approaches to the role language in the communicative constitution of organization, and then each chapter focuses on one particular analytical approach. The chapters cover conversation analysis; membership categorization analysis, positioning theory; ventriloquism; metaphor analysis; and metadiscourse analysis and computer-mediated discourse analysis. Consequently, this interdisciplinary work presents a number of methods that allow researchers unfamiliar with fine-grained linguistic analyses of naturally-occurring talk and text to explore ways of adding to their repertoire of research skills.
This edited book presents contemporary empirical research investigating the use of language in professional settings, drawing on the contributions of a set of internationally-renowned authors. The book takes a critical approach to understanding professional communication in a range of fields and global contexts. Split into three parts, covering Business and Organisations, Healthcare, and Politics and Institutions, the contributors explore how and why academics engage in workplace research which takes the form of 'consultancy', 'advocacy' and 'activism'. In light of an ever-changing, ever-demanding global landscape, this volume offers new theoretical and methodological ways of conducting professional communication research with real-world impact. It will be of interest to linguistics and communication researchers and practitioners, particularly those working in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, business communication, health communication, political communication, language and the law and organisational studies.
This book reflects the state-of-the-art in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) research, drawing on both top-down and bottom-up practices and methodological itineraries. In order to fill some of the gaps in the current literature, it provides well-grounded and thorough investigations into discursive practices in academic, workplace and intercultural settings, throwing light on the specific varieties of language used to achieve professional targets. Teachers have to act as an interface between theory and praxis, bridging the gap between the classroom and the workplace to create a dynamic virtuous circle. The multi-perspective and multi-method frameworks presented in this volume range from quantitative corpus-based techniques integrated with discourse analysis to analyses of what occurs in the classroom informed by English language teaching (ELT) educational theories and notions regarding language acquisition, motivation, learning styles and instructional contexts. Both top-down and bottom-up approaches to the theory-practice dyad provide the opportunity to obtain a closer view of the subject from both ends of the spectrum and can prompt fresh initiatives by all those working within the domain of ESP. This book, therefore, offers a cutting-edge account of some of the latest avenues in research and practice which will be of interest to scholars and university teachers of ESP, as well as scholars in the field of applied linguistics.
