ESP Across Cultures 22

Welcome to volume 22 of ESP Across Cultures, the twelfth to be published in online format. There are four papers in this volume, all highlighting particular aspects of English for Specific Purposes from a cross-cultural perspective. In the opening paper, Cecilia Boggio and Ilaria Parini examine a dataset of 118 headlines of articles from The Economist with reference to the Covid-19 outbreak and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, drawing on a study conducted by R.J. Alexander in 1986. The first aim of this investigation was to see whether the rhetorical strategies observed by Alexander were still to be found in contemporary headlines. Then, by means of a closed-ended questionnaire, 100 Italian undergraduate students specializing either in Economics or Business were asked to identify the rhetorical strategies used by The Economist in its headlines in order to assess the students’ reading comprehension skills in English, particularly their ability to identify and understand what lies beyond the information given. In her paper Chiara Cigliano explores the complex relationship that a group of 18 Italian MA students and PhD candidates have with the English language as it is used in academia, and the one they have with the nebulous figure of the English ‘native speaker’. Semi-structured interviews were carried out in line with their traditional use in language attitudes research; they were subsequently analysed using the Grounded Theory Method. The results suggest that the native-nonnative binary is rooted in the respondents’ minds, creating a situation in which nonnative speakers feel the need to abandon their accent so as not to be stigmatized as ‘defective’ native speakers, in a world where English native speakers always have “the upper hand”. Daniel Martín-González analyses the social media behaviours of 64 undergraduates in Spain specializing in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) who have chosen to use a private Facebook group as an alternative to the Moodle platform for engaging in online class tasks. This novel approach allows for greater freedom of expression as students tackle course assignments. The aim of this study is to identify how students interact with these tasks on the Facebook platform, exploring their tendencies to support or challenge their peers within the context of these simulations. The study also examines the linguistic resources used when offering support or expressing disagreement, and explains how students perceive their behaviours within this social media environment throughout the course. In the final paper in this volume Antonio Pinna, David Brett and Barbara Loranc explore travel journalism using a corpus-driven approach. Their study focuses on a key aspect of formulaicity, collocate pairs and collocation, comparing and contrasting findings in travel journalism in three different languages, English, Italian and Polish by examining texts taken from online versions of The Guardian, La Repubblica, and Gazeta. The texts were annotated for part-of-speech and lemma. Collocate pairs were then extracted from the annotated data. The resulting collocate pairs were placed into thematic groups, the largest being LOGISTICS and CULTURE+HISTORY. The results show how the collocate pairs in the three languages point to differing constructions of destination images and tourism experiences in these cultures.