April 2008 Volume 4
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Foreword

Foreword to April 2008, Volume 4 Issue 1

Welcome to the Spring 2008 issue of the Asian ESP Journal. The common theme that ties the contributions in this edition together is discourse analysis, which is applied toward several different ends. Peter Sampson discusses applying discourse analysis to preparing students for overseas study, Le Cheng, King Kui Sin, &Jian Li apply discourse analysis to interpret differences between American and Chinese case briefs, Anil Pathak analyzes the discourse of mock job interviews, and Zahra Amirian, ZohrehKassaian, &MansoorTavakoli examine corpora of linguistics papers to find differences between Persian and English in preferred discourse organization.

The papers in this volume follow in the tradition established by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), questioning assumptions regarding how English is used and offering often surprising insights into standard organizations of form and the functions those forms serve.

Peter Sampson begins the issue by discussing how teachers preparing their students for university study in English speaking countries can explicitly address the different contexts in which students will be expected to perform, including lectures, tutorials/discussion groups, writing essays, and reading textbooks and research articles. He includes some examples of practical pedagogic activities which other teachers will hopefully be able to apply in their own contexts.

Le Cheng, King Kui Sin, &Jian Li examine corpora of American and Chinese case briefs, or court judgments, to find areas where they may differ. As China increasingly moves toward adoption of WTO standards and rules, there is increasing pressure toward standardization of Chinese legal traditions. Beyond painting a compelling picture of the differences between Chinese and American law, their paper reveals standard genres for law students in both countries, and practitioners who straddle both legal systems. They systematically explain how the two different systems approach the common problem of interpreting law.

Next Anil Pathak deconstructs myths of job interviews perpetuated by textbooks, demonstrating how students, in conducting mock interviews, encountered and dealt with problems and misinterpretations. The central message of this paper is one common to the discourse analysis tradition¾actual discourse is generally much messier and more difficult to interpret than textbooks seem to suggest. The author concludes that teachers should take these findings into account when preparing students for job interviews; explicitly teaching where and how interview discourses can go wrong rather than uncritically following the cleaner discourses included in many textbooks.

Zahra Amirian, Zohreh Kassaian, & MansoorTavakoli complete the issue by comparing three different corpora of linguistics articles, a corpus of English articles published in linguistics journals, a corpus of Persian articles published in Persian journals, and a corpus of English articles written by Persian-speaking writers which were rejected by linguistics journals. They demonstrate some of the differences between English and Persian styles, offering a road map for Persian speakers hoping to successfully write English articles for publication in English language journals. More broadly, the conclusions they reach regarding discourse organization in English could inform native speakers of languages other than Persian regarding the norms of English language discourse and how to conform to those norms when writing.

This issue truly reflects the international nature of the Asian ESP Journal, with articles from China, Singapore, New Zealand, and Iran. I hope you enjoy the issue and find its contents compelling and provoking. If you would like to submit a paper yourself, I encourage you to do so. Please visit the submissions guidelines, linked from this page.

We're looking forward to hearing from you.

All the best,
Theron Muller
Associate Editor,
Asian ESP Journal

April 2008
Volume 4 Issue 1
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Foreword by Theron Muller
1.   Peter Sampson. Using Discourse Analysis to Prepare Learners forOverseas University Study
2.   Le Cheng, King Kui Sin and Jian Li. A Discursive Approach to Legal Texts: Court Judgments  as an Example
3.   Anil Pathak. Deconstructing the Textbook Myth: Using Discourse-DisordersAnalysis for Job Interview Training
4.   Zahra Amirian, ZohrehKassaian and Mansoor Tavakoli. Genre Analysis: An Investigation of the Discussion Sections  of Applied Linguistics Research Articles