917472

research-article2020
REL0010.1177/0033688220917472RELC JournalHafner and Pun

SI: English for Academic and Professional Purposes in the Digital Era

RELC Journal

Editorial: Introduction to
2020, Vol. 51(1) 3­–13
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0033688220917472
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Academic and Professional journals.sagepub.com/home/rel

Purposes in the Digital Era

Christoph A. Hafner and Jack Pun

City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Developments in digital communication technologies have had a significant effect on the

way that people communicate, including how we gain access to, create and disseminate
knowledge in academic and professional contexts. These developments have provoked
interest from researchers investigating innovative digital genres and practices (e.g.
Kuteeva and Mauranen, 2018; Luzón and Pérez-Llantada, 2019), as well as researchers
investigating pedagogical strategies to address such innovations (e.g. Li and Storch,
2017; Yi et al., 2020). In language and literacy education generally, and in the field of
languages for specific purposes (LSP) more particularly, it has been maintained for some
time that the ubiquity of digitally-mediated communication gives rise to ‘emerging
needs’ for language learners (Hafner et al., 2015; Hafner and Miller, 2019; New London
Group, 1996). For example, because of the availability of new forms of digitally medi-
ated collaborative and multimodal forms of expression – think, for example, of collabo-
ration on Google Docs and the video content available on YouTube and elsewhere – it is
now necessary for researchers and teachers to consider how such communicative
resources can be accounted for in the language curriculum. The purpose of this special
issue is to engage with issues of digital communication, teaching and learning in aca-
demic and professional contexts.
For our purposes, English for academic and professional purposes in the digital age
involves a focus on digital mediation as one component of goal-directed activity in spe-
cialized communication practices, including the teaching and learning of LSP. By ‘digital
mediation’ we are referring to the use of networked digital tools like computers, smart-
phones and other devices, in communication processes. When we talk about digital genres

Corresponding author:
Christoph A. Hafner, Department of English, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue,
Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Email: elhafner@cityu.edu.hk
4 RELC Journal 51(1)

and practices we are referring to the recurrent, goal-directed, communicative events

(Swales, 1990) mediated by digital tools in this way, along with the constellation of activi-
ties that surround such events. Such a focus on the digital – digital mediation, genres and
practices – is a necessary part of LSP inquiry, we believe, because of its prominence in
contemporary communication. As Warschauer, Zheng and Park (2013: 825) point out, at
the present time ‘there is little serious writing that is not done digitally’.
The contributions to this special issue emerge from a joint conference on language
education held in March, 2019, namely the 54th RELC International Conference and 5th
Asia-Pacific LSP and Professional Communication Association Conference,1 which
addressed the theme of English for academic and professional purposes in the digital age.
The articles shed light on three areas that are relevant to teaching and learning English in
academic and professional contexts: 1) digital genres and practices; 2) LSP pedagogy in
the digital age; 3) LSP research in the digital age. We consider each of these three areas
in more detail below.

Digital Genres and Practices

Research shows that advances in digital communication technologies have led to the
development and adoption of innovative digital genres and practices in academic and
professional contexts. In general, Jones and Hafner (2012) maintain that the affordances
of digital tools can have a profound effect on the kinds of meanings that people can
make, the relationships that they can have, identities that they can enact, as well as ways
of thinking and doing. Such effects can be seen when academic and professional com-
municators adopt digital tools in their practices. Where this happens, we frequently see
the development of communication practices that are highly multimodal, collaborative,
intertextual, mobile, multilingual, and designed for wide and diversified audiences,
including academics and practitioners. At the same time, such developments do not
always happen in a disruptive fashion but rather emerge over time, complementing exist-
ing genres and practices in order to address the needs of the discourse community (Pérez-
Llantada, 2016). Nevertheless, these developments pose important questions for LSP
researchers and teachers: How is knowledge constructed and disseminated in a digital
environment? How can digital practices be accounted for in LSP courses that target aca-
demic and professional communication?
First, the widespread use of digital tools has facilitated the increased production of
multimodal texts combining a range of modes, like writing, image, sound, and others.
LSP researchers have investigated the role of multimodality in communication and learn-
ing in a range of academic contexts including: university students’ use of visuals as
learning and composing tools on a course in macroeconomics (Johns, 1998); graduate
student writers’ use of PowerPoint slides (Tardy, 2005); expert scientists’ presentation of
conference slides (Rowley-Jolivet, 2002; Rowley-Jolivet, 2004); expert biologists’ com-
position of video methods articles (Hafner, 2018); and expert engineers’ construction of
graphical abstracts (Sancho Guinda, 2015). In professional communication, we also see
an interest in multimodality, as in the work of Bezemer and Kress (2016), focussing on
multimodal aspects of learning and communication in the operating theatre. This work
underlines the embodied nature of multimodal communication practices: not only
Hafner and Pun 5

digitally mediated but situated in material contexts. The theme of multimodality comes
through in a number of contributions to this special issue: Luzón and Albero-Posac, Jiang
and Gao, Kim and Belcher, del Mar and González Argüello, Blake, and Paltridge.
Second, the affordances of digital tools facilitate collaborative and intertextual pro-
cesses. LSP research has tended to pay less attention to processes of text construction
compared with textual products but some interesting work has nevertheless been done.
For example, McGrath (2016) shows how mathematicians use the affordances of a blog
in order to collaboratively construct a research article. Similarly Hynninen’s (2018)
study of computer scientists collaborating on a research article shows how multiple digi-
tal tools are picked up by the authors, and sometimes used in innovative ways not
intended by their designers. In the professional context, we can see that practices are
shifting, with lawyers turning to the markup tools in Microsoft Word as a way to facili-
tate contract negotiations (Townley and Jones, 2016). In this issue, Hafner and Yu show
how such a digitally mediated context can also be a site for language socialization.
Related to these collaborative properties of digital tools, there is also the explicitly inter-
textual nature of digitally mediated interaction. In the LSP literature, one area where this
theme has been explored is in relation to email writing. Studies highlight the intertextual
nature of flows of information in email and address the need for students to learn to man-
age these flows (Bremner and Costley, 2018; Warren, 2013), a theme picked up by
Albers, Trejo Vences and Nickerson.
Third, digital tools allow for the wide dissemination of information over the internet.
This can allow academics and professionals to interact with a diversified audience online;
at the same time, these interactive affordances can challenge traditional relationships
between experts and novices. Some LSP research has looked at the discourse of aca-
demic blogs (Luzón, 2013; Mauranen, 2013) and noted the way in which these can facili-
tate interactions with a wider audience. Another interesting genre is the crowdfunding
research proposal. In an era where funding has become increasingly important to aca-
demics, leading to the adaptation of the motto ‘publish or perish’ to ‘fund or fail’,
Mehlenbacher (2017) examines research proposals posted by academics on the crowd-
funding website kickstarter.com. Her analysis also shows how such texts are designed to
appeal to a diversified audience of both specialists and non-specialists. Of interest to
professionals is the trend for people to self-organize in internet spaces and provide one
another with support. For example, Angouri and Sanderson (2016) investigate a rheuma-
toid arthritis forum, where patients discuss their condition, seeking not only advice but
also emotional support. Medical professionals must now expect patients to come to their
clinics armed with knowledge from a range of sources, arguably changing power rela-
tionships in the traditional doctor-patient relationship.
The communicative affordances of digital media described above (and we have really
only scratched the surface with these examples) raise questions for LSP researchers. It has
long been argued that mastery of disciplinary discourses goes beyond mastery of textual
forms to include other dimensions as well: an understanding of discipline-specific ways
of making meaning through combinations of written, visual and other modes (Hyland and
Hamp-Lyons, 2002); an understanding of the ways in which disciplinary genres form
intertextual systems (Bazerman, 1994) as part of goal-oriented meaning making activities.
More recently, it has been suggested that, in online digital spaces, the influential notion of
6 RELC Journal 51(1)

‘discourse community’ (Swales, 1990) ‘evaporates as a useful analytical concept’

(Kuteeva and Mauranen, 2018). In these spaces, specialists and non-specialists are free to
mingle and interact in pursuit of diverse goals. In our view, the tools of genre analysis
used to understand academic and professional practices in LSP have been fairly robust
when applied to genres in digital spaces. However, theoretical models could address more
explicitly the role of digital media in genre construction and this would also benefit our
students, the ultimate consumers of much LSP research.

LSP Pedagogy in the Digital Age

When it comes to LSP pedagogy, one can identify two main approaches in the digital
age. The first is what Hafner and Miller (2019: 162) refer to as ‘using technology to
learn’, incorporating the affordances of digital tools in the learning process, an approach
typically associated with computer-assisted language learning (CALL). The second, they
refer to as ‘learning to use technology’ to communicate, an approach that has developed
more recently, with the aim of developing ‘digital literacies’ of English language learn-
ers. As Shetzer and Warschauer (2000: 172) pointed out some 20 years ago, ‘whereas
previously educators considered how to use information technology in order to teach
language, it is now essential also to consider how to teach language so that learners can
make effective use of information technology’.
One ‘learning to use’ approach that has attracted interest in LSP and related fields
is that of digital multimodal composing (DMC). Researchers and practitioners are
engaging their students with multimodal genres, in order to promote students’ ability
to use the multimodal semiotic resources (e.g. writing, image, and other modes) ena-
bled by digital tools (e.g. Cimasko and Shin, 2017; Hafner, 2014; Hafner and Miller,
2011; Jiang, 2018). While studies show that the DMC approach brings many benefits
to language learners (see Belcher, 2017), some scholars express reservations about
expanding the language curriculum to embrace multimodal forms of expression
(Manchón, 2017). For example, Manchón worries that engaging learners with the
multimodal forms of expression that they encounter in their digital lives may take the
focus off the second language (L2), drawing learners’ attention away from the
‘demand for formulation’ (Manchón, 2017: 94) in the L2. Others, though, note that
language plays an important part in the multimodal compositions that learners doing
DMC create. Lim and Polio (2020) state that ‘the use of monomodal writing as a pre-
multimodal task production step. . . might address Manchón’s (2017) concern that
multimodal tasks may not facilitate acquisition’. At the level of course design, Hafner
(2014) argues for an approach ‘in which digital literacy practices [like DMC tasks]
are embedded alongside more traditional literacy practices, as one element of the
course design’ (Hafner, 2014: 682). Such an approach aims to balance emerging digi-
tal literacy needs with fundamental language needs of LSP learners rather than requir-
ing a binary choice between them.
Other LSP research takes a ‘using technology to learn’ approach, considering how
best to make use of technological tools to facilitate the learning of specialized genres.
LSP has long been a practitioner-oriented field, with results from studies directly inform-
ing the development of learning materials for particular groups of students. Blake (in this
Hafner and Pun 7

issue) shows how this approach can be taken one step further with the development of
automated writing evaluation software specifically designed for Japanese computer sci-
ence students, on the basis of specialized corpora. The use of technology in the class-
room is addressed in the contributions of Wu and Miller, as well as Moorhouse and
Kohnke. A longstanding issue for the use of instructional technology is teacher education
(Arnold and Ducate, 2015; Hubbard and Levy, 2006). In this special issue, Lawrence,
Ahmed, Cole and Johnston explore the digital practices of EAP teachers while Mahapatra
evaluates changes in practice as a result of training.

LSP Research in the Digital Age

While the majority of the articles in this special issue focus on aspects of genres, prac-
tices, and pedagogy in the digital age, another area of interest is the application of digital
tools in LSP research. The use of digital tools in academic and professional communica-
tion potentially facilitates researchers’ access to sites of interest because of the more or
less permanent trace that digitally-mediated interactions leave behind. Researchers can
thus expand their area of inquiry into digitally-mediated contexts. This is the case with
the work of Hafner and Yu in this issue, who examine feedback in markup of MS Word
documents for its socializing potential, as well as Luzón and Albero-Posac’s analysis of
Twitter at academic conferences. As well as allowing exploration of new contexts in this
way, digital tools also allow for new methods of investigation. LSP research has, of
course, long employed computerized corpus tools to quantitatively examine the features
of specialized communication. More recent advances now allow researchers to analyse
multimodal corpora (O’Halloran et al., 2013), analyse writing processes using tools like
keylogging and screen recording software (Perrin, 2016), and analyse user behaviour in
online communities using tools of big data to collect evidence and quantitative network
analysis to understand it (Page, 2016). Some of these innovations are still waiting to be
fully exploited in LSP research. In line with such developments, in this issue, Pellicer-
Sánchez describes the use of eye-tracking technology in English for academic purposes
research on the process of vocabulary learning from reading.

Overview of this Special Issue

The articles in this issue – eight research articles, a viewpoint, three innovations in prac-
tice articles, a technology review, an expert interview and a book review – are drawn
from a wide range of geographical areas including the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, the
Middle-East, and North America. The articles can be seen as falling into the three main
areas of interest outlined above: digital genres and practices; LSP pedagogy in the digital
age; and LSP research in the digital age.
First, the area of digital genres and practices in professional, scholarly and business
communication is addressed by three research articles, a viewpoint article and an inter-
view. Taking an ethnographic approach, Hafner and Yu follow a team of Hong Kong
law students and their teachers who make use of the collaborative affordances of
Microsoft Word markup tools in order to co-author a legal memorandum for an interna-
tional competition. They discuss how these digital tools provide a context for language
8 RELC Journal 51(1)

socialization processes, with law students acquiring both content knowledge and disci-
plinary language through socializing feedback from teachers and peers. Luzón and
Albero-Posac analyse a corpus of academic conference tweets, investigating discursive
functions and the range of semiotic resources deployed. Based on this analysis, they call
for a redefinition of ‘what it means to produce academic texts in the 21st century’ and
argue that EAP instruction should engage with multimodal forms of expression in digi-
tal media. Albers, Trejo Vences and Nickerson provide an example of what such an
expansion of the curriculum might look like in a business communication context at a
university in the United Arab Emirates. Starting from the notion that digital forms of
communication are essential to the modern business context, they target email writing,
especially ‘the ability to create a shared sense of purpose and identity, the ability to
understand different audiences and accommodate them in different messages, and the
ability to recognize and create inter-linkages between email and spoken communication
in the form of intertextuality or interdiscursivity’.
Also on this theme, Brian Paltridge’s viewpoint article and Xia’s wide-ranging inter-
view with Vijay Bhatia provide further reflections on the possible impact of the
affordances of digital technology on scholarly and professional practices. According to
Paltridge, ‘The use of digital technologies has transformed the processes of writing for
academic journals and the dissemination and preservation of academic work’. He exam-
ines this transformation with respect to online journals, open access, predatory journals,
social media and curating an online presence, and multimodality in academic publica-
tions. In the interview, Bhatia discusses genre analysis in the digital age, noting that
‘digital media, in recent years, has certainly introduced a new dimension to the way
interdiscursive performance is realized and revealed in most professional contexts’. He
goes on to add, ‘However the impact of digital media on professional genres is unlikely
to change drastically the essential nature of genre so long as we continue to identify
genre on the basis of its communicative purpose’.
Second, the area of LSP pedagogy in the digital age is the focus of four research arti-
cles, the three innovations in practice articles, and the tech review. Jiang and Gao’s mul-
tiple case study examines the unusual setting of a basic English course at a vocational
school in China, with low proficiency students majoring in railway service. The authors
evaluated the use of video projects to promote digital empathy in students, and, along
with English learning, noted development in digital empathy along cognitive, metacog-
nitive and attitudinal dimensions. Kim and Belcher report on a small-scale comparative
study of digital multimodal composing (DMC) tasks and traditional writing tasks on a
mandatory university writing course in Korea. The authors present a nuanced discussion
of the two tasks based on comparisons of linguistic output and the perceptions of stu-
dents. Their article is a direct response to the concern of some scholars that DMC tasks
may distract students’ attention from language learning. The findings show some differ-
ence in the linguistic output of students doing DMC tasks, which is found to be less
complex in structure than linguistic output on traditional tasks, an unsurprising finding
given that the DMC task employed involved spoken language output. However, the
authors find no difference in terms of the accuracy of the output, suggesting that ‘multi-
modality use does not lessen attention to language’.
Hafner and Pun 9

Taking up the challenge of teacher education in the digital age, Lawrence, Ahmed,
Cole and Johnston present findings derived from a large-scale project investigating
teachers’ digital practices on English for academic purposes (EAP) courses in North
America. Focussing on observations and interviews with teachers and administrators in
three universities, they note both enthusiasm and critical perspectives, and note that
‘technology still remains somewhat peripheral to EAP education, left to the responsibil-
ity of largely unsupported teachers and inhibited by structural and contextual constraints’.
As a result, they call for systematic teacher training in innovative pedagogical methods.
Neatly following on from this call, Mahapatra presents a case study of three EST teach-
ers in India, comparing their technology integration practices before and after they par-
ticipated in a 12-hour need-based training programme in digital technologies. One
interesting feature of this programme is the way that teachers were motivated to explore
digital technologies and tools independently, developing the ability to go beyond tools
introduced on the programme, search for and evaluate tools to suit their purposes.
The three innovations in practice articles and the tech review all provide interesting
and innovative ideas for the use of technology in language education. Working with
Spanish students of Media Studies, del Mar and González Argüello report on their use of
the popular ‘Booktubing’ practice, that is the creation, sharing and commenting on of
videos dedicated to various aspects of books and reading. In this, their aim is to promote
digital literacy as ‘one of the fundamental objectives of the Media Studies and Information
and Communication degrees’. Wu and Miller describe the use of mobile-assisted peer
feedback by Hong Kong business students, noting that the app used provides, among
other things, opportunity for real-time, anonymous feedback and the promotion of learner
agency. Related to this, in the tech review, Moorhouse and Kohnke examine potential
uses of the student-response system Mentimeter, noting pedagogical benefits including
‘increasing interaction and engagement, soliciting opinions, and formatively evaluating
student understanding’. The final innovation in practice is Blake’s article on the develop-
ment and evaluation of automated writing evaluation software for computer science
majors at a public university in Japan. This software has been developed to address the
specific needs of such students, which generic error detectors are unable to cater to, as
well as provide a range of multimodal formative feedback.
Finally, the area of LSP research in the digital age is addressed by just one research
article in this issue. Pellicer-Sánchez reviews existing work that uses eye-tracking tech-
nology in English for academic purposes reading research. Her article identifies an
emerging intersection of research areas, as eye-tracking studies have typically been used
to study processes of reading but relatively few such studies have addressed the question
of vocabulary learning from reading.

The Way Forward

The articles in this special issue all contribute to the growing interest in the use of digital
media in LSP research and pedagogy, with a focus on the three key areas as elaborated
above: 1) digital genres and practices; 2) LSP pedagogy in the digital age; 3) LSP research
in the digital age. In future, LSP research should continue to explore digital genres and
practices, and how an understanding of the affordances and constraints of digital tools
10 RELC Journal 51(1)

can be incorporated into LSP courses on academic and professional communication.

With respect to digital genres and practices, future research can expand knowledge in
three key ways: by expanding theoretical models of discourse and genre analysis; by
expanding research methods; by expanding the current scope of analysis.

•• First, while models of genre analysis have proved useful in analysing digital dis-
course, they nevertheless require some adjustments to account for the affordances
of digital media: the multimodal forms of expression; the collaborative processes
of writing and design; the diversified online audiences and communities.
•• Second, a considerable amount of current LSP research on digital genres tends to
focus on textual products and traces. In line with LSP research more generally, we
need more studies that go beyond online texts to examine the (often collaborative
and multimodal) text construction processes; this will necessitate the adoption of
multi-perspectival genre analytical methods, ethnographies, and virtual ethnogra-
phies in order to identify discipline-specific forms of multimodal representation
and text production. As noted, the digital tools themselves provide ample oppor-
tunities for LSP researchers to observe genre construction processes, with poten-
tial use of multimodal corpora, key logging, screen recording as well as big data
techniques of data collection and analysis.
•• Third, digital literacies studies have turned something of a corner in recent years,
with digital media playing an unfortunate role in various kinds of fakery and public
panic. We are aware of little LSP research that engages with the more critical aspects
of digital media in discipline-specific knowledge production and dissemination,
including roles played by algorithmic sorting and serving of content, for example.

Finally, in line with LSP practice, it will of course be necessary to find ways to incorpo-
rate findings from such studies into practical teaching and learning contexts. A major
question here is how to strike a balance, accounting for multimodal, collaborative
affordances while still focussing on the development of specialized, disciplinary dis-
courses. We would conclude that there is much work still to be done: we hope that the
articles in this special issue provide a step in the right direction and prompt further
research and investigation.

Acknowledgements
We are grateful to our partners at the RELC, especially Susan Leong, Alvin Pang and Marie Yeo, for
giving us the opportunity to put this collection together. We would especially like to thank Marie
Yeo, the Editor-in-Chief of RELC Journal, who along with Hazleen Hamdan, has been tireless in
responding to the questions and queries that we have asked along the way. We are greatly indebted
to the many anonymous reviewers who lent us their expertise, and without whose contributions it
would have been impossible to assemble this volume. Finally, thank you to the authors for their
willingness to share their ideas in this forum and their perseverance throughout the review process.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Hafner and Pun 11

ORCID iD
Christoph A. Hafner https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9592-8092

Note
1. More information available at relc.org.sg and lsppc.org

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