Specifying Learners’ Professional Needs in Academic Writing

The article examines the controversial procedure of analyzing the learner’s professional needs. Needs analysis is generally regarded as an invaluable tool for constructing a course syllabus. It might be really informative if the target situation analysis and present situation analysis are combined. Speaking about academic writing teaching for Russian non-academic students at the Bachelor Degree level, one should admit that students have no or limited experience of functioning in an academic area in English. Consequently, their responses to the questionnaires as one of the frequently used methods of target situation analysis are merely assumptions; and the answers could not be taken as objective and valid. The author presents a system of analyzing students’ needs within the framework of Academic Writing course: namely, distinguishes the stages that precede or follow teacher-student talks about their expectations, provides more objective practice of examining learners’ needs, and discusses ways of improving question-answer sessions/ interviews. Needs analysis practice that develops learners’ professional needs involves task-based learning, reflexive activities, and teaching to ask good questions. Bringing into life the analogy between customer development theory in management and needs analysis practice in education, it is possible to work out a fruitful strategy. Conducting needs analysis pertains equally to specifying and developing students’ needs in academic communication.

Introduction: Ending the Romance of Academic Flying

In this introduction, we note how academic work has come to be ever more closely entwined with air travel, and point out that we, in the face of climate crisis, are obliged to transition to other means of academic communication. Such a transition requires a reliable documentation of the consequences of academic flying; a deep understanding of the various reasons why academics fly; as well as sophisticated insight into what can replace flying and how. The introduction explores these themes first through David Lodge’s novels Changing Places and Small World, and then explains how the book’s chapters follow up the research agenda on academic aeromobility, as well as how this agenda can contribute to practical change.

Too Anxious to Talk: Social Anxiety, Academic Communication, and Students’ Experiences in Higher Education

Social anxiety is related to a host of negative student outcomes in the educational context, including physical symptoms of anxiety, reduced cognitive functioning, and poor academic performance. Despite the prevalence of social anxiety, little is known about mechanisms that may underlie associations between social anxiety and outcomes in the context of higher education. Therefore, the goal of this study was to evaluate a conceptual model linking social anxiety, communication with peers and instructors, students’ experiences (i.e., engagement, connectedness, and satisfaction), and indices of socio-emotional functioning at university. Participants were N = 1,073 undergraduate students ( Mage = 20.3 years, SD = 3.49) who completed a series of self-report measures. Among the results, social anxiety was negatively related to communication with instructors, socio-emotional functioning, and student experiences, and academic communication accounted for significant variance in the links between social anxiety and student experiences. In addition, there was at least some evidence that student experiences partially mediated the association between social anxiety and socio-emotional functioning. Gender effects suggest that social anxiety is related to less communication with instructors, lower engagement and satisfaction, and poorer socio-emotional functioning among females compared with males. Results are situated within current literature examining social anxiety in education. The discussion provides concrete suggestions for educational practitioners to increase support for students who experience social anxiety.

Learning to Write Titles for Research Articles

The article discusses the basic guidelines for writing titles of articles intended for publication in scientific journals. The relevance of the topic touched upon in this article is due to the fact that currently teachers are faced with the need to train master degree students at both linguistic and non-linguistic faculties to write scientific articles in English. The title is a very important part of the article, since it presents in a concise form the main information about the content of the publication. A well-formulated title can interest the reader and make him or her eager to read the article. On the contrary, titles which are too complicated to understand, cumbersome, and vague are unlikely to attract attention and arouse the interest of a potential reader. The aim of the study is to provide an overview of guidelines for writing titles that can be found in the English-language literature. The author also analyzes the typical mistakes that Russian-speaking authors make when writing titles of articles in English. Research methods include analysis, description, observation, comparison. The results of the study showed that the most common causes of errors in the formulation of titles are linguistic interference and ignorance of the peculiarities of the English-speaking communicative culture related to written communication in the scientific field. It is concluded that the course «Written academic communication in English» should be included in the Master course program, which will familiarize students with the main features of scientific articles in English and teach future authors to correctly formulate the titles of their publications.

Diversifying academic communication in anti-racist scholarship: The value of a translingual orientation

This article develops a complex orientation to linguistic domination and resistance to demonstrate how academic communication can be diversified to facilitate anti-racist scholarship. While it draws from social sciences which provide complex theories of social structuration, it demonstrates how linguists can offer fine-grained analytical tools to track these processes across diverse scales of space, time, and institutions. The objective of this article is to introduce an orientation to language which goes beyond traditional reductive and overdetermined perspectives to accommodate its generative and resistant potential. It introduces translingual practice as accommodating the theoretical developments discussed, and demonstrates how methods of indexical analyses can help scholars study texts and communication across various spatiotemporal scales in achieving structuration. This approach is applied to the writing practice of African American scholar, Geneva Smitherman, to demonstrate how her anti-racist scholarship renegotiates established structures of academic communication and generates change. While this article will help applied linguists to develop an appreciation of writers and writing in constructing diversified academic communication, it can provide linguistic tools to social scientists for tracing the workings of structuration and change at diverse spatiotemporal and social scales of consideration.

Kommunikationsgeschichte der Vorlesung: Linguistische Zugänge zur historischen Wissenschaftskommunikation im akademischen Hörsaal

The analysis of historical lecture practice in the context of a history of academic communication requires a multi-perspective approach. Different manifestations of communication from a historical lecture hall must be brought together and examined on the basis of a broad selection of source materials. The linguistic analysis of texts/languages, images, objects, spaces and bodies promises new insights into a long-lived communicative genre whose significance in the history of language and culture has so far only been explored in rudimentary form.

Characterizing response quantity on academic social Q&A sites: a multidiscipline comparison of linguistic characteristics of questions

PurposeAs academic social Q&A networking websites become more popular, scholars are increasingly using them to meet their information needs by asking academic questions. However, compared with other types of social media, scholars are less active on these sites, resulting in a lower response quantity for some questions. This paper explores the factors that help explain how to ask questions that generate more responses and examines the impact of different disciplines on response quantity.Design/methodology/approachThe study examines 1,968 questions in five disciplines on the academic social Q&A platform ResearchGate Q&A and explores how the linguistic characteristics of these questions affect the number of responses. It uses a range of methods to statistically analyze the relationship between these linguistic characteristics and the number of responses, and conducts comparisons between disciplines.FindingsThe findings indicate that some linguistic characteristics, such as sadness, positive emotion and second-person pronouns, have a positive effect on response quantity; conversely, a high level of function words and first-person pronouns has a negative effect. However, the impacts of these linguistic characteristics vary across disciplines.Originality/valueThis study provides support for academic social Q&A platforms to assist scholars in asking richer questions that are likely to generate more answers across disciplines, thereby promoting improved academic communication among scholars.

Polymedia in interaction

This Special Issue on “Polymedia in interaction” theorizes and empirically investigates practices and ideologies of digitally mediated interaction under conditions of polymedia. We argue that the proliferation of mobile interpersonal communication in the 2010s calls for, and is reflected in, conceptual and methodological shifts in empirical research on digital language and communication in pragmatics and sociocultural linguistics. In this introduction, these shifts are crystallized in five interrelated themes: (1) a turn from ‘computer-mediated communication’ to ‘digitally mediated interaction’ as a bracket category; (2) a move beyond the on/offline divide and focus on the integration of mediated interaction in everyday communication on micro-units of social structure (e.g. transnational families, business or academic communication); (3) an empirical downscaling towards private and small-scale public data; publicness; (4) a shift from the study of single modes of digital communication to polymedia; and (5) a focus on semiotic repertoires and registers of digital mediation. Research that orients to (some or all of) these focal points is compared with other trends in digital language research, including computational methods. The papers in this issue flesh out these five dimensions with findings from qualitative research, based on multi-sited linguistic and digital ethnographies in various sociolinguistic settings.