On 13–17 March 2018, Carmen enjoyed five days of Erasmus + programme for teaching mobility at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies.
Carmen talked about “Academic literacy and writing in English for Research Publication Purposes” and “Actions and challenges of an internationally engaged university: what role can quality assurance play for campus internationalization?”
Thank you very much lecturers and students of the EDU-RES master programme for your hospitality, friendliness and fruitful exchange of experiences on English language education and research communication! A truly memorable event!
Here are some pictures with the EDU-RES team.

On 13–17 March 2018, Carmen enjoyed five days of Erasmus + programme for teaching mobility at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies (Romania).  Carmen delivered two talks, “Academic literacy and writing in English for Research Publication Purposes” and “Actions and challenges of an internationally engaged university: what role can quality assurance play for campus internationalization?”

Thank you very much lecturers and students of the EDU-RES master programme for your hospitality, friendliness and for a very fruitful exchange of experiences on English language education and research communication!

Here are some pictures of one of the sessions

The paper “Connecting Genres and Languages in Online Scholarly Communication: An Analysis of Research Group Blogs” has been pre-published in Written Communication.

Abstract

Blogs provide an open space for scholars to share information, communicate about their research, and reach a diversified audience. Posts in academic blogs are usually hybrid texts where various genres are connected and recontextualized; yet little research has examined how these genres function together to support scholars’ activity. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the affordances of new media enable the integration of different genres and different languages in research group blogs written by multilingual scholars and to explore how various genres are coordinated in these blogs to accomplish specific tasks. The study reported in this article shows that the functionalities of the digital medium allow research groups to incorporate myriad genres into their genre ecology and interconnect these genres in opportunistic ways to accomplish complex objectives: specifically, to publicize the group’s research and activities, make the work of the group members available to the disciplinary community, strengthen social links within their community and connect with the interested public, and raise social awareness. Findings from this study provide insights into the ways in which scholars write networked, multimedia, multigenre texts to support the group’s social and work activity.

 

Luzón, MJ. “Connecting genres and languages in online scholarly communication”. Written Communication. Prepublished September, 12, 2017, DOI: 10.1177/0741088317726298

Three members of our group participated in ELF 10 (12-15 June 2017, Helsinki).

Ignacio Vázquez participated in the pre-conference workshop  After all that, what do we know – and what do we still need to know?  Findings from ‘Linguistic diversity on the international campus’ (convened by Jennifer Jenkins
University of Southampton)

 

María José Luzón presented the paper “Language choice on research-related webpages in a Spanish university” and Marian Velilla presented the paper “Pragmatic strategies used by Spanish lecturers to preempt misunderstanding in English-medium university courses”

 

Language choice on research-related webpages in a Spanish university

Abstract. Research centres and research groups use their webpages for self-presentation and for the dissemination and publicising of scientific activity and results. Since English is the lingua franca of scholarly communication, the webpages of some research centres and research groups in non-English speaking countries are written in English, or combining English and the local language, in order to make them more visible at an international level. In this paper I will explore the choice of language (English/ Spanish) on the webpages of research centres, research groups and individual researchers in a Spanish university. I will address the following questions: (i) Are these webpages predominantly written in English or Spanish?; (ii) Does discipline influence the choice of language in these webpages?; (iii) When both English and the L1 are used, how do these languages co-exist and interact (e.g. both Spanish and English versions are available, some contents are written in English and others in Spanish); (iv) Why, and for which contents, is English or the L1 chosen?; (v) which English is considered as acceptable to be used in these webpages?  To answer these questions I will complement the systematic observation of the webpages with short interviews to some of the agents (research institute directors, research group leaders, individual researchers).

 

Pragmatic strategies used by Spanish lecturers to preempt misunderstanding in English-medium university courses

Abstract. As a result of the thriving process of internationalization that many Spanish Universities are undergoing, there is a recent interest in offering English as medium of instruction courses, English being adopted as the common language of choice for academic activities. In this paper I present the preliminary results of research analyzing the pragmatic strategies used by Higher education lecturers in EMI courses in a Spanish university. The corpus for the study consists in 14 hours of lectures in two different disciplines (Business Administration and Nanoscience). The analysis of the data reveals that most of the pragmatic strategies used to pre-empt potential communicative breakdowns, negotiate, and clarify meaning fall into one of the following groups: (i) use of multilingual resources (e.g. code-switching); (ii) self-repair (iii) reformulation. The results show that participants use these strategies to cope with the heavy investment in the communication process that is required when using a vehicular language different from one’s own in such high-stakes institutional academic settings.