Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2000) 20, 59–76. Printed in the USA.

Copyright © 2000 Cambridge University Press 0267-1905/00 $9.50

LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

John M. Swales

SOME BRIEF HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Thirty-five years ago, three leading British linguists published a landmark

volume entitled The linguistic sciences and language teaching (Halliday, McIntosh
and Strevens 1964). The careful wording of the title of this book was something of
a clarion call; in effect, the authors promised to usher in a Brave New World of a
stronger descriptive base for pedagogical materials. As far as Language for Special
Purposes (LSP) is concerned, the key passage (which is well worth revisiting after
all this time) is the following:

Only the merest fraction of investigation has yet been carried out into
just what parts of a conventional course in English are needed by, let us
say, power station engineers in India, or police inspectors in Nigeria; even
less is known about precisely what extra specialized material is required.
This is one of the tasks for which linguistics must be called in. Every
one of these specialized needs requires, before it can be met by appro-
priate teaching materials, detailed studies of restricted languages and
special registers carried out on the basis of large samples of the language
used by the particular persons concerned (1964:189–190).

This forthrightly-expressed agenda proved very attractive to most of the

small band of LSP practitioners working in the 1960s as well as to many of the
increasing numbers of others who have become involved in the LSP movement in
each succeeding decade. The reasons for this attractiveness are not hard to find.
The research would be descriptive (with no “literary” stylistic criticisms of the
target discourses); it would deal with “normal” discourse (and not that provided by
famous figures in the respective fields); it would be synchronic (with no need to
look back at shaping historical forces); it would be basically textual or transcriptal
(with little attempt to investigate such matters as authorial motives for linguistic
choices); and it would rely on functional grammar, as primarily developed by

59
60 JOHN M. SWALES

Halliday, and also make use of some version of the “neo-Firthian” model of
contextual factors affecting language choices.

In retrospect, we can see that the great appeal of this approach lay in the
fact that it seemed eminently manageable to early LSP practitioners, who were
often working in underprivileged environments and who were also having to
administer programs, develop teaching materials, and do a fair amount of teaching.
First, the 1964 “manifesto” offered a simple relationship between linguistic analysis
and pedagogic materials. Second, there was no strong emphasis on the need for
practitioners to have any of the following types of expertise: Expert content
knowledge of the fields or professions they were trying to serve; real understanding
of the rhetorical evolution of the discourses central to those fields or professions; or
advanced anthropological training in “fly on the wall” ethnography. Third, the
ways and means of studying registers and special languages were often taught in
graduate courses and were familiar territory for LSP practitioners (although less so
in the United States). The early LSP practitioners were thus well equipped to carry
out relatively “thin” descriptions of their target discourses. What they principally
lacked was a perception of discourse itself and of the means for analyzing and
exploiting it—lacunae that were largely rectified by the 1980s.

We can usefully view the thirty-five years of Languages for Specific

Purposes since the publication of The linguistic sciences and language teaching as a
response (even if often inadvertent) to this opening scenario. On the one hand,
there has been a solid tradition of work that has continued this descriptive textual
tradition, albeit with shifts in focus from language to discourse to genre, and
perhaps now to activity theory (Russell 1997). For example, many of the articles
in the leading journal English for Specific Purposes fall into this category, as do
many LSP master’s theses from many parts of the world, and as do two of the
collections selected for the Annotated Bibliography of this review (Duszak 1997,
Fortanet, et al. 1998).

On the other hand, all of these founding tenets have been challenged at
one time or another. The challenge to a simplistic relationship between linguistic
analysis and classroom activities has long been one of Widdowson’s major
contributions to ESP (e.g., Widdowson 1998), and perhaps it reached its fullest
earlier expression in Hutchinson and Waters (1987). More recently, the debate
about this relationship has re-emerged in the context of how to handle in class the
new masses of linguistic data being produced by corpus linguistics (Partington
1998). The second issue (what should practitioners know) has also become more
complex. Part of this issue simply derives from the massive amount of new
information that is now available; for example, we now have several studies that
can tell us much about the evolution of professional discourse—in economics
(Gunnarson 1997a, Henderson, Dudley-Evans and Backhouse 1993), in physics
(Bazerman 1988), and in the life and health sciences (Atkinson 1999a, Salager-
Meyer 1997, Valle 1999). Further, new approaches to understanding professional
discourse have been developed, ranging from “shadowing” individual professionals
 LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 61

as they go about their work (Dudley-Evans and St John 1998); to investigations into
textual biographies (Swales 1998); to deeper perceptions of text construction,
reception, and evaluation (Prior 1998); to various kinds of study of workplace
discourse (Gunnarson, Linell and Nordberg 1997); and on to ideological critiques
(Huckin 1997). However, if understanding discourse is so complexly situated in all
these potentially various ways, then LSP practitioners are today forced into some
kind of informal cost-benefit analysis as they struggle to come to terms with how
much they need to know before they can offer what they have learned to their
students. In this climate of competing models, exhaustive explorations, growing
internationalization, and an exploding literature, it is not altogether surprising that
the simplicity of purely textual studies based on mid-sized corpora continues to have
appeal, perhaps especially in studies that attempt to compare texts in English with
those of another language (Connor 1996).

LSP: A PROFESSION, A DISCIPLINE, OR NEITHER?

ESP/LSP has a rather peculiar relationship with other branches of applied

linguistics. Its closest connection is certainly with discourse analysis and prag-
matics (including cross-cultural pragmatics); indeed, in some sense, it can be
argued that in many ways LSP is the prime realization of applied discourse
analysis. (And this is not to disregard comparable and important developments in
business and technical communication in North America and in the training of
translators in Europe.) It also has good connections with language assessment and
communicative language teaching. On the other hand, it has very few points of
contact with second language acquisition (SLA). Indeed, in this context it is
probably not a chance event that last year’s ARAL 19 had an opening section
entitled “Second Language Acquisition” and a distinct second one entitled
“Language Use in Professional Contexts.” These two intellectual worlds thus
continue to be socially constructed poles apart, perhaps because SLA continues to
focus on grammar and its acquisition by young and often beginning learners.
However, if these kinds of field-imposed restrictions are a cause of regret to the
LSP movement, it is also true that LSP has been insufficiently concerned with how
and how well its students acquire or do not acquire the communicative and literacy
skills that they need. One thin strand of inquiry that has attempted to bridge this
gap has been investigations into the transfer of academic skills (Johns 1997), and
whether this learning is primarily articulated through content, through knowledge
of a particular discourse domain (Douglas and Selinker 1994, Whyte 1995), or
through the “formal” knowledge of how different genres are co-constructed and
internally articulated. More work in this area would be welcome.

A major consequence of this picture is that LSP has a highly variable status
as both a discipline and a profession in different parts of the world. The
disjunction between ESP/LSP and language acquisition, basic FL methodology,
psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics has in the United States left very little space
in graduate programs for ESP work. Apart from some individual efforts to change
this situation, such as those by Peter Master and Denise Murray at San Jose State,
62 JOHN M. SWALES

the lack of opportunity for professional preparation has had deleterious effects on
research and program quality. Elsewhere, the situation is much rosier because of
the emergence of Departments of Applied Language Studies (or close termino-
logical cousins), especially in places like Australia, Brazil, Britain, Hong Kong,
and Scandinavia. Although these units are not always primarily interested in
ESP/LSP, they tend to be favorably disposed to its aspirations. Finland, for
example, in 1999 launched a nationally-funded Ph.D. program in applied language
studies to be centered at the University of Jyväskylä.

The ESL/FL field as a whole, and as seen internationally, is known for

having “a long tail.” In other words, there are very few senior (professorial)
positions but many lecturers, adjuncts, and part-timers. This situation is also
largely true of ESP/LSP where traditional forces in language, literature, and
linguistics departments have operated to preserve senior posts for established areas
of scholarship, and where many LSP practitioners have unstable careers as
independent consultants. As a partial consequence of this, ESP/LSP has yet to
establish itself as either a full profession or as clear sub-discipline in the language
sciences. The import of this uncertain status for the potentially globalized language
situation in the new century is hard to ascertain, but the lack of insti-tutional
structure will probably be seen as more of a deficit than will its more optimistic
interpretation—entrepreneurial flexibility—be believed to be an asset.

LSP AND SCIENCE, MEDICINE, AND LAW

In the spirit of Bakhtin’s work on intertextuality (Bakhtin 1986), which has

been so influential in studies of academic and professional discourse, I can open
this short section by referring interested readers to the comprehensive surveys of
the following areas in ARAL 19: Atkinson (1999b) on language and science;
Gibbons (1999) on language and the law; and Hyden and Mishler (1999) on
language and medicine. In consequence, I will be mostly concerned here with
some LSP amplification and some minor updating.

As Atkinson (1999b) reveals, there have been numerous rhetorical and

linguistic accounts of the contemporary scientific style, especially as it is encoded
in the research article—that master academic narrative of recent decades.
Montgomery (1996) offers an elegant recent synopsis:

Scientist or not, one hears the voice of univocity, unbroken statement,

the single voice of the scientific style. But how achieved? How
constructed? For the most part, through a series of grammatical and
syntactic strategies that attempt to depersonalize, to objectify all premises,
such that they seem to achieve the plane of ahistorical essence: “recent
advances have shown…”; “Analyses were performed…”; “The data,
therefore, indicate…”. The narrative is driven by objects, whether these
be phenomena, procedures, earlier studies, evidence, or whatever
(1996:13).
 LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 63

Meanwhile we know from the classic early laboratory studies, from

Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995), from Prior’s (1998) case studies, and from The
mangle of practice (Pickering 1995), that matters on the investigative ground are
much more contingent, haphazard, and interpersonally complex. Although focus
on such compressed and depersonalized accounts has concentrated for good reason
on methods sections, Dressen and Swales (in press) explore the suppression of field
experience in introductions to geology articles. They show that petrologists no
longer offer any descriptions of their expeditions to inhospitable settings, which are
now replaced by a part-genre usually called “Geological Setting.” Expertise in the
locale is communicated via a condensed, expert, and conventionalized description
and interpretation of the site’s geological record, which has thus come to function
as surrogate for the silenced voice of geological authority. In effect, their findings
nicely reflect Montgomery’s observation that “the narrative is driven by objects,
whether these be phenomena, procedures, earlier studies, evidence, or whatever”
(Montgomery, op. cit.). As Huckin trenchantly observes, “those of us interested in
the cultural aspects of genre study would do well…to include textual silence in the
list of features to be analysed” (Huckin 1997:76). For LSP in its more applied
aspects, there would seem to be an important lesson here. If our students need
various kinds of help as they acculturate into their chosen scientific or technical
cultures, then they need to see that contemporary specialized texts are distanced
reconstructions of mangled experience. If they do not, they will tend to believe that
published authors have, in comparison to their own messy and preliminary
excursions, been blessed by some unlikely combination of skill, magic, or luck to
get everything seemingly so exactly right. EAP teaching and support materials
might therefore do better by giving more attention to false starts, abandoned leads,
and various types of revision and correction.

Although Johns (1997), Dudley-Evans and St John (1998), and Atkinson

(1999a) all do a creditable job in describing and explaining the rise of genre-based
approaches, they all stop short of conceptualizing genres as more than independent
entities. Doubtless, taking a genre as a separable class of texts was a sensible
practice in the early days of the genre movement, but pioneering studies by
Bazerman (1995) on patents and by Devitt (1991) on tax accountancy communi-
cations reveal how genres are networked and reticulated. It is not clear at the
moment how best to characterize these relationships, whether any kind of single
characterization will work, or whether possible answers lie more in theory or in
empirical investigation. At one extreme there are linear orderings such as in patent
law, whereby genre X is prerequisite for the instantiation of genre Y, and Y a
necessary precursor for genre Z. Here, as Bazerman argues, we could indeed
envision some system of genres. At the other end, in the academy, the rela-
tionships among conference presentation or poster, publication, and thesis or
dissertation have no necessary chronological relationship, even though there may be
orderings in the sub-systems of supporting but “occluded” genres: A conference
abstract is submitted, a committee reviews it, they find it acceptable and require a
short summary for the program booklet, and the presentation event actually takes
place. However, in academic situations in general, we might be better advised to
64 JOHN M. SWALES

think of genre relationships in terms of sets. While both of the above cases share a
requirement for the selection of specific genres, still looser arrangements are
possible in which, at many decision-points, communicative action can be realized
by potentially different genres. For example, a request for an academic paper may
be communicated by a departmental “reprint request” card, a formal letter, an e-
mail, or a phone call. One option in this situation might be to conceive of the
network as consisting of repertoires (or menus) of genres that can be drawn upon
according to circumstance.

There are, I believe, several advantages that accrue to LSP research from
these expansions of the role of genre. First, as Gunnarsson (1997b) persuasively
argues, we now have a powerful way of reintegrating spoken and written
professional discourse. Second, we can now more easily see how genres evolve
and why, and not only under the pressures of technological developments. Third,
our support materials can offer a more realistic mapping of the universe of
discourse for which we might be preparing a particular group of students. In
ongoing efforts to increase this understanding, useful recent contributions have been
published on submission letters (Swales 1996), academic book reviews (Motta-Roth
1998), recommendation letters (Precht 1998), journal acknowledg-ment sections
(Giannoni 1998), and research grant applications (Connor and Mauranen 1999).

Last year’s ARAL chapters on Law and Medicine only need some minor
rounding out via reference to work directed at the non-native speaker. Bhatia
continues to be active in the area of legal discourse, especially in comparing legal
with other disciplinary texts (e.g., Bhatia 1998). Harris (1992; 1997), originally a
lawyer himself, is excellent on explaining non-native speaker (NNS) difficulties in
legal educational settings; Fredrickson (1996) usefully shows how broader features
of legal systems have their narrow discoursal effects; and Trosberg (1997) uses
modifications of speech act theory to reveal differences in legislation, contracts,
and conversation. A recent study by Feak, Reinhart and Sinsheimer (in press)
offers an innovative analysis of the student-written but published “Law Review
Note” in American law schools. However, despite the efforts of a few individuals,
this is not an area of LSP that has particularly thrived in recent years; that said, one
promising development is the international project on the discourses of commercial
transactions under development at the City University of Hong Kong. LSP work in
medicine has been particularly thin in recent years, except for synchronic and
diachronic discoursal investigations of medical research articles, which au fond are
really part of English for Academic Purposes. One of the few recent contributions
is the needs analysis of medical students in Taiwan (Chia, et al. 1999).
 LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 65

LANGUAGES FOR BUSINESS PURPOSES

In recent years, Languages for Business Purposes has become a major

growth area in LSP, many of the pedagogical consequences of which are well
described by Dudley-Evans and St John (1998). The causes of this growth are
multiple. First, this area has been historically under-researched (especially in
discourse terms) in comparison to science or technology. Second, internation-
alization and the new globality (globaloney?) has drawn many more business people
into bilingual and multilingual occupational settings. Third, the new business
climate (wherein turbulence is the likely norm) has made it more and more obvious
that traditional business language teaching materials (such as translating commercial
letters) are becoming increasingly obsolete in today’s multi-media business world.
Fourth, the emerging recognition of an international marketplace has done
something to bring together the strengths of the North American business-
communications research tradition and the investigative and curricular skills and
practices of a predominantly European tradition of languages for business.

Following the much-cited paper by Yates and Orlikowski (1992) on the

genres of organizational communication (with its clever integration of structuration
theory), genre and genre study has become a major starting point for analyzing and
explaining these universes of discourse. However, much of the more successful
work in this field has also adopted a number of additional (and triangulating)
techniques such as linguistic auditing (Reeves and Wright 1996), interpretive
ethnography (Smart 1998), familiarity analyis (Charles 1996), “fly on the wall”
shadowing of business persons as they go about their daily routines (Louhiala-
Salminen 1999), compuational analysis of a text corpus (Fox 1999), and user
reactions to business discourses (Rogers in press). It seems clear that these
innovative and comprehensive studies have largely heeded Devitt’s admonition that
“we need to find ways to keep genre embedded and engaged within context while
also keeping our focus on learning about genre and its operations” (Devitt
1996:611). And here it is worth observing that in EAP we can often obtain some
inkling of the reception-history of a particular text by seeing where it was pub-
lished and how it was cited. In the business world (aside from focus-groups in
advertising), we rarely have such traces. As Rogers (in press) points out, studies
of genres have tended to conceptualize communicative purposes in terms of the
strategies of the speakers or writers. She then goes on to argue that, at least in
organizational contexts, such purposes cannot be fully understood without some
sense of how those “purposes” are evaluated by their audiences. Hence, there is a
need to incorporate user-based analyses; a superb example of this kind of work is
Locker’s recent study of responses to various forms of negative letters and the
consequences of these findings for business communication textbooks and classes
(Locker 1999).
66 JOHN M. SWALES

Dudley-Evans and St John note a further important difference between

English for academic and business purposes:

EAP operates within a world where the fundamental concern

is the acquisition of knowledge by individuals, while in EBP the
purpose is not centered on the learner as an individual but as a
member of a transactional world where the fundamental concern is
the exchange of goods and services (1998:72).

As we gain increasing access to this (international) transactional world, a number of

factors have emerged as being potentially relevant. First, Charles (1996) has
convincingly shown that a key factor for the resulting discourse is whether
participants are attempting to establish a new business relationship or merely
consolidating a prior one. Second, the mode of communication (letter, phone, fax,
e-mail, etc.) is also significant, as indeed we might expect (Akar and Louhiala-
Salminen 1999, Nickerson 1998). Third, the primary power in the business is
typically complementary to that of the academic setting: In the business rela-
tionship, the power relationship typically turns out to be with the potential buyer
rather than the potential seller (Yli-Jokipii 1994). Fourth, the corporate or sectorial
culture (“the way we do things around here”) is quite different from the academic
culture. This distinction is exemplified by Smart (1998) for the Federal Bank of
Canada, Bilbow (1999) for a Hong Kong airline, and Nickerson (1998) for a
multinational oil company. Finally, national cultural values and expectations add
further variability and here much can be learned from Scollon and Scollon (1995)
for east Asia, and Tebeaux (1999) for Mexico. These last efforts are both
historically rich and subtle studies which salubriously steer their readers away from
facile stereotyping.

Although it might be premature to conclude that Languages for Business

has overtaken Language for Academic Purposes as the lead area in the field, there
is equally no doubt that the quality gap has narrowed very considerably. One
reason for this growth in Languages for Business has been a fine series of doctoral
dissertations based (at least in part) on Scandinavian business settings, although
good work has covered other geographical areas such as Akar (1998) for Turkish
business communications and Barbara, et al. (1996) for Brazilian ones. Another
contribution to this strength has come from a useful accumulation of particularistic
genre analyses starting with Devitt (1991) on taxation correspondence and Bhatia
(1993) on sales letters, and moving on to cover such disparate discourses as
corporate mission statements (Swales and Rogers 1995), “chair talk” in business
meetings (Bilbow 1999), and faxes (Akar and Louhiala-Salminen 1999). Basic
research in this area positions LSP well for the new millenium, although there
remain—as in EAP—significant issues with regard to what Language-for-Business-
Purposes instructors need to know, how they are to be trained or helped to come to
that knowledge, and how those insights can be parlayed into effective pedagogic
delivery systems.
 LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 67

ENGLISH ENGLISH EVERYWHERE

One of the ironies of the emergent field of ESP is that its very success in
catering to the needs of nonnative speakers has contributed to the overpowering
position of English in today’s worlds of science, scholarship, and business. Part of
the irony is that those interested in comparing Anglo-American research rhetoric
with comparable rhetorics in other languages are having increasing trouble locating
sufficient numbers of those other-language texts. Indeed, there has been a massive
conversion over the last two decades from other-language journals to English-
medium ones, and, as far as I can see, almost all of the many new journals that
have been springing up have an English-only submission policy. We are facing a
real loss in professional registers in many national cultures with long scholarly
traditions.

Crystal (1997) believes this trend to be a benign phenomenon, one

inevitably linked with ‘progress’ and one that will lead to a more harmonious
world. Others (Phillipson 1999, Swales 1997) strongly disagree with Crystal’s
excellently-written but ultimately triumphalist account. There are of course wider
and important issues here that cannot be discussed in this chapter; nevertheless, the
decline and disappearance of other major scholarly languages, as well as the stunted
growth of aspiring new ones in developing countries, has at least one immediate
consequence for LSP. Immense power is now concentrated in the hands of
American academic gatekeepers; Wayt Gibbs (1995) calculated that, in 1994, 31
percent of all papers published in the world’s leading journals emanated in the
United States, and even five years later that percentage has probably moved
upward. We are faced in effect with a growing linguistic and rhetorical monopoly
and monoculture against which we need to consider offering ‘cultural rainforest’
arguments of the following type: “Insofar as rhetorical practices embody cultural
thought patterns, we should encourage the maintenance of variety and diversity in
academic rhetorical practices—excessive standardization may counteract innovation
and creative thought by forcing them into standard forms” (Mauranen 1993:172).
One small but direct way in which the field can resist this standardization is to
transfer some of the resources and expertise that exists in ESP to lesser understood
professional languages.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

One of the clearest signs that ESP/LSP has played its full part in the
emergence of Applied Linguistics as a discipline is that the space constraints of a
single short chapter prevent full coverage of the field. For instance, I have not
been able to do full justice to the lively area that usually goes by the name of
Contrastive Rhetoric, wherein scholars are now going beyond simply showing
rhetorical differences between languages to now attempting to explain them. Nor
have I adequately covered some other recent developments. One is the tremendous
interest in corpus linguistics and its great, if uncertain, potential for LSP work of
all kinds. Another is the rather belated recognition that many professional texts
68 JOHN M. SWALES

have an important visual structure that parallels that of the written word (Johns
1998, Miller 1998). Yet other developments include the impact of new forms of
electronic communication, the current state of the art with regard to actual LSP
pedagogic materials, recent developments in translation studies, and the question of
whether ESP has been overly neutral in terms of its ideology and its attitudes
toward its NNS clientele (Pennycook 1997).

Overall, we can see that LSP has a number of structural problems such as
weaknesses in institutional recognition and uncertain provision of professional
training. Chile, for example, a great pioneer in ESP in the 1970's, has been unable
to recruit a younger generation of specialists to replace its retiring experts
(Horsella, personal communication). Furthermore, although LSP has, in English
for Specific Purposes, a flagship journal, regular attempts to get it included in the
Social Science Citation Index have always failed. On the positive side, it is much
more of a truly international field than most areas of applied linguistics, as this
chapter has tried to show and as the provenance of papers in English for Specific
Purposes impressively demonstrates. Its alliance with and contribution to discourse
analysis is also impressive, but legitimate questions can be asked about the
“applied” nature of some of these investigations, since it is not always clear how
the findings are to be transmuted into teaching or study materials. All in all,
though, the field has responded well to the 1964 “call to arms,” both in terms of
the envisioned types of linguistic analyses and in greatly extending and enriching
them.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

[Introductory Note: For this section, I have selected only book-length items
published after 1994. In so doing, I have made a conscious effort to include some
volumes that represent important and relevant work done outside the ESP
mainstream, both in terms of provenance and in terms of orientation.]

Bargiela-Chiappini, F. and C. Nickerson. 1999. Writing business: Genres, media

and discourses. London: Longman.

This volume offers a strong collection of articles that show the current
vibrancy of this LSP sub-field, especially in western Europe; it is a
showcase of this sub-field’s strengths in both research and application.

Belcher, D. and G. Braine (eds.) 1995. Academic writing in a second language:

Essays on research and pedagogy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

This book is the key collection on the topic of academic writing, now
nicely complemented by Candlin and Hyland (1999). The volume contains
 LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 69

some outstanding case studies of academic writing situations, and

throughout there is a careful balance between social and cognitive
demands, and between resistance to and acceptance of typified features of
academic discourse.

Biber, D., S. Conrad and R. Reppen. 1998. Corpus linguistics: Investigating

language structure and use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This book is a comprehensive and helpful introduction to a relatively new

field. Of particular interest to users of this chapter will be Part II
(Investigating the characteristics of varieties). The volume as a whole is
strongly influenced by Biber’s multi-dimensional model of register.

Candlin C. N. and K. Hyland (eds.) 1999. Writing: Texts, processes and practices.
London: Longman.

This recent volume offers a wide variety of approaches to writing in a

variety of academic and professional settings, not all of them involving
non-native speakers. However, the papers cohere around a general
acceptance that institutional practices and percepts strongly influence both
the construction and interpretation of written texts. Another strong feature
of this volume is the serious attention given to the relation between
research and practice.

Dudley-Evans, T. and M. J. St John. 1998. Developments in English for specific

purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

As might be expected from the authors, this volume is a model of clarity

and good sense. It provides a comprehensive overview of the field and,
perhaps for the first time, offers a proper assimilation of work in English
for academic purpose and English for business purposes, two sub-areas that
traditionally have gone their rather separate ways. As a volume in the
Cambridge Language Teaching Library series, it is full of textbook extracts
and has a well-constructed series of tasks for student completion. It is
probably the best introduction to the field now available, even if it tends to
steer clear of a number of controversial topics.

Duszak, A. (ed.) 1997. Culture and styles of academic discourse. Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.

This volume is an excellent contribution to the fast-growing area of

contrastive rhetoric as applied to academic discourse. Part One deals with
attitudes and values, Part Two with the expression of interpersonal
meaning, and Part Three with variation in genres. Duszak’s own
contributions, both in the introductory chapter and in her paper on
70 JOHN M. SWALES

“digressiveness” in Polish texts, are exceptionally good. The volume as a

whole showcases recent work from Eastern Europe.

Fortanet, I., S. Posteguillo, J. C. Palmer and J. F. Coll (eds.) 1998. Genre studies
in English for academic purposes. Castello, Spain: Universitat Jaume I.

This collection presents a strong “normal science” contribution, generally

showing excellent knowledge of the literature and high-level analytic skills.
Since half the contributors come from Spain, the volume demonstrates the
rapid development of a strong EAP tradition in this country. The volume
may not turn out to be as well known as it deserves to be because of its
relatively obscure provenance.

Grabe, W. and R. B. Kaplan. 1996. Theory and practice of writing. London:

Longman.

This is a substantial volume (of close to 500 pages) that examines all
aspects of writing from an applied linguistics perspective. The chapters of
greatest interest and relevance to LSP are those devoted to contrastive
rhetoric, writing for professional purposes, and teaching writing at
advanced levels.

Gross, A. G. and W. M. Keith (eds.) 1997. Rhetorical hermeneutics: Invention and

interpretation in the age of science. Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press.

As the title might intimate, this is a challenging volume, but one of great
interest to all those seriously interested in analyzing the language of
science. Among the important issues the contributors discuss are the
agency of the author, whether our clever analyses of technical texts reflect
authorial intent or merely our own close reading, and whether at these
higher levels of interpretation we are essentially staring into the mirror of
our own imagination. The volume is something of a slugfest among
contemporary rhetoricians, and engaging for that additional reason,
although McCloskey clearly goes over the top. The editors provide an
authoritative and intriguingly self-reflexive introduction.

Gunnarsson, B-L., P. Linell and B. Nordberg (eds.) 1997. The construction of

professional discourse. London: Longman.

This wide-ranging volume covers many fields, such as law, medicine,

science, and social work. A number of the chapters provide instructive
accounts of discourse in specialized communities of practice, how this
discourse is socially constructed, and how it operates to validate and reify
the values of the institution within which that discourse is situated.
 LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES 71

Johns, A. M. 1997. Text, role and context. New York: Cambridge University
Press.

Like several of its predecessors in the well-known Cambridge Applied

Linguistics series, this volume is important for both its theoretical and
practical contributions. Johns’ chosen territory is the acquisition of
academic literacy by incoming university students from disadvantaged
backgrounds, and she succeeds in showing how a complex approach
drawing on genre, community, and multiple modes of apprenticeship can
be made to work. This book is one of few recent volumes to fully integrate
research, theory, and practice.

Jordan, R. R. 1997. English for academic purposes: A guide and resource book for
teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

For this volume, Jordan has pulled a vast amount of material together, and
manages to do so in such a way that research, pedagogical application, and
practical illustration are well indicated. However, the volume somewhat
over-favors British work and tends to avoid certain contemporary
theoretical and ideological issues.

Louhiala-Salminen, L. 1999. From business correspondence to message exchange:

The notion of genre in business communication. Jyväskylä, Finland:
University of Jyväskylä.

This study integrates the theoretical framework of genre analysis and

traditional notions of business communications. It then views the
traditional business letter and the new genres of fax and e-mail through this
lens. This monograph can serve as an exemplar of the quality of current
studies in LSP business communications.

Miller, T. (ed.) 1997. Functional approaches to written text: Classroom

applications. Washington: USIA. [Originally THE Journal. 2/3. Paris:
TESOL France. 1995.]

Tom Miller of the USIA has here succeeded in pulling together a group of
(mostly) leading specialists in their fields in order to demonstrate how
discourse analysis can be put into practical effect. The coverage is
particularly wide (reading, writing, critical discourse analysis, genre,
grammar, concordancing, etc.) but the overall effect is remarkably
coherent. This volume is one of the best volumes on applied discourse
analysis available.
72 JOHN M. SWALES

Prior, P. A. 1998. Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of literate activity

in the academy. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum.

This volume is a culmination of a long series of studies conducted by the

author in recent years. If Johns (1997) is concerned with the enculturation
of undergraduates, Prior is concerned with that of graduates. Inter alia, he
is able to demonstrate, via extremely detailed casework, that this process is
much more complex and multi-faceted than the field had hitherto imagined.
Because of his striking findings, this important work needs replicating in
other fields of endeavor, such as science, engineering, and medicine.

Swales, J. M. 1998. Other floors, other voices: A textography of a small university

building. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum.

This is the first book by this author which is not directly concerned with
LSP issues. Rather, it explores discoursal life in a small academic
building, and then examines the textual lives of seven individuals, four
botanists and three applied linguists. One of the book’s main purposes is
to re-examine—and perhaps rehabilitate—the concept of discourse
community.

Valle, E. 1999. A collective intelligence: The life sciences in the Royal Society as a
scientific discourse community. Turku, Finland: University of Turku.
[Anglicana Turkuensia No 17.]

This volume is the latest is a fine series of discourse-based studies showing

the evolution of scientific discourse. Once again, we find here a complex
methodology ranging from standard historical research to very fine-grained
studies of citations and modes of reporting the work of others. The author
concludes that while the discourses she examined have remained dialogic
over the last 300 years, that dialogue has consistently become more
centered on the public rather than the private domain.

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