APPL940- Interpersonal Communication in LSP

Task

This assignment allows you to explore an aspect of LSP that interests you. You may choose one of the following essay topics or you may negotiate a topic with the Unit Convenor (by discussing your idea with him).

Identify ONE trend in LSP since 1960 and discuss how it has impacted on the teaching of LSP.

Discuss why focusing only on vocabulary and jargon in LSP courses is ineffective in developing overall communicative competence in workplaces.

Compare and discuss the challenges of teaching ESP in (i) a country (of your choice) where English is widely spoken; and (ii) a country (of your choice) where English is not widely spoken.

Suggest an area of LSP that you think would benefit from further research.

Discuss why you think this area would benefit and what you think could be learned.

Discuss the important role played by culture in ONE area of LSP (e.g. Language for Business Purposes; Language for Professional Purposes (e.g. Medical or Legal or Financial Purposes etc.). How is culture relevant in this area and what impact does it have?

Of the three major approaches to genre (ESP; New Rhetoric; Australian)

which do you consider most useful and why? Discuss in relation to ONE area of LSP (e.g. Language for Business Purposes; Language for Professional Purposes (e.g. Medical or Legal or Financial Purposes etc.).

Discuss the importance of multimodality on ONE area of LSP (e.g. Language for Business Purposes; Language for Professional Purposes (e.g. Medical or Legal or Financial Purposes etc.).

Task 1

• Is there a specific language of specialised communication?

• What information is available regarding the syntactic and lexical features of the target discourse in an LSP classroom?

• Where does this information come from?

• What information would be useful to know and how might you collect it?

How is information about the language features of a discourse collected?

• Ethnography

• Corpus analysis

• Discourse analysis

Can teachers carry out ethnographic research themselves?

Task 2

Use the concordance of ‘emphasis / emphasise /emphasize’ to answer the following questions:

• Which is the noun form?

• Which is the verb form?

• What preposition is used with the noun form?

• What preposition is used with the verb form?

• What other question(s) might you usefully ask?

Nominalisation

• Competency based training (CBT) focuses on working out what abilities someone needs to do their job and developing and delivering training based on those abilities and recognising this training with a certificate.

Competency based training (CBT) focuses on the identification of abilities needed to complete a task and the development and delivery of appropriate certified training.