CfP: Crises, Challenges and Post-Pandemic Prospects

Studia 2023 Special Issue on Languages for Specific and Academic Purposes

Deadline: 15 February 2024

Special issue information:

This special issue focuses on Languages for Specific Purposes and welcomes papers taking a research, pedagogical or theoretical perspective on the topic.

Language for specific purposes (LSP) is an approach to language education based on identifying the specific language features, discourse practices, and communicative skills of target academic groups, and which recognizes the subject-matter needs and expertise of learners. It sees itself as sensitive to contexts of discourse and action and seeks to develop research-based pedagogies to assist study, research or publication in English. It requires teachers to identify the diversity of disciplinary languages used in the workplace or academy and encourage students to engage analytically with target discourses and develop a critical understanding of the contexts in which they are used. This is probably the most widely adopted approach to language instruction in higher education today, involving thousands of teachers and students across the world.

Students now take a broader and more heterogeneous mix of academic subjects, some of which involve modular or joint degrees and emergent ‘practice-based’ courses such as nursing, management and social work. Further, they now have to deal with a broad range of modalities and presentational forms beyond written texts, and must learn to negotiate a complex web of disciplinary specific text-types, assessment tasks and presentational modes in order first to graduate, and then to operate effectively in the workplace.

This special issue of Studia addresses research on LSP or the application of understandings from it in the classroom. We are not only interested in empirical research but also classroom practices, and theoretical discussions. A point of central importance is that each chapter is directly about specific language instruction, either using English or another language. We are aware that LSP instruction occurs in a wide range of settings, is aimed at learners with various backgrounds (immigrant, foreign language, 3rd language, etc.), operates in various contexts (e.g., genre-based pedagogy, teaching for general or specific academic/occupational purposes), focuses on different modalities (print-based, digital, multimodal, oral), and encompasses a host of teacher activities (e.g., syllabus design, materials development, instructional delivery, provision of feedback, assessment). We are interested in papers covering any topical aspects in these diverse academic contexts.

Manuscript submission information:

You are invited to submit your manuscript at any time before the submission deadline.

In this Special Issue we are interested in publishing both full-length articles (6000-7000 words including references) and shorter reports on teaching or classroom practices (2500 -3000 words). All submissions should be in English and relate to the topic of the Special Issue.

Please include the following with your submission:

● Name(s) of author(s), institutional affiliation and bionote

Type of submission

● Working title

For any inquiries about the appropriateness of contribution topics, please contact Dr. Octavia Raluca Zglobiu-Sandu.

Please refer to the Guide for Authors to prepare your manuscript.

Submission deadline: 15 February 2024

Contact Information

Guest editors: 
  • Professor Ken Hyland, University of East Anglia, UK
  • Dr. Octavia Raluca Zglobiu-Sandu, Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania
  • Dr. Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu, Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania