Professional Discourse Research Articles

Editorial

In this first issue of 2022, Journal of Modern Languages (JML) is pleased to share six interesting articles which are of relevance to the field of languages and linguistics. The first article of Volume 32, Department Store Surveys as a Methodology in the Study of Linguistic Variation by Shangxin Zheng and Xiaomei Wang, evaluates the use of Department Store Surveys (DSS) as an effective sociolinguistic tool to study linguistic variation in a multilingual society. Then, the next article by Vivian Chiew and Cecilia Cheong talks about the socio-cognitive and professional practice perspectives on chairperson statements. The findings of their study do not only illuminate the importance of professional discourse but also highlight pedagogical implications for English for Professional Communication (EPC) programmes. In this issue, we have also included an article that concern minority languages, a major area of interest for many researchers. In the article Maimani Language and Lawati Language: Two Sides of the Same Coin?, Said Humaid Al Jahdhami shares with us the resemblance between two minority languages which are Maimani Language and Lawati language. The other two articles focus on translation. In the article Evaluating the Curriculum for M.A. English Translation in Iran: Is the Curriculum Effective for Students?, Aynaz Samir evaluates the effectiveness of the English translation programme in Iran by investigating 341 university students’ perspectives. Insights for curriculum reform in the area of English translation are provided. The following article The Art of Paper Cutting: Strategies and Challenges in Chinese to English Subtitle Translation of Cultural Items by William Chai, Hui Yi Ong, Mansour Amini and Latha Ravindran highlights the technical, cultural and linguistic challenges faced in translating culture-specific items. Some of the proposed strategies in dealing with the translation of culture-specific terms are omission, equivalence, adaptation and direct transfer. Last but not least, Abbas Pazireh, Nilofar Hessamodini and Zohre Jaferi reported the findings of their quantitative study in the article Iranian EFL Learners’ Perceptions towards Demotivation in Learning English. In their study, 300 Iranian high school students’ perceptions of demotivation in learning English were gathered and factors such as teachers, textbooks, classroom conditions were identified. We hope that these articles published by JML are insightful to you and that you would share them with your friends and colleagues. For your easy reference, a list of featured articles published in the last five years is attached in the Appendix.

Bursting the ‘childhood bubble’: reframing discourses of LGBTQ+ teachers and their students

ABSTRACT LGBTQ+ teachers have been noted to struggle with conflicting professional and personal subjectivities within schools, which are sites of (re)production of heteronormativity. This clash relies upon positioning LGBTQ+ as an adult activity in opposition to discourses of childhood, which are framed around protection and innocence. This research, however, took place at a time of potential change, with aspects of LGBTQ+ inclusion being present within UK schools to varying degrees. In 2020, 50 UK LGBTQ+ teachers engaged in individual semi-structured interviews. Thematic Foucauldian analysis was applied to the data to examine both the discourses produced by the teachers and the subjectivities that were navigated. Findings suggest that many teachers are able to disrupt the binaries of professional/personal and a ‘new’ teacher subjectivity emerges, that acknowledges their LGBTQ+ status. This is framed around neoliberal traits of honesty and authenticity. In relation, the binary distinction between student and teacher is navigated, and childhood is no longer discursively constructed by the teachers as innocent; instead, students are framed around their agency and social awareness. However, there is evidence that protectionist discourses of the child, and professional discourses of the teacher, are also being used to prevent LGBTQ+ inclusion, and restrict LGBTQ+ teachers.

Professional discourse of the specialty "Information, library and archival affairs"

The urgency of the study is due to the contradiction that arises due to the lack of "information profession", necessary for professional self-identification of students studying in educational and professional programs (ЕPP), which can be conditionally attributed to the "information" component of "Information, Library and Archival Affairs" and undeveloped professionalism of this component of the Information, library and archival affairs specialty (ILAA). It is emphasized that in the educational process of higher education the goal of professionalism is to create a mechanism of conscious professional motivation of future professionals to professional growth, forming an active position in the acquisition of professional competencies, awareness of public recognition and importance of the chosen profession. The article outlines the state of professional research of the components of the specialty "Information, library and archival affairs". The importance of presenting the profession of information business as a discipline in the curriculum of specialist training is emphasized, which is due to the need to develop competencies and professional self-identification, the basis for which is the professional knowledge of future specialists. It is emphasized that the variety of directions and forms of interaction of the information specialist with the surrounding social information space and the tasks he solves complicates the development of a generalized concept of information profession and translation of its achievements into the training process. One of the pedagogically expedient ways of introducing "information profession" as a discipline in the process of training specialists at the current stage of development of scientific approaches to the profession of information science, proposed semantic differentiation and classification of information professions in a variety of specializations. With this approach, it is appropriate to develop the discipline "Professiology" for specific educational programs, which are positioned in the component "information business" specialty ILAA.

The Myth of the "Integrated Resort"

The expansion of the casino industry in Asia over the last two decades has purportedly given rise to a new development model known as the “Integrated Resort” (IR). Within state, professional and public discourses, the IR is often defined in three ways: 1. it evolved from large multi-attraction casino projects in Las Vegas; 2. it is distinguished by the fact that the casino occupies a small area of the property but makes a large contribution to its total revenue; and 3. the casino helps to make non-gaming attractions like museums financially viable. While not all factually inaccurate, I argue that these claims are strategic representations that legitimize and promote the IR in this part of the world. By triangulating different sets of discourses and participating in industry events like the Global Gaming Expo, I unravel the politics of these claims and trace their shifting effects as the IR is translated into various forms of regulatory controls and corporate practices. The emergence of the IR signals a historical moment in the normalization of commercial gambling in Asia, and shows how this transition can proceed through an architectural medium.

Creating a reason to read: coaching strategies that support teachers to establish reading as a professional practice

The complex nature of teaching draws teachers to read so as to satisfy their curiosities, problem-solve and innovate. However, teachers find it challenging to access and learn from educational research findings. Through our work as ‘consultant coaches’ in one Australian school over the duration of one school year, we co-constructed strategies to support teachers in translating insights from professional reading in their classrooms. This article reports on how regular coach meetings provided a forum for professional discourse about successes and struggles that contributed to the generation of four interconnected strategies that supported teachers in making connections between educational research and their problems of practice. While experimenting with more sophisticated research-informed pedagogies sometimes produced tensions in the form of student resistance, persistence led to eventual success and tended to affirm for the majority of teachers that reading is a worthwhile professional activity. This, in turn, motivated teachers to continue reading. That coaches grew in their ability to encourage teachers to read and experiment is testament to the effectiveness of the coach meetings for supporting and extending their work as teacher educators.

COGNITIVE TERMINOLOGICAL STRUCTURE AS A UNIT OF THE PROFESSIONAL WORLDVIEW

The article deals with the problem of obtaining, processing, storing and transferring professional information with the help of language means and the formation of a system of professional knowledge. The paper substantiates the term ‘cognitive terminological structure’ proposed by the authors to denote a unit of professional consciousness, in which a fragment of the professional worldview is concentrated and which is verbalized through terms. The formation of such a cognitive unit is the speaker’s reaction and reflection to the phenomena of the scientific world. Understanding of these phenomena is formed in the mind with the acquisition of knowledge about them, and ideas about them are continuously transformed by added professional and relevant information, are stored in professional memory and verbalized in the form of a term. Terminological units are associated with the cognitive terminological structures they verbalize. Such cognitive terminological structures are clumps of information stored in the memory of a professional metalanguage user. From the linguo-cognitive point of view the authors offer to understand the term as a word or phrase, representing a fragment of the professional worldview through the verbalization of the cognitive terminological structure within a certain scientific / professional discourse.

Navigating tensions and asserting agency in language teacher identity: A case study of a graduate teaching assistant

This paper reports on a qualitative case study of an often-overlooked language teacher: The graduate teaching assistant (GTA). The study relies on the theoretical premise that teachers’ professional learning is a process of identity construction. During this process, teachers experience tensions as they are introduced to professional authoritative discourses (ADs) and negotiate internally persuasive discourses (IPDs). In the qualitative case study of Karina, a GTA at a US University (State University, henceforth), we address the research question: How did Karina navigate her identity tensions as a GTA in the German program at State University? Our findings detail the effect of authoritative discourses in the program, and a GTA's agency in developing her own IPD.

Lexical ambiguity detection in professional discourse

Professional discourse is the language used by specialists, such as lawyers, doctors and academics, to communicate the knowledge and assumptions associated with their respective fields. Professional discourse can be especially difficult for non-specialists to understand due to the lexical ambiguity of commonplace words that have a different or more specific meaning within a specialist domain. This phenomena also makes it harder for specialists to communicate with the general public because they are similarly unaware of the potential for misunderstandings.In this article, we present an approach for detecting domain terms with lexical ambiguity versus everyday English. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with three case studies in statistics, law and biomedicine. In all case studies, we identify domain terms with a precision@100 greater than 0.9, outperforming the best performing baseline by 18.1–91.7%. Most importantly, we show this ranking is broadly consistent with semantic differences. Our results highlight the difficulties that existing semantic difference methods have in the cross-domain setting, which rank non-domain terms highly due to noise or biases in the data. We additionally show that our approach generalizes to short phrases and investigate its data efficiency by varying the number of labeled examples.

Linguistic Organization of the Official Sport Discourse Text
 (Based on 2017–2020 Rhythmic Gymnastics Code of Points)

The purpose of this article is to identify compositional, lexical and grammat-
 ical features of the texts related to the official sports discourse. The research is based on 2017–2020 Rhythmic Gymnastics Code of Points in English and Russian versions. The relevance of the study is due to the insufficient coverage of the linguistic peculiarities of documents related to sports in linguists’ publications and the importance of describing this segment of sports discourse from the point of view of its goal, sub-
 ject, communicants and linguistic means used in official texts.
 The text of Code of Points implements professional sports discourse, as it
 is created and read by specialists. Linguistic analysis of the official sports text
 makes it possible to identify the features of the compositional structure of the text,
 grammatical features, as well as lexemes that have meaning-forming functions.
 The research involves methods of structural, semantic, contextual and discourse
 analysis. The peculiarities of the composition lie in the clear structuredness of the
 material, which contributes to its logical presentation.
 The authors of the article present terms as key units that are significant
 for the content of the text and characterized by unambiguity, a tendency to fre-
 quent use in one text. Abbreviations and non-verbal signs promote concise com-
 munication of information. The syntax features include simple extended sen-
 tences, compound and complex sentences, conditionals, and passive clauses. The
 prescriptive nature of the text is also achieved by the functioning of modal verbs.
 The revealed features of the linguistic organization regulate such characteristics
 of the official text as informativeness, prescriptiveness, descriptiveness, concrete-
 ness and impersonality.

A content analysis of school leaders’ conversations about ‘off rolling’ on Twitter and its relevance to teacher education

ABSTRACT This article seeks to illustrate the usefulness to teacher educators of small-scale qualitative social media content analysis by reporting a study of online microblogs (tweets) posted by senior school leaders’ relating to ‘off rolling’ (practices that bypass legal permanent exclusion procedures in English mainstream schools). The outlined method enables analysis of social media content in the absence of costly opinion mining software and its associated affordances and limitations are discussed. The article also outlines the implications of the study’s findings for teacher education. In this instance, it served to illustrate a disparity between different types of professional discourse which future teachers should be prepared to navigate in their teacher training. Given the illegality of ‘off rolling’ and an increasingly incontestable socio-political discourse around inclusive education, it was hypothesised that Twitter affords school leaders a forum for the articulation of views that rest uneasily with this discourse, current legislation and statutory guidance around off rolling. A tendency to discount ‘off rolling’ as a rare occurrence was found despite growing anecdotal evidence that it is viewed as a legitimate, if illegal, practice within some school cultures. This finding is relevant to teacher educators and future teachers who aspire to an inclusive education system.

A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF INTERPERSONAL PERSUASIVE WRITING SKILLS OF PAKISTANI ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Persuasive writing skills empower English Language Learners (ELLs) to produce, evaluate, and understand ethical, professional, and political discourse. The appraisal system provides lexical and grammatical uses in each stage and phase of argumentative writing to develop prosodies required to construct an authorial voice and enable a writer to confront diverse viewpoints to build a convincing argument and build solidarity with readers. This work investigates the uses of appraisal system choices according to each phase of the argumentative genre schematic structure to achieve persuasion in fifty Pakistani argumentative essays drawn from the International Corpus of Learners English (ICLE). The findings reveal that most undergraduate Pakistani English Learners inappropriately utilized appraisal language choices regarding stage and phase requirements which undermined the persuasiveness of Pakistani learners' arguments. It is likely to deduce that this work can explicitly assist the English language teaching and learning community using evaluative writing skills central to persuasive written discourse. Keywords: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Analytical Argumentative Essay Writing, Persuasive Language Patterns, Argumentative Genre Model, Appraisal Theory

Lingua-cultural Peculiarities of Tourism Discourse and the Perspective of its Teaching

The article deals with the problem of lingua-cultural peculiarities of tourism discourse, contrastive analysis of English and Georgian tourism-related vocabulary and terminology, and outlook of teaching tourism discourse to students or people who are interested in the field of tourism. Tourism discourse is an independent type of discourse that has a specific addressee and it refers to communication among people who do not belong to a specific social or cultural group or language community. Therefore, our main focus will be addressed to reveal language peculiarities of English and Georgian tourism discourse to make the teaching process easier for any group of people who are interested in understanding the specific terms and expressions used in the texts. Revealing lingua-cultural differences and similarities between the chosen English and Georgian texts contributes to a better understanding of various cultures and traditions. Thus, the paper aims to research the vocabulary and terminology of the tourism discourse and to select the appropriate terminology for teaching tourism-related texts considering their lingua-cultural peculiarities. The research based on contrastive analysis of English and Georgian tourism-related texts shows that in professional and academic tourism discourses certain terms and special vocabulary are observed, in public tourism discourse - evaluative vocabulary and emotional connotations prevail. Lingua-cultural analysis of the tourism-related English and Georgian texts showed that they are characterized by an abundance of borrowed words and lacunas, although the use of idioms is rare. The conclusions drawn in the paper contribute to the further research of tourism texts. In addition, it should be noted that the work is interdisciplinary, and it will be useful not only for specialists working in the tourism industry but for philologists and teachers teaching English to students qualifying in tourism..

Re-framing Built Environment Practice: Towards an Accessible City

As practising architects in Victoria, Australia, we have observed significant, systemic industry failure, impeding the development of accessible and inclusive cities. Contemporary built environment design practice and design values push ‘accessible design’ to the margins, often considered as an after-thought and only in terms of technical and regulatory compliance. Built environment practice needs to be challenged into deeper ways of thinking – ones that stimulate professional discourse and heighten industry awareness of both its control over built environment accessibility outcomes and, critically, its accountability in serving the public good.Cities invariably comprise neighbourhoods. To begin to understand built environment inaccessibility at the neighbourhood scale, the built environment mindset must change to properly engage with complex, socio-ecological, public-realm (public space) built environments. Design practice must improve its neighbourhood site analysis approach, going beyond private, contractual site boundaries and immediate physical surrounds, to understanding end-user experiences, neighbourhood journeys, and the broader scale of (in)accessibility. Industry attitudes, practice approaches and the way disability is positioned by industry must change to embrace processes that necessitate diverse actors working together across multiple disciplines and sectors with people with disability being core actors in decision-making.We believe that opportunities exist in building industry interest and capacity. Research-informed built environment practice embracing systems-thinking, human rights-based approaches, and transdisciplinarity can be effective for aggravating industry change and the way industry positions disability. This paper adopts an analytical, collaborative autoethnographic approach, examining case studies of neighbourhood-scale accessibility assessment, outputs from activities questioning why built environment practitioners believe inaccessibility exists, and self-reflection on 10 to 35+ years of working in architectural practice. Importantly, this paper argues that in working towards achieving universally accessible public spaces for all, built environment practitioners, and architects in particular, must accept accountability for the impact of their actions on people with disabilities’ lived experiences.
 
 Read the full article in accessible html-format here.

Teacher candidates’ motivations for the profession and career advancements in the Carpathian Basin

Attractiveness of the educator’s career path, the number, quality and motivation of candidates starting this profession has been in the focus of domestic and international professional discourse for decades now. We suppose that today, the motivation for the career of a pedagogue (including its existential, organizational and infrastructural conditions) is different from the level of commitment to the profession of an educator (which can be experienced informally, or outside of the public education system). In our research, we made efforts to address the widest possible range of student elementary teachers, and to interpret their responses using different filters. In the first phase of our study, we analyzed first-year kindergarten teacher students’ career motivation and commitment to the profession, and in the second phase, that of final-year kindergarten teacher candidates. In the third phase, we conducted surveys to explore students’ motivation for the profession and the career path of a pedagogue in four countries of the Carpathian Basin (Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Serbia). The surveys were conducted in 17 campuses of 11 Hungarian teacher’s training colleges and universities. Finally, we extended the survey to practicing graduates preparing for their on-the-job rating examination. Based on our results, in all breakdowns, regardless of age group, training institute or - in part - geographical location and nationality, it is proven that lack of social- and financial esteem of the profession poses serious risks for recruitment and retention of teachers.

What does it mean to ‘start where the person is at’?: Reflections on personhood in social work

Summary: The quality of the helping relationship is experienced when theories and principles are enacted in practice. Here, the people social workers seek to serve are able to decide whether the practice they experience is useful. One way that social workers can enhance the quality of the relationships they develop is to ‘start where the person is at’. In order to explore what this phrase means in and for effective social work practice, this paper revisits Martin Buber’s articulation of the I/thou relationship seeking to shed light on the notion of personhood in this value-based profession. Two participants, within a larger research project exploring the experiences of social workers in the Australian child welfare field, independently used the language of personhood to refer to the way they conceptualised the process of engaging with people. Both were referring to enacting the transcendent value of each person in terms of a practice philosophy. These personal narratives inspired the authors to move away from the usual professional discourse about the skills involved in relationship building and instead reflect on their own practice in order to capture something philosophical about caring relational processes. Revisiting humanistic conceptualisations of the helping relationship such as the I/thou has the potential to discourage practitioners from seeing relationships as transactional. This has particular significance in practice contexts characterised as risk-averse, austere or involuntary, and/or where people may be feeling anxious, stressed and/or simply unheard. Contemporary implications for social work practice are discussed.

How nursing stakeholders in the Republic of Ireland define evidence-based practice and why it matters.

Evidence-based practice (EBP) has garnered increasing exposure in professional healthcare discourse over three decades. While the term is used frequently, its interpretation varies widely. An accurate, shared understanding of what EBP means is essential to the achievement of EBP implementation in clinical practice. As part of a national study in the Republic of Ireland, nurses, midwives, educators, and students shared their personal understanding of what EBP was to them. To establish nurses', midwives', educators', and students' knowledge and understanding of the concept of EBP in the Republic of Ireland. In a national study exploring EBP beliefs, implementation, and organizational readiness for EBP among nurses, midwives, educators, and students, an open-ended question invited participants to explain what EBP is, in their own words. Content analysis was used to interpret participants' responses. Five themes emerged from the data from the single open-ended question: (1) varying definitions of EBP, (2) best practice, (3) nurses' and midwives' role in EBP, (4) knowledge, and (5) barriers and facilitators of EBP. The dominant finding centered on the substantial conflation of EBP with research utilization and other concepts such as quality improvement. Poor knowledge and understanding of EBP is a fundamental challenge to EBP implementation. Conflation of EBP with research utilization and other healthcare concepts is not uncommon among nurses and midwives globally and has persisted for some time. This has the potential to hinder the advancement of EBP in nursing and midwifery and, therefore, measures to enhance EBP knowledge and promote EBP implementation are key. Professional regulating bodies, educators, and clinical and educational organizations all have a role to play. The findings from this aspect of this national study offer a realistic, context-specific starting point for tailored educational interventions for clinicians, educators, and students and identify professional and organizational strategies that promote EBP as the expectation and "the way things are done here."

Book Review: Functional Approach to Professional Discourse Exploration in Linguistics by Elena N. Malyuga (Ed.)

Book Review: <i>Functional Approach to Professional Discourse Exploration in Linguistics</i> by Elena N. Malyuga (Ed.)

Distinctive Features of Association Measures Applied to Chinese Character Bigram Extraction Tasks

Studying professional discourse, a researcher has now an opportunity to create collections of texts and apply linguistic analysis software tools to them. However, when it comes to Chinese discourse there is a problem with the reliability of automatic word segmentation of texts. One of the ways to extract lexical units in Chinese texts is to apply statistical association measures for collocations to Chinese character bigrams. The purpose of this work is to conduct a comparative analysis of seven different statistical measures for collocations as a means of extracting two-syllabic lexical units (binomes) in an unsegmented Chinese character text. The subject of the analysis is the lexical, grammatical and frequency characteristics of bigrams with higher values of the statistical measures. Their comparison makes it possible to draw a conclusion about the features of statistical measures, in particular, about the best correspondence of linguistic tasks to statistical measures. The linguistic material of the study was a collection of 560 military-related news texts in Chinese with more than 720 thousand characters. The results show that the statistical measures considered can be divided into three groups according to the characteristics of bigrams receiving the highest values. The first group includes measures MI, MS and logDice, which give priority to rare bigrams with limited compatibility of components, such as the Chinese two-syllable single morpheme words “lianmianzi”. These measures do not extract terms well, but can be used to search for phraseologically related components. The measures of the second group, t-score and log-likelihood, are frequency-oriented, similar to frequency analysis, but they cope with non-lexical bigrams better, while log-likelihood somewhat lowers the rank of numerals and pronouns, picking out best the typical vocabulary of professional discourse. The third group includes measures MI3 and MI.log-f, which average the opposite approaches of the first two groups. The MI3 measure is considered to be the most universal one; it could be used to compare different corpora or collections of texts. It is concluded that applying statistical association measures to Chinese character bi-grams is possible and appropriate, when taking into account the correspondence of their specifics to a research task.

"Let Us See What Is Meant by the Word Recorde"

Taking as its starting point the discussion of “what is meant by the word Recorde” in a 1581 work by William Lambard, this article considers the development of conceptual ideas about records from the Middle Ages to the early years of the 20th century. After examining the medieval understanding of record as oral testimony of legal judgments, it discusses how concepts of record in England gradually expanded to embrace written texts, and it traces the shift from an exclusive association with courts of law to a perception that records could be made, kept, and used across a much wider range of contexts. The article also examines the changing terminological relationships between records and archives and the dissemination of English understandings of records to other Anglophone countries. It concludes with a brief exploration of points of contact between older debates about the scope of the term record and those of present- day professional discourse.

REFLECTION OF VIOLENCE AGAINST PEOPLE OF RESPECTABLE AGE AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM OF MODERNITY

The article highlights the problem of reflection on violence against people of respectable age, reveals the types of violence and manifestations against people in this category. Therefore, the purpose of the article is the need for timely social prevention of violence against people of respectable age. The structure and content of social support of people of respectable age in modern society are analyzed.&#x0D; Statistics confirm that Ukraine is one of the countries with a significant population over the age of sixty. Statistics also confirm the existence of domestic violence against elderly people and these individuals do not seek help from social services. It was found that the issues of ill-treatment of elderly people are currently the most common in the professional discourse of social assistance. There is a strong correlation between the two interpretations: in the context of health care and social assistance. This is one of the reasons why we focused primarily on the interpretation of human rights and the application of the legislative and political approach. The socio-pedagogical conditions that help prevent the treatment of elderly people are presented and the leading factor is the need to adopt legislation on human rights in this category.&#x0D; The rights of respectable people are not yet fully regulated by a separate international human rights instrument, as is the case for some other vulnerable groups (eg the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities). At the UN level, the issue of protecting them as a vulnerable group was first raised at the 1982 World Assembly on Aging, which adopted a political declaration and an International Plan of Action on Aging.&#x0D; The prospect of further research is to study the structure and content of social support for the adaptation of elderly people in social services in Slovakia.