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ASpla revue du GERAS
73 | 2018VariaAnthony Saber (dir.)
Édition électroniqueURL : http://journals.openedition.org/asp/5089DOI : 10.4000/asp.5089ISSN : 2108-6354
ÉditeurGroupe d'étude et de recherche en anglais de spécialité
Édition impriméeDate de publication : 1 mars 2018ISSN : 1246-8185
Référence électroniqueAnthony Saber (dir.), ASp, 73 | 2018 [En ligne], mis en ligne le 01 mars 2018, consulté le 01 novembre2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/asp/5089 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/asp.5089
Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 1 novembre 2020.
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SOMMAIRE
Éditorial : Construire une bibliothèque des pratiques pédagogiques en anglais de spécialitéAnthony Saber
Articles de recherche
The emergence of text-graphics conventions in a medical research journal: The Lancet1823-2015Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet
Specialised aspects of architectural discourse: Metaphors in the British magazine TheArchitectural ReviewClaire Kloppmann-Lambert
Adapting English for the specific purpose of tourism: A study of communication strategies inface-to-face encounters in a French tourist officeAdam Wilson
Le corpus comme aide à la rédaction de résumés scientifiques pour des étudiants LANSAD :une approche comparativeLaura-May Simard
Recensions
Maurizio Gotti, Stefania Maci, Michele Sala (eds.), Ways of Seeing, Ways of Being:Representing the Voices of TourismBern: Peter Lang, 2017Adam Wilson
Magdalena Sowa, Jaroslaw Krajka, Innovations in Languages for Specific Purposes –Innovations en langues sur objectifs spécifiques, Present challenges and futurepromises – Défis actuels et engagements à venir Bern: Peter Lang, 2017Shona Whyte
Alissa J. Hartig, Connecting Language and Disciplinary Knowledge in English forSpecific Purposes: Case studies in lawBristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, 2017Anne-Marie Barrault-Méthy
ASp, 73 | 2018
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Éditorial : Construire unebibliothèque des pratiquespédagogiques en anglais despécialitéEditorial : Building a library of pedagogical practices in English for specificpurposes
Anthony Saber
1 « Trop de volumes et pas assez de livres » : cette formule paradoxale et malicieuse,
attribuée à l’auteur de vaudevilles Adrien Decourcellle, pourrait illustrer le paysage
actuel des pratiques pédagogiques en secteur LANSAD. Chaque jour, au sein de leur
institution de rattachement, les enseignants d’anglais de spécialité imaginent des
procédures d’enseignement originales, créent des exercices inventifs, et, attentifs aux
besoins de leurs élèves, mettent en œuvre des approches spécifiques, écrivant ainsi au
quotidien la réalité de notre discipline. Cependant, ces pratiques souvent innovantes ne
sont que trop rarement archivées ou transmises à la communauté des enseignants
LANSAD, ne bénéficiant que d’une diffusion limitée et locale, alors que leur indexation
au sein d’une bibliothèque de référence serait incontestablement d’une grande utilité.
C’est donc tout un continent d’actions et de dispositifs pédagogiques qui demeure,
malheureusement, une vaste terra incognita.
2 À ce titre, l’équipe éditoriale est heureuse de vous annoncer le lancement d’une
nouvelle rubrique dans notre revue, intitulée « pratiques pédagogiques en anglais de
spécialité », à compter du prochain numéro1. Issue d’une réflexion menée par Valérie
Braud, Monique Mémet et Philippe Millot, elle aura vocation à répertorier et à
archiver des pratiques pédagogiques remarquables, qui illustrent la créativité, les
réflexions et le savoir-faire des praticiens du secteur LANSAD. La trame commune
proposée aux auteurs pour rédiger ces rapports en provenance des différents
« terrains » de notre discipline permettra aussi, nous l’espérons, de favoriser la
comparaison des pratiques, et ainsi de contribuer à une meilleure codification de nos
ASp, 73 | 2018
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interventions pédagogiques en fonction du contexte institutionnel et des besoins des
différentes populations en matière d’anglais de spécialité. Ces comptes rendus
pédagogiques, d’une longueur préconisée de 4 000 mots, comprendront ainsi des
indications sur le dispositif de formation, les objectifs du cours, l’ingénierie des
séances, l’évaluation de la progression, les procédures de notation ou de certification,
ainsi qu’un bref bilan général de l’action de formation. Chaque contribution sera
précédée d’un commentaire proposé par un enseignant-expert du secteur LANSAD, qui
mettra en perspective l’objet traité par l’auteur. Nous invitons vivement tous nos
collègues, notamment les agrégés et certifiés impliqués dans des formations en anglais
de spécialité, à nous proposer des textes relatant leurs pratiques, quel que soit le
contexte dans lequel ils travaillent (universités, grandes écoles, IUT, BTS, formation
continue...).
3 Nous formons l’espoir que cette bibliothèque des pratiques pédagogiques en anglais de
spécialité, certes potentiellement infinie sur un mode borgésien2, si l’on considère le
très grand nombre de situations et de contextes, ainsi que la diversité des acteurs et des
enjeux en secteur LANSAD, suscitera au fil du temps la construction collective de
doctrines d’action et de procédures partagées. Ainsi, pour reprendre les derniers mots
de Jorge Luis Borges dans sa nouvelle « La bibliothèque de Babel », « le désordre
apparent, se répétant, constituerait un ordre, l’Ordre. Ma solitude se console à cet
élégant espoir ».
4 Le présent numéro d’ASp comprend quatre articles de recherche. Adoptant un point de
vue diachronique, Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet s’intéresse à la multimodalité de
communication au sein de la revue médicale The Lancet de 1823 à 2015. Si les articles
publiés dans cette revue ont toujours comporté des éléments graphiques (par exemple
des dessins illustrant des gestes chirurgicaux dans les articles publiés au XIXe siècle),
c’est dans les années 1950, avec l’emprise croissante du modèle IMRAD, que les
composants visuels (graphiques, tableaux, images, photographies...) se diversifient et se
multiplient, souvent assortis de textes d’accompagnement de plus en plus détaillés, ce
qui favorise une consultation non séquentielle des articles de recherche en médecine
par les lecteurs experts. Cette évolution traduit le passage graduel d’une médecine
d’inspiration principalement chirurgicale et narrative au XIXe siècle, attachée à
l’anatomie et à la description de cas individuels de patients, à une médecine de
laboratoire de plus en plus axée sur les éléments de preuve statistiques.
5 Claire Kloppmann-Lambert réfléchit sur le rôle majeur de la métaphore chez les
architectes s’exprimant dans The Architectural Review. Les réseaux métaphoriques mis
en évidence traduisent le mode de pensée analogique de cette profession, qui
conceptualise les bâtiments comme des êtres vivants, des plantes, des objets, des
matériaux, voire, de manière plus surprenante encore, comme des textes, des textiles.
Les métaphores sont dotées d’une dimension explicative qui traduit le projet
architectural, et illustrent le double positionnement de l’architecte, qui est tantôt celui
qui fait et conçoit (architectus ingenio), tantôt celui qui parle et explique (architectus
verborus)3. Certaines métaphores sont même constitutives de théories architecturales
actuelles, comme le « biomorphisme ». L’emploi très fréquent de ce trope par les
acteurs du domaine, et la poésie qu’on note dans des expressions imagées telles que wet
palimpsest ou geological nougat, traduit un tropisme artistique qui semble l’emporter sur
une conception purement technicienne de l’architecture, inscrivant nettement celle-ci
dans la constellation des arts plastiques.
ASp, 73 | 2018
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6 Adam Wilson tente de modéliser les interactions en anglais entre le personnel de
l’Office du tourisme de Marseille et les touristes visitant la cité phocéenne, inscrivant
son étude au croisement de l’ethnographie, de la pragmatique, et de la caractérisation
de l’anglais du tourisme. Le vecteur des échanges est bien entendu l’anglais lingua
franca, qui permet aux interactants de se comprendre même si la forme du message est
imparfaite. L’auteur met en relief plusieurs stratégies à l’œuvre dans les échanges :
vérification de la compréhension par l’interlocuteur, confirmation du fait que
l’information demandée a bien été fournie, signalement d’obstacles à la
compréhension, « réparation » de quiproquos. Répétition et reformulation sont les
principaux moyens langagiers de ces stratégies, qui relèvent d’une co-construction du
sens, certes souvent laborieuse, par les interactants.
7 Laura-May Simard présente les résultats d’une étude de terrain portant sur un groupe
de vingt-quatre étudiants en Master suivant un cours de rédaction scientifique
anglaise. La moitié de cet effectif était invitée à utiliser de manière privilégiée un
corpus et un concordancier comme principale ressource rédactionnelle, alors que
l’autre demi-groupe devait avoir recours au dictionnaire en ligne Word Reference.
L’analyse qualitative des productions écrites ainsi que des journaux de bord tenus par
les étudiants démontre une bonne appropriation du couple corpus-concordancier par
le premier groupe. Un gain d’efficacité rédactionnelle perceptible, mais modéré est
noté pour les étudiants de niveau moyen ayant eu recours au corpus ; il est nettement
plus prononcé pour les sujets bénéficiant déjà d’une bonne maîtrise linguistique. Une
typologie des usages du corpus (recherche simple, recherche de collocation,
vérification de formulations) par les étudiants est présentée dans cette étude, qui
n’écarte cependant pas le recours au dictionnaire comme outil pédagogique en cours de
rédaction scientifique.
8 Vous trouverez aussi dans ce numéro trois recensions par Adam Wilson, Shona Whyte
et Anne-Marie Barrault-Méthy.
NOTES
1. Voir pages 125–127 de ce numéro et <http://journals.openedition.org/asp/5085>.
2. Comme l'on sait, Jorge Luis Borges formule en 1941, dans sa célèbre nouvelle « La Bibliothèque
de Babel », à la suite du philosophe allemand Kurd Lasswitz en 1904, l'hypothèse d'une
bibliothèque qui contiendrait tous les ouvrages déjà écrits et tous ceux à venir.
3. On doit cette distinction à Caballero, Rosario. 2006. Re-viewing Space. Figurative Language inArchitects’ Assessment of Built Space. Berlin, New York : Mouton de Gruyter.
ASp, 73 | 2018
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Articles de rechercheResearch articles
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The emergence of text-graphicsconventions in a medical researchjournal: The Lancet 1823-2015L'émergence de conventions texte-image dans une revue médicale, The Lancet
1823-2015
Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet
1. Introduction
1 The literature on the growth of the scientific research article is vast, and several book-
length studies have been devoted to its progressive development from the early
epistolary communications in the 17th century to the present (Banks 2008; Bazerman
1988; Gross et al. 2002; Halliday & Martin 1993; Swales 1990, to mention but a few). The
main focus of these investigations has been the emergence and conventionalization of
the linguistic and rhetorical features of research articles, such as the IMRaD structure,
or the construal of scientific research in specific phraseologies, terminologies and
linguistic choices. They have provided us with a very rich and detailed picture of how
the argument structures and language evolved in response to the evolution of science
itself. There has been far less work, however, on the evolution of the conventions
governing the interaction between the text and the non-linguistic elements in the
research article, despite the widely recognized fact that specialized discourse makes
meaning not just through language but through other semiotics (Lemke 1998). Indeed,
as argued by Gross et al. (2002) and by Gross and Harmon (2013), this visual-verbal
interaction is a defining feature of the modern research article, which can therefore
not be approached or understood by considering the text alone:
[…] it is the interaction of visual and verbal texts, an interaction enabled and facilitatedby devices of style and presentation, that constitutes the heart of scientificargumentative practices at the end of the twentieth century. (Gross et al. 2002: 213,my italics)
ASp, 73 | 2018
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[…] scientific communication is a consequence of the interaction between wordsand images. (Gross & Harmon 2013: Chapter 1)
2 The present study focuses specifically on some of these presentational devices in order
to trace the gradual emergence of the conventions governing the interaction between
non-textual elements such as drawings, photographs, tables, graphs and schematics –
called ‘graphics’ hereafter for simplicity’s sake – and the text in a medical journal. The
need for explicit codification and rules to organize their juxtaposition and integration
is in fact a fairly recent development in the history of the research article, dating
roughly from the second half of the twentieth century. As pointed out by Gross et al.(2002: 162), despite some sporadic efforts at standardization in the first half of the 20th
century, and which mainly concerned the overall structure of articles rather than
details of presentation, it was not until the 1950s, under pressure from the institutions
and gatekeepers of science (scholarly societies, editorial boards of journals), that
discipline-specific style manuals were published (in physics in 1951, biology in 1960,
medicine in 1964, chemistry in 1967). Nowadays, as is well-known, highly detailed and
constraining instructions for the presentation of data and text and their interaction
have to be followed by all authors when submitting their manuscripts for publication.
The Lancet, for example, subscribes to the recommendations of the ICMJE (International
Committee of Medical Journal Editors), whose website specifies how the different types
of medical articles should be organized and presented.1 Before the establishment of
these explicit guidelines, text-graphics conventions and interaction appear to have
evolved in a sporadic, unsystematic and spontaneous fashion – even if, with hindsight,
one can discern trends at work – though not haphazardly. Indeed, I will argue that the
evolution of these conventions parallels changes in the approach and knowledge of the
discipline and therefore reflects, on a par with the development of the IMRaD structure
(Swales 1990) or of scientific language (Banks 2008), the close relationship between
semiotic resources and disciplinary context.
3 As a useful starting-point from which to trace the emergence of these conventions, we
can take modern text-graphics conventions in scientific research articles. Briefly
summarized, these are as follows: each graphic element is given its own textual space,
clearly separated from the verbal text; it has a title and is numbered (Table I, Fig. 2,
etc.); its different components are clearly labelled (headings of columns and rows in
tables, axes and lines on graphs, labels or a key on schematics); it has an explanatory
caption if further information is necessary to understand the content of the graphic; it
is always referred to by name and number in the accompanying text (e.g. see Fig.1). It is
these features that will be examined here over the last two centuries, from the
founding of the first English medical journal, The Lancet, in 1823 up to the present.
4 This “master finding system” (Gross et al. 2002: 128) allows readers of the modern
research article not only to easily locate and link up the graphics with the relevant
parts of the text, it also enables a non-linear reading strategy. As shown by Bazerman’s
(1985) study of physicists, expert readers use selective, non-sequential reading
strategies to spot the newsworthy information, a strategy greatly facilitated by the fact
that the graphics, which generally contain the ‘news’, are sufficiently informative and
have acquired enough autonomy from the text to be read by themselves (Bazerman
1988). In addition to tracing the emergence of the conventions themselves, this study
will therefore also address the question of the autonomy of these non-textual elements
with respect to the text, and track changes in the type of reading strategy favored at
different periods. In the last few decades, for instance, a major development has been
ASp, 73 | 2018
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the migration of documents to the web and hypertextuality, which have resulted in
text nowadays being broken up into modules or small chunks, generating a ‘navigating’
mode of reading. A diachronic approach allows one to put these recent developments
into perspective and better understand their filiation with the changes that have
gradually taken place over the centuries.
5 One of the few longitudinal studies to investigate this type of feature in scientific
articles is Gross et al. (2002), covering over three centuries and three languages
(English, French and German). In addition to analyzing style (syntax and lexis) and
argument structure – aspects not addressed in the present study – they also looked at
presentational features such as citations, headings, and non-textual elements (tables,
graphs, etc.). Their data on the evolution of the number and type of graphics and
formal conventions such as the numbering of tables and figures or the presence of
legends, in particular, are useful points of comparison for the present study. The
breadth of coverage of their study did not enable them to look in great detail at the
interaction between text and graphics, which is a specific focus of the present study,
nor did their data focus on medical texts, so the finer-grained analysis presented here
should complement the broad sweep of their survey.
6 The organization of the paper is as follows. I will first describe the number and types of
visuals that were found over the whole 200-year period. This will not only bring my
previous study (Rowley-Jolivet 2010) which stopped in 1900, up to the present, but it
will provide the necessary context for the more specific focus of the study, which is the
interaction between the text and the non-textual elements, looking both at the
conventions governing the presentation of these elements themselves, and the
conventions used for intratextual reference to them.
2. Study design
7 I have selected for this study the same British journal as in the earlier investigation, namely The Lancet, a high-impact medical journal currently ranked second out of 150
journals in the general medicine category (Journal Citation Report 2015). It is one of the
oldest peer-reviewed medical journals, founded in London in 1823, the date which
therefore constitutes the starting-point for this study, by Thomas Wakley, a member of
the Royal College of Surgeons and a militant medical reformer (Sprigge 1899). As
indicated by the journal’s title – a lancet is a surgical instrument – the journal initially
focused on surgery. Rapidly, however, the coverage of the journal broadened to include
many aspects of medicine, and in addition to the parent journal, published weekly,
there are now nine monthly specialty journals – The Lancet Haematology, The LancetNeurology, The Lancet Oncology, etc.2 These were all created very recently, however, and
over the two centuries covered by the present study only the parent journal existed;
material for the study was therefore collected from the parent journal only.
8 The corpus is based on the same sampling procedure used in the previous study. For
each decade between the 1820s and 2015, the first 750 pages of the paper version of the
journal were examined at 10-year intervals – 1823-25, 1835, 1845, etc. up to 2015. This
gives 20 samples of 750 pages, totaling 15,000 pages. In these 15,000 pages there are
4,788 graphical, or non-textual, elements. All the articles that included graphics were
downloaded for analysis. The specific add-ons and affordances of the web-based journal
ASp, 73 | 2018
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were beyond the scope of the present study, and deserve a separate investigation (see
e.g., Gross & Harmon 2016; Perez-Llantada 2013).
3. Quantitative overview 1823-2015
9 In order to contextualize the specific analysis of text-graphics interaction that follows,
this section gives an overview of the number and types of graphics over the whole
period, and traces their evolution. Figure 1 shows the number of graphics over the
whole period.
Fig. 1: Number of graphics 1825-2015 (750 pages per sampling year), in The Lancet
10 As can be seen, there is an enormous difference between the early years and the
present time. In the first two decades, 1825 and 1835, there were only 10 graphics per
750 pages, compared to over 600 since 2000. Indeed, in the whole of the 19th century,
there were only 352 graphics, and the number never exceeded 80 per year sampled. The
number increased slowly over the century, though with some variations, which can
probably be attributed to the sampling procedure: some issues include reports of
surgical lectures, a genre which contains a large number of anatomical drawings,
whereas in other years (1855, 1875, 1885), this type of article was absent in the sample,
resulting in a much lower number of images.
11 There are several reasons, both technical and epistemological, for the paucity of
graphics in the 19th century. The production of highly detailed anatomical plates,
whether by engraving or woodcut, was a time-consuming affair, requiring the skill of
an experienced craftsman, and generally reserved for costly books, often long in
preparation. For a fledgling journal such as The Lancet, which moreover had to produce
issues at regular and frequent intervals, this quality of work was beyond its budget and
incompatible with the time constraints on the journal. As a result, the journal could not
afford to include many images. The technical breakthrough in the printing process did
not come until the invention of photography in the latter years of the century (Ivins
1969). Another reason for the scarcity of graphics of all kinds is the extent of medical
knowledge and its methods, which govern what can be understood and ‘seen’, and
hence visualized (Fleck 1979 [1935]). Nineteenth-century medicine was essentially
based on narratives of individual case histories or loosely related case collections
ASp, 73 | 2018
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(Atkinson 1992; Taavitsainen et al. 2014), and the burden of the sequential narrative,
including any numerical information, was carried by the text, which recounted the case
from the beginning to the patient’s recovery or death. As each case concerned a single
patient, only one visual at most tended to accompany the text. In addition, diagnosis
was mainly based on the observation of external phenomena and symptoms; the
understanding of internal processes and structures was lacking – X-rays, which were
far more informative medically speaking than ordinary photographs, were only
discovered in 1895 – and the medical relevance of other sciences such as chemistry,
biochemistry, physics, and statistics, with their different and more varied forms of
visualization, was not yet perceived.
12 The years 1905 to 2015, in contrast, contain 4,436 graphics. The overall trend is that of a
marked increase since the beginning of the 20th century: in the first four decades, the
number of graphics reached 200 per 750 pages, rising to 650 in 2005, or practically one
per page. Figure 1 indicates that the turning point seems to have occurred in the 1940s,
when the total number of graphics more than doubled compared to the 1930s. Again,
there are some variations, in particular a drop in the number during the decades
1975-1995 compared to the 1950s. It is highly likely that part of the explanation for this
decrease is the sampling procedure: as shown in the 19th century, this could result in
considerable quantitative differences from one sample to the next. A more exhaustive
analysis of all the issues during these three decades would be necessary to check this,
however. Notwithstanding, this remarkable increase over the century demonstrates
the importance given to visualization in modern medical research and the multimodal
resources now used, rather than text alone as in the 19th century. This rise can be
attributed in part to technical affordances: since the beginning of the 20th century, the
technical obstacles in the printing industry have been overcome, the variety of
photographic techniques and the forms of representation used in medicine have
progressed enormously. It also reflects, however, a shift towards laboratory-based
medicine and the contribution of experimental sciences to the field (analysis of
different variables to find significant factors).
13 Not only the number but also the types of graphics have evolved considerably over the
two centuries. To enable comparisons over such a long period, during which non-
textual elements underwent a great diversification, broad categories had to be used.
The data were therefore grouped into the following four types: drawings, which are
figurative representations, either realistic or simplified, of the anatomy or other
objects; photographs, which are also figurative representations of phenomena, ranging
from simple snapshots to sophisticated microscale imagery; tables, i.e. numerical
representations of data; graphs (line graphs, bar charts, etc.), which are constructed
and non-figurative. Figure 2 shows the evolution of each category per decade.
14 In the 19th century, practically the only type of visual in the journal was drawings,
accounting for 79% of the total. These were either technical drawings of apparatus or
anatomical drawings of individual cases, both of which had long existed and had
developed their specific representational conventions (cf. Vesalius for anatomy,
Leonardo da Vinci for both anatomical and technical drawing). Photos (3% of the total)
only began to appear in 1895, and were snapshots of outdoor scenes (the housing of the
poor in Budapest) or pictures of individual patients. The occasional graphs (4% of the
total) were simple temperature charts, also of individual patients. This confirms the
data of Gross et al. (2002), who found no photographs, and only one line graph, in their
ASp, 73 | 2018
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19th-century corpus. The idea that medical phenomena could be represented in non-
figurative ways does not seem to have occurred to the profession in the 19th century.
Tables were also absent except for a few in 1845 and 1855 (14% of the total). It is a moot
point, though, whether the items I have classified as tables in 1845 would be considered
as such nowadays, as will become clear when looking at how they are integrated into
the text (section 4.1.2). The first real tables occurred in 1855, which was the period of
the Crimean War (1853-1856). It is possible that one of the contributing factors leading
medicine to use tables, that can report extended series of data, may have been war: the
Crimean War brought together large cohorts of men all suffering from the same
complaints (war wounds or infectious diseases such as cholera and dysentery), thereby
providing army doctors with the opportunity to go beyond individual case histories and
consider groups of patients. However, these tables contain only raw numbers, there are
no statistical analyses.
Fig. 2: Evolution of the 4 categories of graphics, 1825-2015, in The Lancet
15 Moving on to the 20th century, and following the line for tables still in Figure 2, one can
also observe a very sharp rise in the number of tables in 1915, the period of the First
World War, and again in 1945 during World War II, after which the number remains
high and rises again in the 1960s. This is the decade when the use of statistics in
medicine started to become widespread. Over the whole of the period 1905-2015, tables
are the most frequent type of graphic, accounting for 41% of the total. Drawings have
declined in importance since 1900, now numbering no more than they did in 1835, and
representing only a very small fraction of the modern total (9%). Moreover, most of the
recent examples are idealized schematic drawings in which all the iconic details have
been filtered out. The number of photos has of course increased since 1900, related to
the development of photographic techniques: first X-rays and camera photos, then
much later ultrasound images, MRI, CAT scans, etc. and represent overall 23% of the
total. This increase is rather erratic, however, with several ups and downs. A striking
feature is the enormous increase in photos in the 21st century, to which I return below
(section 6). Lastly, graphs, “the reigning monarch of twentieth-century visuals” (Gross
et al. 2002: 201) account for 27% of the total. They have increased fairly regularly ever
since 1900 and have now overtaken tables, reflecting the close links that now exist
ASp, 73 | 2018
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between medicine and non-medical sciences such as chemistry, physics, and statistics.
While equations are extremely rare in the medical data studied here, the ousting of
diagrams by graphs mirrors the evolution observed by Bazerman (1988) in 20th-century
physics. The marked shifts in the ‘graphical mix,’ or distribution of the different types
of graphics, since the 19th century reflect the evolution of the objects of study and
methods used in medicine: only graphs and tables are capable of handling large masses
of data in order to compare datasets, reveal trends, and represent change over time or
cause and effect relations between variables (Lemke 1998).
4. The evolution of text-graphics conventions
16 How has the co-existence within the same textual space of the verbal text and these
various types of graphics evolved over this period of nearly two hundred years? The
following sub-sections examine the organizational cues used to relate text and graphics
(titles, captions, numbering and intratextual referencing), first in the 19th-Nekonata
aŭtoro2018-02-10T16:47:00century texts, then in the 20th-century articles.
4.1. The 19th century
4.1.1. Titles and captions
17 Titles were rarely used for graphics in the 19th century in The Lancet: only one fifth of
articles gave their graphics a title. This makes the graphic highly dependent on the
text, as it cannot be understood without reading the accompanying text; it is not
autonomous or self-explanatory. Figure 3 is a typical example from an 1855 article on
“A Few Observations on the Wounded from the Crimea.”
Fig. 3: Drawing with no title, The Lancet, 1855, pp. 208-9
18 When titles were used, they were often very uninformative: This week; Experiment 1;
Number of cases.
19 Explanatory captions were even rarer in the 19th century: only 10% of articles included
them. As with titles, in order to understand the meaning of the parts of the figure
labelled a, b, c, etc., it was necessary to read the surrounding text (Figure 4).
Fig.4: Drawing with no caption, The Lancet, 1845, p.209
I will now proceed to a description of the instrument […]. The speculum consists ofa glass cylinder (Fig 1,a), accurately fitted to an outer one of metal (b,), withinwhich it slides […]. The edge of the smaller or uterine extremity is carefullyrounded into a smooth ring (c,) …
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13
4.1.2. Numbering of graphics and referencing
20 When there was only one graphic in the article, which was the case with half of the
19th-century texts, numbering was not felt to be necessary. Moreover, as already
mentioned, the majority of 19th-century articles recounted individual case histories;
there was therefore no ambiguity as to which patient the figure or table referred to,
and the title of the article served as title for the graphic. Figure 5, for example, the only
visual accompanying the case report, has no title, number, or caption.
Fig. 5: The Lancet, 1845, p. 34. Article entitled “Case of acute fungous disease of the thigh and leg”
21 In the absence of numbering, the graphics could obviously not be referred to by
number in the text, as is customary in modern research articles. This left authors
considerable latitude in their choice of referring expressions. Among the various
expressions used one finds: the subjoined engraving; the accompanying woodcut represents…;
A graphical illustration is given in the appended figure; the tumour of which I enclose a slightsketch; This instrument, as will be seen from the annexed outline; vide sketch. In many cases,
integration of the graphic in the text was by simple linear juxtaposition, using
cataphoric or anaphoric terms or other deictics to refer to it: the following engravingshows; the apparatus figured above; this is a copy of the engraving; the appearance thusdelineated; in the table before you. Authors occasionally made an evaluative comment on
the aesthetic quality of the drawing, complimenting the artist who provided the image:
the original and beautiful sketch from which the engraving has been taken. Clearly, no
conventionalized expressions had yet been established for this referencing function. In
some cases, there is no intratextual reference to the graphic at all, the text and graphic
are simply juxtaposed within the same textual space.
22 When the article contains several graphics, however, numbering is clearly very useful if
the author wishes to refer to a particular graphic without confusing the reader. This
convention was only slowly established however. In the surgical lectures, despite their
large numbers of diagrams, no numbering system was used for the drawings up to 1865.
The visuals, as in a modern conference presentation (Rowley-Jolivet & Carter-Thomas
2005), are referred to by inversion (Here is a drawing representing it…; Here is thetourniquet…) or deictics (This is a cast…), by adverbials with present-time reference (as I
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now show you), or by cataphora (the following engraving). No distinction is made between
oral delivery and the written article which is a verbatim transcription of the lecture
(Figure 6).
Fig. 6: The Lancet, 1845, pp. 3-6. “Lecture on the Operations of Surgery”, by R. Liston Esq., F.R.S.
23 This case is known to surgeons under the name of aneurismal varix. Here is a drawing
representing it
24 […] Here is the improved screw tourniquet of Petit.
25 […] This, for instance is a cast of a most admirably useful hand
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26 […] The middle phalanx can also be taken off in the same manner, as I now show you
27 Obviously, this type of presentation has drastic consequences on text-graphics
interaction. The drawings had to be placed at exactly the right point in the text, since
the sentence immediately preceding the drawing explains the image. Only a linear
reading strategy is possible, and the drawings are not self-standing; one has to read the
text sequentially to understand what they represent and to grasp their relevance.
28 By 1865, figure numbers begin to appear sporadically in the surgical lectures, so the
figures can be referred to by number in the text. Deictics continue to be used as well,
however, which gives the following rather odd combinations to our modern eyes: the
largest tumours such as this (Fig. 13) or this (Fig.14); Here are the casts (Fig.11 and 12) and hereis the result (Fig.38). This mixture of referring conventions indicates that the 1860s and
1870s were a transitional period. From the mid-1880s on, however, in articles
containing several images, drawings were systematically numbered, and deictics were
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replaced by references to figure numbers in the text; the conventions were clearly
stabilizing.
29 Only two exceptions to this development were found in the data: drawings of chemical
molecules, which are never numbered in the 19th century, as apparently they do not yet
seem to be considered as graphics; and some numerical data. Throughout the 19th
century and well into the 20th century, much of the numerical data was not presented
as tables at all. The text carried a much heavier burden of numerical information than
the graphics. Statistics of births and deaths or occurrences of diseases, for example,
were given as blocks of text containing a vast quantity of numbers, and not presented
as a table or graph, as would be customary nowadays (Figure 7). This type of
presentation again enforces a linear reading strategy, and makes it extremely difficult
to locate particular items of information or to compare different parameters (disease
type, temporal evolution of mortality, age-group of patients, etc.).
Fig. 7: The Lancet, 2 Jan. 1915, “Vital Statistics. Health of EnglishTowns”
The 4882 deaths from all causes were 698 fewer than the number in the previousweek, and included 411 which were referred to the principal epidemic diseases,against 429 and 465 in the two preceding weeks. Of these 411 deaths, 175 resultedfrom measles, 70 from infantile diarrhoeal diseases, 66 from diphtheria, 58 fromwhooping-cough, 30 from scarlet fever, and 12 from enteric fever, but not one fromsmallpox. The mean annual death-rate from these diseases was equal to 1.2, against1.3 per 1000 in the previous week. The deaths attributed to measles, which had been155, 181, and 210 in the three preceding weeks, fell to 175, and caused the highestannual death-rates of 1.9 in Birkenhead, 2.6 in Gateshead, 3.4 in Wigan and inNewcastle-on-Tyne, 4.2 in Huddersfield, 4.3 in Merthyr Tydfil, and 7.3 in Grimsby.[…]
30 Similar to what was observed above in the surgical lectures, in most of the 19th century
the text and the tabular data are completely integrated, with the numbers forming part
of the syntax of the sentence. An example is shown in Figure 8, where the sentence is
part text (the disease […] had declared itself) and part tabular data (in one child only 203times). Indeed, apart from the fact that the numbers are arranged in an orderly fashion
in columns and rows, it is debatable whether they can be considered as tables stricto
sensu. None of the conventions (table number, title, intratextual reference) are yet in
place, and again only a linear reading strategy is possible.
Fig. 8: The Lancet, 1845, p. 255. Article entitled “M. Baillarger on hereditary transmission ofinsanity”
31 Table numbers and table titles started to appear sporadically towards the end of the
19th century, but several presentational systems co-existed side by side until late into
the 20th century, often within the same issue of the journal or even within the same
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article. Numerical information continued to be non-autonomous with regard to the
text; the statistics in Figure 9, from 1925, are presented without a table number or title,
and are syntactically dependent on the preceding text.
Fig. 9: The Lancet, Jan. 3, 1925. Article entitled “Tuberculous meningitis in children”
32 In 1945 one finds a very similar presentation:
METHODS An investigation was carried out at West Park Hospital, Epsom, with 8 subjects, asfollows: [data in 9 columns and 4 rows then follow on the page] And even as late as 1965, numerical data are not always presented as a numberedtable: The serum-cholesterol levels of the normal males with and without an arcus were: [data in 3 columns and 9 lines then follow]
4.2. The 20th century
33 The evolution of text-graphics conventions in the 20th century can be dealt with more
rapidly than in the 19th century, as many of the conventions were fully stabilized from
mid-century onwards and ceased to evolve.
4.2.1 Titles and captions
34 Titles for all types of graphics began to be regularly used from 1915 on, and, with some
exceptions concerning tabular data noted above, systematically so from 1935. They also
became much more precise and informative, as shown in Figure 10, as medical
procedures and analytical categories acquired greater precision.
Fig. 10: Increasing length and precision of titles of graphicsin the 20th century, The Lancet
Date Title of the graphic
1925 TABLE II. (CASE 2) – Blood Counts
1945 TABLE II-Average Total, Free, and Acetylated Sulphathiozole Levels during the Dosing Period
1975
Fig. 3-Incidence of gallbladder disease (%) in 40-59-year-old female patients with
hyperlipoprotein2emia types Ha and IV compared to that recorded for female subjects of the
same age in reported necropsy series.12-14
2005
Table 4: Aspirin use, over-the-counter NSAID use, smoking history, and family history of
acute myocardial infarction in 817 randomly selected controls with remote NSAID exposure
or current exposure to celecoxib, ibuprofen, naproxen, or rofecoxib
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35 A similar evolution is observed in the data concerning captions, or glosses. Their
frequency and length gradually increased after 1900 and they started to include
statistical information from the 1960s on, thus considerably increasing the autonomy of
the graphic in relation to the text (Figure 11). The tables also became longer and more
detailed, running to several pages in the case of meta-analyses, and graphs became
more complex, as more and more numerical information was transferred from the text
to the graphics.
Fig. 11: Increasing length and precision of captions of graphicsin the 20th century, The Lancet
Date Caption of the graphic
1935FIG. 2.-Section of lung. Note enlarged cervical glands reaching to the apex of the right lung,
and the thickened pleura. Note also spread into left lower lobe from a roof gland.
1955
Fig. 8-Perforated duodenal ulcer. Diodone in stomach and small bowel and leaking from
duodenum; capped by air-bubble and spreading as far as 12th rib. Note gas under diaphragm,
and left renal calculus.
1965 Prematurity in bacteriuric and non-bacteriuric women is highly significant. χ2= 11.1, p<0.001.
1975
Fig. 3-Comparison of the effects of Graves’ immunoglobulins on the binding of labelled T.S.H.
to human thyroid membranes (receptor assay) and activation of adenyl cyclase in a similar
membrane preparation. Receptor assay response= % T.S.H. bound in presence of normal
immunoglobulins minus % T.S.H. bound in the presence of Graves’ immunoglobulins.
Activation of adenyl cyclase= C.A.M.P. produced in the presence of Graves’ immunoglobulins
(b-1)/C.A.M.P. produced in presence of normal immunoglobulins (a).
1995
Figure 3: Mortality in days 0-35 subdivided by other randomly allocated study
treatments
Comparisons (a), (b), and (c) as in figure 1. C=captopril, N=mononitrate, Mg=magnesium: so,
for example, the subgroup assessment of captopril m the presence of mononitrate is denoted
C+N vs N. Odds ratios (ORs: black squares with areas proportional to the amount of
"statistical information" in each subdivision60) comparing the mortality among patients
allocated the study treatment to that among patients allocated the relevant control are
plotted for each of the treatment comparisons, subdivided by the other randomly allocated
study treatments, along with their 99% confidence intervals (Cis: horizontal lines). For each
of the three study treatment comparisons, the overall result and its 95% CI is represented by
a diamond, with the overall proportional reduction (or increase) and statistical significance
given alongside. Squares or diamonds to the left of the solid vertical line indicate benefit
(significant at 2p<0.01 when the entire horizontal line is to the left of the vertical line and at
2p<0.05 when the diamond does not overlap the vertical line). Chi-square tests60 for evidence
of heterogeneity of the sizes of the ORs in the subdivisions are also given.
2015 The caption can cover up to half a page in small print
4.2.2. Numbering and intratextual references
36 As noted above, numbering of graphics was already the norm by 1900. The usefulness,
or the necessity, of numbering became apparent once articles started to deal with large
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groups of patients, not single case studies, and to analyze different factors. The
expressions used to refer to numbered graphics also quickly stabilized around the
1920s, with a limited number of expressions, the ones we use today, namely: as shown inFig.1; Fig. 1 shows; see Table II; (Fig. 1). The older practice of not numbering continued to
exist side by side with the newer convention until the 1950s, however, even in the same
article. When the article contained more than one of a given type of graphic (e.g. two or
more tables), they would be numbered but when there was only one of a given type
(e.g., a single line graph), the latter was often not numbered.
37 The general trend that emerges from observation of the data in the 20th century is that
certain conventions gradually fell into place during the first half of the century, but
were not enforced and therefore not applied systematically. Authors retained a certain
freedom as to how they presented numerical data (in tabular format or integrated into
the text), whether they numbered all the graphics or only some, and how much or what
sort of information they chose to include in the captions. Editorial practices were also
somewhat variable. No strong conventions yet appeared to govern the layout of the
graphics and their positioning within each article: graphics were not systematically
framed, the number was sometimes placed above, sometimes below the graphic, and
the graphic not necessarily positioned within the section to which it referred. The
comment by Gross et al. on their 19th-century data could be applied equally well to the
first half of the 20th century as far as the medical data studied here are concerned:
while uniformity and convergence are general, there is considerable variation; […]while there is movement toward the master finding system of the modern scientificarticle, this movement is not as marked as one might have expected. (Gross et al.2002: 128)
38 A turning point occurred, however, during the decade 1955-1965, when the structure of
the articles in The Lancet became standardized, with a limited set of organizational
headings used to label the different sections. This can probably be related to the
publication, in 1964, of the first discipline-specific style manual for medicine, following
the growing trend since the beginning of the decade for scholarly societies to codify the
presentation of research in their field (Gross et al. 2002: 162). In the 1965 sample, all the
research articles conform to the following format: introductory paragraph, Patients
and Methods, Results, Discussion, Summary, References. By 1975, the Summary (not yet
called Abstract) had moved to the very beginning. With this IMRaD format in place, the
graphics began to be properly positioned in the relevant sections (Methods and
Results), not haphazardly. It was also in the 1960s that the text-graphics conventions
that have been studied here became fully stabilized, as the journal imposed formatting
instructions on its authors; all the articles in the 1975 sample comply with them. The
rise of personal computers and desktop publishing was obviously a major technological
factor in this standardization from the 1970s onwards. Other minor changes to the
layout and conventions were introduced in the 1990s: the numbering system for
graphics changed from Latin to Arabic numbers, the section on patients and methods
started to be printed in a smaller typeface, and information concerning patients to be
presented as a table (Patient characteristics), rather than in the text. This is but the latest
step in an evolution that started in the early 20th century and that gathered momentum
throughout the century, namely the transfer of quantitative or numerical information
from the text to the graphics.
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5. Relation between text-graphics conventions andmedical practice and knowledge
39 The conventions that have been examined here – titles, captions and numbering of
graphics, intratextual referencing – may appear at first glance to be merely superficial,
typographical details and thus not worthy of analysis. When looked at from a long-term
perspective however, they tell us a great deal about the evolution of medical methods,
aims, and knowledge. The semiotic resources and typographical conventions of the
medical research article evolved in parallel with the field itself, just as the rhetorical
structure and the language used have evolved in response to changes in the practice
and communication of science.
40 In the 19th century, medicine was based on narratives of individual case histories or
loose collections of small numbers of cases. The absence of text-graphics conventions
reflects this focus on individual case histories: when each article deals only with a
single case, usually with a single graphic, there is no real need for titles, numbering or
intratextual reference. As the dominant form of visual – figurative diagrams of the
anatomy or of instruments – was easily understood and familiar to readers, an
explanatory gloss was seldom necessary. This is only part of the explanation, however,
because as shown above surgical lectures contained a large number of graphics but still
did not use any conventions to label or refer to them until late in the century. I suggest
that this is because, like case histories, the surgical procedure was conceived of as a
continuous narrative, of which the graphics were an integral part, as shown by their
integration into both the spatial layout of the page and the syntax of the sentence. A
similar phenomenon was observed with numerical data, which for most of the 19th
century were considered an integral part of the textual narrative and so were not
marked off from it in proper tables. The content of the table, which would nowadays be
presented as its title, was part of the sentence, and the numbers and text formed a
single integrated sentence. It was the verbal language (the text) that carried the entire
burden of the chronological narrative. The only reading strategy possible in these
presentational conditions was to read the document linearly, as one would read a story.
So the types of conventions used, or rather not used, corresponded to the dominantly
narrative approach to disease of the discipline.
41 In the 20th century, the progressive establishment of text-graphics conventions
paralleled changes in the approach and knowledge of the discipline: the movement
from private to public medicine (the growth of hospitals which brought together large
numbers of patients), the professionalization of the field and the reconceptualization of
medicine on the model of laboratory science from 1900 onwards (Atkinson 1992),
meant that medicine evolved from a narrative approach towards experimental
procedures, in which separate variables are isolated and tested using randomized
controlled trials, laboratory analyses, and statistics of large series and groups of
patients. This resulted both in diversifying the types of graphics used in medicine, as it
adopted the visualization strategies of experimental sciences, and in increasing
enormously the number of graphics needed to report results, which could now no
longer be presented as a single linear narrative but were a modular combination of
many different variables, sub-groups, and factors. In these conditions, precise
conventions such as numbering, titles and intratextual referencing became a necessity
to link the text and graphics. The increasing complexity of the graphics themselves and
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the use of statistical measures led to ever-longer explanatory captions. In the early
stages, these conventions appear to have developed in a rather sporadic and
spontaneous fashion, but once they were explicitly codified by academic journals and
professional societies in the second half of the 20th century, they became mandatory
and standardized. All these conventions greatly increased the autonomy of the
graphics from the text: not only could the graphics be easily located, but understanding
their content no longer relied on reading the text. This induces a non-linear reading
strategy, in which the graphics acquire increasing importance as a means of supporting
claims.
6. Coda: the 21st century
42 Discourse genres never cease to evolve in response to their environment, and while it is
doubtless too early to discern what will be the dominant trends in the 21st century, I
would like to conclude by touching on two new developments concerning text-graphics
conventions that have occurred in the paper version of The Lancet since 2000. The first
concerns photos. As pointed out above (Section 3), there was a spectacular rise in the
number of photos in 2005 and 2015, which were also the first sampling years to appear
in color. This increase is found, however, not in the research articles but in the other
parts of the journal such as editorials, comments on current events, or letters. The
photos accompanying these texts are snapshots or news photos that illustrate the topic
of the article: an editorial on Ebola is accompanied by a news photo of African patients
receiving treatment, a comment on the World Health Organization shows a photo of
the debating chamber at the WHO, a letter on osteoporosis shows an elderly person
with a walking frame, etc. What characterizes these photos is that they display none of
the conventions established in the 20th century: no number, title or caption, and no
intratextual reference to the photo. Does this mean that we are witnessing a return to
the absence of conventions that was characteristic of the early 19th century? Quite the
opposite in fact. These photos come from image banks (e.g., Getty Images, Science
Photo Library), their function is purely decorative, and the images they show are often
stereotypes, reflecting perhaps the influence of web-mediated texts on the journal,
where this kind of vignette is very common. It is the absence of all the conventions
examined here that very clearly distinguishes them from the medically informative
photographs in the research articles of the journal. The text-graphics conventions have
become a code that indicates how an image is to be interpreted and what its scientific
value is.
43 The second new feature concerns the compositional layout of the research articles
since 2005. In addition to the running text and the graphics, one now finds shaded
blocks of text, marked off from the rest of the article by their color. Some are called
Panels, others Key Messages, Selection Criteria, or even give verbatim quotes from
interviewees. They are not graphics in the traditional sense, but neither are they part
of the running text and are often written in a telegraphic style, using bullet points.
Only the Panels are numbered and can be referred to by number in the text; the others
have none of the text-graphics conventions. They break the text up into small, easily
digestible chunks and often resemble PowerPoint slides; for the reader, they are the
fast track to certain types of information. Together with the strong autonomy that
graphics have now acquired, this makes the 21st-century article increasingly modular
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and promotes a ‘navigating’ reading strategy. This evolution is, of course, particularly
in evidence in the online version of the journal, which was beyond the scope of the
present study. It will be interesting to follow these developments in the future.
This study is a welcome opportunity to acknowledge the major contribution that David Bankshas made to the analysis of specialized discourse by extending its field of investigation toencompass diachronic studies. My interest in diachrony was sparked off by the ERLA symposium
N°7 that David organized at the University of Brest and subsequently published as Aspects
diachroniques du texte de spécialité (Banks, D. [ed.] 2010). The present study is a modest attempt
to follow David's lead.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ATKINSON, Dwight. 1992. “The evolution of medical research writing from 1735 to 1985: the case of
the Edinburgh Medical Journal.” Applied Linguistics 13/4, 337–374.
BANKS, David. 2008. The Development of Scientific Writing: Linguistic features and historical
context. London: Equinox.
BANKS, David (ed.). 2010. Aspects diachroniques du texte de spécialité. Paris: L'Harmattan.
BAZERMAN, Charles. 1985. “Physicists reading physics: Schema-laden purposes and purpose-laden
schema”. Written Communication 2, 233–242.
BAZERMAN, Charles. 1988. Shaping Written Knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental
article in science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
FLECK, Ludwik. 1979 [1935]. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
GROSS, Alan G., Joseph E. HARMON & Michael REDDY. 2002. Communicating science: The scientific articlefrom the 17th century to the present. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
GROSS, Alan G. & Joseph E HARMON. 2013. Science from Sight to Insight: How scientists illustrate meaning.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
GROSS, Alan G. & Joseph E HARMON. 2016. The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities. New
York: Oxford University Press.
HALLIDAY, Michael A. K. & James R. MARTIN. 1993. Writing Science. London: Routledge.
IVINS, William M. Jr. 1969. Prints and Visual Communication. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Journal Citation Report, Thomson Reuters 2015. <http://thomsonreuters.com/en/products-
services/scholarly-scientific-research/research-management-and-evaluation/journal-citation-
reports.html>.
LEMKE, Jay. 1998. “Multiplying meaning: Visual and verbal semiotics in scientific text.” In MARTIn,
J.s R. & R. VEEL (eds.). Reading Science. London: Routledge, 87‑113.
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PEREZ-LLANTADA, Carmen. 2013. “The Article of the future: Strategies for genre stability and
change.” English for Specific Purposes 32/4, 221–235.
ROWLEY-JOLIVET, Elizabeth. 2010. “The Evolution of medical imagery in the 19th century: The Lancet,1823-1905.” In BANKS, D. (ed.), Aspects diachroniques du texte de spécialité. Paris: L'Harmattan, 53–74.
ROWLEY-JOLIVET, Elizabeth & Shirley CARTER-THOMAS. 2005. “Genre awareness and rhetorical
appropriacy: Manipulation of information structure by NS and NNS scientists in the international
conference setting.” English for Specific Purposes 24/1, 41–64.
SPRIGGE, S. Squire. 1899. The Life and times of Thomas Wakley. New York: Longmans Green & Co.
SWALES, John M. 1990. Genre analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
TAAVITSAINEN, Irma, Turo HILTUNEN, Anu LEHTO, Ville MARTTILA, Päivi PAHTA, Maura RATIA, Carla SUHR
& Jukka TYRKKÖ. 2014. “Late modern English medical texts 1700–1800: A corpus for analysing
eighteenth-century medical English.” ICAME Journal 38/1, 137–153.
NOTES
1. Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in
Medical Journals <http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf>.
2. See <http://www.thelancet.com> for further details.
ABSTRACTS
Present-day medical journal articles contain a large number of typologically varied images and
other non-verbal material (tables, statistics). Strong conventions govern the way this graphical
material is presented: each item is sequentially numbered, has a title and key or labels, and is
linked to the surrounding text by intratextual references. The often lengthy glosses give the
graphics an autonomous status in relation to the text. However, the current multimodality of
medical research articles and their text-graphics conventions are the result of a long and gradual
process; early medical journals contained no tabular data, very few images and an extremely
limited visual typology, while the absence of titles and labels, intratextual references and glosses
meant that only a linear reading strategy was possible. This study traces the gradual emergence
of these conventions since the founding of the British journal The Lancet in 1823 up to the present
day and proposes some explanations for the changes observed.
Les articles de recherche actuels en médecine contiennent un grand nombre d'images de divers
types ainsi que d'autres éléments non verbaux (tableaux, statistiques). La présentation de tous
ces éléments est régie par des conventions fortes : chaque élément est numéroté, comporte un
titre et une légende, et il est relié au texte par des références intratextuelles. Les légendes,
souvent très détaillées, confèrent à ces éléments une grande autonomie par rapport au texte.
Cependant, la multimodalité actuelle des articles de recherche en médecine, et les conventions
qui régissent l'interaction entre texte et éléments non verbaux, résultent d'un long processus :
les premiers articles publiés dans les revues médicales se caractérisent par l'absence de tableaux,
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très peu d'images et une typologie visuelle très restreinte. L'absence de titres, de légendes, et de
références intratextuelles imposaient une stratégie linéaire de lecture. L'objectif de la présente
étude est de retracer l'émergence de ces conventions depuis 1823, date de la parution de la
première revue médicale anglaise, The Lancet, jusqu'à nos jours, et de proposer des explications
pour les évolutions constatées.
INDEX
Mots-clés: anglais médical, article de recherche, diachronie en anglais de spécialité, interaction
texte-image
Keywords: diachronic ESP, medical English, research article, text-graphics interaction
AUTHOR
ELIZABETH ROWLEY-JOLIVET
Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet is a research member of the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique at the
University of Orleans, France. Her research interests cover multimodality in spoken and written
scientific discourse, the epistemology of science, genre analysis of academic discourse, web-
mediated genres, and English as a Lingua Franca in academic settings. She has published in
several international journals, compiled or contributed to several corpora in ESP and ELF, and co-
edited books in these areas. [email protected]
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Specialised aspects of architecturaldiscourse: Metaphors in the Britishmagazine The Architectural ReviewAspects spécialisés du discours architectural : les métaphores dans la revuebritannique The Architectural Review
Claire Kloppmann-Lambert
1. Introduction
1 Little attention has been given to architectural discourse as a specialised variety of
English so far. To the best of our knowledge, only three previous studies have
addressed the language of architecture, either through the lens of terminology (Soneira
2017) or that of metaphors and comparisons (Caballero 2006, 2014; Ubeda Mansilla
2003). The latter have shown that the use of metaphors is quite common in
architectural discourse (“AD” from now on), and that architects and other specialists of
architecture often refer to buildings, to space or to the city by using images derived
from domains as diverse as agriculture, biology, or mechanics for instance.
2 Architectural practice relies on three basic operations: conceptualising new buildings is
one, producing digital, graphic or scale model proposals of projected buildings is
another, and producing oral and written discourse to communicate about their project
is the third (Jeudy 2012). Interestingly, as Caballero (2014: 157) underlines, metaphors
“inform all the stages of designing a building as well as the language used to discuss it
(with clients, colleagues, etc.) before, during and after its construction.”
3 In this study, we focus on the final stage of an architect’s work plan, as defined for
instance by the Royal Institute of British Architects:1 the moment when the building is
in use, following stage 0 (“strategic definition”), stage 1 (“preparation and brief”), stage
2 (“concept design”), stage 3 (“developed design”), stage 4 (“technical design”), stage 5
(“construction”) and stage 6 (“handover and close out”). At this stage, reviews are
produced by architects and architecture specialists to describe and evaluate new
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buildings usually not their own. This study is based on the metaphors found in a
selection of articles written in the last twenty years by architects in The Architectural
Review, a British monthly magazine, which has been acknowledged for the quality of its
architectural reviews since it was launched in 1886.
4 Bernard Secchi claims that “the role of the metaphor, as it is well-known, is just this: to
give a meaning to what we are provisionally unable to understand” (Secchi 2014: 125).
In architectural discourse, both the discipline of architecture and its objects buildings
and cities are difficult to define and open to interpretation: for instance “30 St Mary
axe”, also called “the gherkin” in London, is not truly metaphorical in itself, but
metaphors appear when spectators, users, critics and especially architects and
designers themselves, try to comment on a building’s shape and appearance. Philippe
Boudon describes this as the metaphorical effect of architecture (Boudon 2013: 59).
However, this would be oversimplifying the role of metaphors for the discourse
community of architects: this study aims to show that, beyond the descriptive and
explanatory function of these metaphors, there is a highly persuasive dimension to it,
as they serve the positive and negative criticisms of the reviewer, as they impose a
worldview, but also as they show the reviewer’s compliance with the community’s
genre conventions and his creativity.
5 Here are the few questions this corpus-based study aims to explore: can we formulate a
convincing definition of a “metaphor” that reflects the complexity of metaphors found
in AD? What are the specific characteristics and functions of metaphor (structure,
nature of the images, recurrence, etc.) used by architects in articles from The
Architectural Review over the last twenty years? More importantly, we would like to
extend Caballero’s efforts to contextualise the specific use of metaphors in AD. What do
these metaphors show about the profession of architects? What do they suggest about
their communicational strategies (efficiency, originality, didactics, etc.) in architectural
reviews? To what extent are metaphors linked to their context of production?
2. A definition of metaphors in architectural discourse
6 Applied linguistic theory has undertaken to combine a linguistic, a social and a
cognitive perspective on metaphor (Cameron & Low 1999) and has paved the way for
both discourse analysis and ESP-driven analysis of metaphors in their socio-
professional context. A basic description of metaphor and its constituents can be found
in Cameron & Low (1999: 3): “Metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of
something else (Burke 1945: 503).” This primary description is interesting because it
suggests that a metaphor is both a linguistic tool (“a device”) and an intellectual
process (“seeing”). Our aim is to explore both aspects of metaphors, verbal and
conceptual, and to show that both approaches are legitimate and compatible in a larger
socio-professional perspective: architects share both specific ways of writing and
talking, and ways of seeing the world around them.
7 On a linguistic level, a metaphor is primarily a device that brings together two
constituents: a ‘Topic’ – sometimes called ‘Tenor’– with a ‘Vehicle.’2 For instance,
“London is this collage of places”, a sentence taken from text 11 of our corpus
(indicated by “[xx]” from now on), brings together the Topic “London” and the Vehicle
“collage”. But according to Cameron & Low (1999), the lexical ‘Topic’ and ‘Vehicle’ can
be drawn from any word class (noun, adjective, adverb, verb, participle, etc.) and take
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on several syntactic forms (modifier-head, subject-verb, verb-object, verb phrase, non-
explicit topic, etc.). A more conceptual analysis shows that a metaphor brings together
two domains3 and enables a better understanding of a conceptual domain thanks to the
other. In our example, “London is a collage of places” [11], the target domain of
URBANISM4 and the source domain of ART are brought together in the metaphor. If we
look at what happens in terms of meaning, we can say that a metaphor is a disruption
of isotopy (Ricœur 2004: 217), or semantic coherence (here, a reference to urbanism),
which can be reestablished by the expressive power of an “emergent structure” or
“blended space” (Fauconnier & Turner 1998; Fauconnier & Lakoff 2009), a new meaning
resulting from the interaction of two domains, understood partly in terms of one
another: if A TOWN IS A COLLAGE, then the city is to an architect what a collage is to an
artist, that is a piece of art made up of many different parts and deliberately assembled.
8 Cameron & Low’s analysis is central to understanding how metaphors can be both a
phenomenon of language and a cognitive phenomenon. Let us consider a more complex
example such as: “buildings, each intent on drawing attention to itself” [5]. Here, the
linguistic or “surface” topic and vehicle are (respectively) “buildings” and “intent on
drawing attention to itself”, while the conceptual topic the underlying idea and the
conceptual vehicle the idea of the term under which the topic is understood are
respectively “building” and “person”: the building is seen as a person. When critics
refer to Topic and Vehicle, they sometimes refer to the linguistic device, and
sometimes to the interacting concepts – both phenomena are intrinsically linked.
9 In our example, we could distinguish an explicit Tenor and an explicit Vehicle, but this
is not always the case (Bordas 2003). Metaphors can work as ‘metaphors in praesentia,’when we can find a Topic and a Vehicle, or as ‘metaphors in absentia’, where the Topic is
missing. For instance, in “After a long gestation, the Wilsons are now preparing to build
their library in Milan” [5], the Vehicle term “gestation” stands for the idea of
ARCHITECTURAL CREATION. Shared knowledge between the two speakers and the
context enable to elicit the meaning of the image.
10 To conclude this approach of metaphors, we should attempt to find some conditions
that must be fulfilled to be able to recognise a metaphor in a text – especially because
this corpus-based research project relies on a primary selection of metaphors. Cameron
& Low (1999: 118) selected three fundamental criteria to decide whether an expression
is a metaphor or not:
N1: it contains reference to a Topic domain by a Vehicle Term (or terms) and
N2: there is, potentially, an incongruity between the domain of the Vehicle Term and the
Topic domain and
N3: it is possible for the receiver (in general a particular person), as a member of a particular
discourse community, to find a coherent interpretation which makes sense for the
incongruity in its discourse context, and which involves some transfer of meaning from the
Vehicle domain.
11 In our case, the Topic will be linked to space, buildings, the architectural process, the
discipline, its agents and the city, while the Vehicle will refer to a great variety of
domains.
12 G. Steen (2011: 87) offers a suitable three-dimensional framework to describe
metaphorical expressions used by architects in our corpus of articles:
Linguistic analysis: studying morphological categories, syntax and function of the segment,
degree of lexicalisation
•
•
•
i.
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Conceptual analysis: determining the concepts, the analogy, the kind of metaphorical
process (abstraction, materialisation, animation, personification, etc.)
Communicational analysis: concluding on the degree of creativity of the metaphor, its aims,
its efficiency, etc.
13 This framework will enable us to better ascertain metaphors as a linguistic
phenomenon in our corpus, but also to look further into the reasons for their use by a
particular socio-professional group, the effects and the strategies at stake. Interest in
metaphor as a resource for professional genres is relatively recent in ESP research
(Salager-Meyer 1990; Galonnier 2000; Charteris-Black & Mussolf 2003; Sun & Jiang,
2014); the importance and the functions of metaphors in AD therefore need to be
investigated thoroughly (Ubeda Mansilla 2003).
14 Research on metaphor should also be more concerned with the context in which
metaphors are used. Context can be understood in a narrow sense as the immediate co-
text in discourse or as the situational context, but it can also be understood in a
broader sense, which means that we will have to investigate the function of metaphors
in the specific genre of architectural reviews, but also in the larger social and historical
landscape in which the discourse was produced. As Charles Jencks underlines,
metaphors on a particular building may vary according to the time period of the
discourse, as buildings that were compared to “cheese-grits” in the 1950s could be
perceived as “garages” ten years later (Jencks 1974: 40). Bernardo Secchi analyses some
historical changes that had a profound effect on the type of metaphors used (medicinal
research in the Renaissance period enabled people to conceive the city as a body, the
industrial revolution gave rise to a metaphor of the city as a predictable and “banal
machine”). We would like to focus more specifically on our contemporary period,
which is, according to him, marked by issues of “Environment, mobility, growing social
inequality” but also “growing individualisation of the world”, and “growing confidence
in technical progress” (Secchi 2014).
3. Corpus and method
15 Begoña-Beloso (2015), who also compiled an architectural corpus, insisted on the
importance of considering size, subject, coherence, accessibility and sampling
procedure so as to have a “well-designed” corpus. Our corpus of 35 reviews taken from
The Architectural Review, a journal that architects hold in high regard (Begoña-Beloso
2015: 88), should allow us to conduct targeted analyses on the scale of a review and to
draw larger conclusions on the use of metaphors by architects. We selected a review
whenever it could answer favourably the question: “Is this a building review written in
the last twenty years (1996-2016) by a contemporary architect?” which means that we
had to exclude articles concerned with sociology or geography for instance, as well as
book reviews or exhibition reviews. We also left out reviews written by non-Anglo-
Saxon writers who contributed to the internationally famous journal. We finally
excluded articles from The Architectural Review that had been written by journalists,
historians and writers who had never been trained as architects so as to constitute a
corpus written exclusively by architects which the majority of authors were. Reviews
were selected randomly (cf. Appendix) among the reviews that met these criteria.
16 We worked through the texts of our small-sized corpus manually and systematically
and followed Cameron & Law’s criteria to decide whether an expression was
ii.
iii.
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metaphorical or not. For each metaphor, we decided what the source and the target
domains were. Of course, one concept may fall under several domains (Faber 2012: 86),
which means that some metaphors had to be interpreted thanks to the context. On the
whole, we collected 527 metaphors, of which 501 architectural metaphors (referring to
rooms, buildings, cities, space, architectural process, architectural experience, agents
of architecture) that are included in this study. This number allowed us to conduct both
a qualitative and quantitative approach.
4. Results: linguistic, conceptual andcommunicational description of the metaphors in ourcorpus
4.1. Linguistic analysis
17 Metaphors (Figure 1) were grouped according to the main grammatical category of the
vehicle (noun, verb, adjective, adverb). More than half of them (60.3%) are nominal
metaphors with some of the following patterns: “N: a N” (“the building: a wet
palimpsest” [1]), “N - N” (“it just stands there a white vision” [4]), in appositive
patterns (“the rear part, a concrete shell” [6]), in pre-modification patterns such as
“NN” (“skin panels” [3]), post-modification patterns such as “N of N” (“the meanders of
open-space” [2]), but also in the copular use “A is B” or “A becomes B” pattern (“the
university itself becomes the spectacle” [14]).
18 However, not all metaphors are nominal. Instead, one finds a significant number of
adjectival metaphors (13%) such as “An anonymous door from the pavement” [27], and
verbal metaphors (24%), such as ‘the freestanding tower […] again asserting its
autonomy” [23]. 1% are adverbial metaphors, such as “it just stands there, […]
arrogantly complete” [4]. An additional 2.2% corresponds to mixed metaphors for
which it was impossible to determine a dominant grammatical category, as in “Its [the
building's] fabric, textured by alternate courses of dressed and split stone” [19].
19 Metaphors are rarely isolated features. They are often extended to the whole sentence:
the title “the jam in the donut” [2] refers to the qualities that make a building
attractive, original, shiny but also functional. According to the author, the architect
therefore desires to “create a public jam” [2], in a “well-baked architecture” [2] and not
a “lean donut” [2]. The lexical field of food is developed through various adjectives,
nouns and verbs.
20 We are already integrating conceptual elements into our lexical analysis. This suggests
how inseparable these are.
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Figure 1: Distribution of different types of metaphors
4.2. Conceptual analysis
4.2.1. Distinguishing between metaphors in praesentia and metaphors in absentia
21 Among the 501 metaphors in our corpus, there are 393 metaphors in absentia (78.44%),
and only 108 metaphors in praesentia (21.56%), which means that most of the time, the
reader has to infer the second underlying concept. It suggests that these analogies are
presented as non-problematic for the reader, which is coherent with the fact that the
magazine targets a readership of experts and architects.5
4.2.2. Target domains of architectural metaphors
22 In our corpus, we can distinguish a few global categories of tenors (in capitals) that are
usually associated with a vehicle in AD (Figure 2). BUILDING MATERIAL, BUILDING or
PART OF A BUILDING, CITY or PART OF A CITY, LANDSCAPE, SPACE, ARCHITECTURAL
PRACTICE (realisation of the project), ARCHITECTURAL EXPERIENCE (experience of
discovering the project), AGENT (architect, visitor), ARCHITECTURE, OTHER (colour,
furniture, etc.) are the ten categories into which we can classify our topics (be they
explicit or implicit). Interestingly, more than 70% of metaphors are product-focused
and refer to the material on which architects work (be it SPACE, LANDSCAPE, BUILDING
or PART OF A BUILDING, CITY or PART OF A CITY), while the rest is rather process-
focused, with about 18% of metaphors used to describe their own domain and around
10% used to describe agents and their activity (be it creating architecture or
experiencing architecture).
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Figure 2: Distribution of target domains
23 This result suggests that authors are trying to describe, define or redefine the
discipline of architecture and its objects buildings and cities and to suggest or impose
a worldview of what they are or what they could be.
4.2.3. Source domains of these metaphors
24 Source domains (F(Figure 3) fall into a few major categories: LIVING BEINGS (44%),
OBJECTS AND MATERIALS (20%), ARTS AND LANGUAGE (19%),6 SCIENCE AND
TECHNIQUES (11%) and ENVIRONMENT (6%).
Figure 3: Distribution of source domains
4.2.3.1. Living beings metaphors
25 Living beings metaphors are predominant (Figure 4), with a great number of metaphors
referring to human features (33%), anatomy (27%), animals (13%) and movement in
general (17%), which means that metaphors are widely used to describe buildings and
cities as living beings. This is consistent with the results of Paloma Ubeda Mansilla’s
questionnaire, completed by 62 architects, which showed that architects considered
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and described the city predominantly as body or as an animal, and the city as a living
organism or a tree. In other words, BUILDING IS LIFE, and CITY IS LIFE (Ubeda Mansilla
2003: 42).
Figure 4: Distribution of living beings metaphors
26 The majority of these metaphors refers to human features such as behaviour (marry,
waiting, hugging, breathes) or character (playful, bawdy, generous, severe,
mischievous, smart, mute, sensuous). Interestingly, many images underline the striking
presence or discrete presence of a building (extrovert, at ease, arrogant, or on the
contrary half-hearted, self-effacing, reticent…). When for instance a building is
described as “architecture at ease with the majestic presence of surrounding mature
trees” [19] the building’s presence in its environment is understood in terms of social
interaction: contrary to being “arrogant” or “reticent”, being “at ease” is a valued
social quality in Western countries. Implicitly, the building’s architecture is thereby
presented as legitimate and suitable. Personification can go as far as to lend intentions
to buildings and cities (“drawing attention to itself”, “the place wants to be”, “knows
how to get down its basic strategy”), identity (“asserting its autonomy”, “right to be
here”, “justify their existence”, “asserting itself as”), relationships (“mother”,
“affiliation”) and even consciousness/unconsciousness (“make conscious”, “town on
the couch”). Text [12] for instance depicts urban planning as the psychoanalysis of the
“town on the couch” and an attempt to reveal and sublime its unconscious desires
(“what the place wants to be”). Anthropomorphism in AD has a long history. “The
metaphor of the living being is one of the oldest and most persistent in architectural
discourse”, according to Caroline Von Eck (in Gerber & Patterson 2013: 133). Indeed,
through personification, architectural projects acquire significance, and architecture as
such becomes a discipline of self-expression which, if successful, can produce works of
art that have a life of their own. We will analyse the strategic functions of metaphors of
cities and buildings as living beings further on.
27 While most metaphors refer to the human being, other metaphors associate buildings
or cities with plants or animals. These primary metaphors associating things with
living beings seem quite intuitive and can become more elaborate: if a building or city
is considered as a living entity (animal, vegetal or human), then a part of it can be
described in terms of animal parts (feathers, wings, carcass, shell, vital component),
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vegetal components (root, seed, petal) or human anatomy (hips, belly, elbow, head,
spine, hands, skeleton, nervous system, body, etc.). A few traditional images of heart,
skin and face can be characterised more precisely (serene or beating heart, outer skin,
external skin, inner skin, translucent skin, thin skin, fair-faced). As Caballero indicates,
anatomical metaphors have an explanatory function by highlighting how the subparts
relate to a whole (Caballero 2006: 17).7 Text [22] for instance depicts the IPad-run
digital system of the “smart app-artment” as its “nervous system”, underlying its
central role in connecting the different parts of the apartment. Furthermore, the
notion of interface and “skin” seems to play a major role in AD.
28 We should not forget that some living beings metaphors aim to describe people
positively, valorising architects or people experiencing architecture (collagist,
traveller) or negatively, dehumanising other agents such as architects, politicians or
critics (fish, fledgling, hawks). These metaphors are clear markers of evaluation.
4.2.3.2. Objects and materials metaphors
29 These metaphors associate two physical entities: a city or building with 11% of objects
(such as pepper-pot, lantern, mattress, bottle or umbrella), 19% of objects referred to
for their function (string, rollercoaster or knot), 18% of containers (box, pocket, vessel),
19% of food (fish and chips, nougat, sweet reward) or 20% of liquid (fluid, liquid, wells,
sources, flowing, meanders…), but also occasionally with time, wind, air, fire or
jewellery (Figure 5).
30 This is an extraordinarily diverse category or metaphors that can be used for their
visual characteristics (if a building is “geological nougat”, it has whitish walls with
integrated brown stones) as well as for their structural characteristics (if a building as
“a palimpsest”, then its façade certainly changes through time). They are for the most
part original and unexpected and seem to have both explanatory and entertaining
purposes. To describe a striped lighthouse as a “striped pepper-pot” for instance is a
daring visual analogy that strikes and makes the reading more pleasant.
Figure 5: Distribution of objects and materials metaphors
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4.2.3.3. Arts and language metaphors
31 These are more abstract metaphors. They are also commonly used in AD. Here, images
are rather diverse, referring to domains such as language (27%), narration (15%), visual
art (12%), leisure (10%) but also music, sound, poetry, theatre, dance, pedagogy or 2D
representation (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Distribution of arts and language metaphors
32 In order to refer to city, buildings and architecture in general, architects borrow
images from the visual arts (collage, assemblage, palette, sculptural, sharply
chiselled…), or from the domains of music and sound, which is more surprising since it
is intangible (dissonance, discordant note, rhythmic, loud, deafening, subtle tune,
orchestrated). However, the overwhelming majority of metaphors are highly
conceptual metaphors: ARCHITECTURE IS LANGUAGE. These expressions suggest that
architects express themselves through buildings as they would through language
(highly poetic language, complex and contradictory languages, explore language,
reassess language), that they think of building elements as words (minimalist
vocabulary, self-conscious vocabulary, rigorous but refined vocabulary), and that the
building itself becomes an autonomous language (sequential composition, dialogue,
conversation, quotations, re-quotation) that can be characterised by linguistic features
(punctuation, paratactic logic, tone, rhetoric, understatement, eloquently). This gives
rise to more complex metaphors such as ARCHITECTURE IS POETRY (an ode to, a-b-a-b-
a structural rhythm, a poetic essay), ARCHITECTURE IS THEATRE (scene, scene-setting,
theatre, theatrically, performer, drama, dramatic) or even ARCHITECTURE IS A STORY
(narrative, mythical narrative, reading, legible, drama of the development, unfold
cinematically, leading protagonist). Describing a building in terms of language is akin
to stressing its structural coherence. It also indicates that a building is the expressive
result of an architect’s intentions. It finally suggests that the architect who writes the
review is able to decode or decipher intentions underpinning an architectural project
and which can in some cases be quite hard to understand. For instance, in the lead of a
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text [24], the author declares that the building’s “sobriety is also undercut by a more
complex and contradictory language”, which makes the following explanations all the
more necessary. These metaphors therefore seem to have both explanatory purposes
and to emphasise the authority of the author.
4.2.3.4. Science and techniques metaphors
33 Science and techniques metaphors seem to be secondary in terms of frequency.
However, the image of TEXTILE seems central in AD (59% of all science and techniques
metaphors), probably because, like architecture, it is a technique of assemblage that
creates continuity or discontinuity between parts (as in “its base intricately woven into
the brick” [7]). There are other interesting isolated examples of images that must have
appeared in the past few decades: they rely on contemporary disciplines such as
ELECTRONICS (circuit of connection), COMPUTER SCIENCES (datum, pop-up) and
TECHNOLOGY (pixelated surface, network). This clearly indicates that some AD
metaphors are the product of our time and of the digital revolution. Language is
informed by the way we conceive the world, and this in turn is linked to major
technical innovations.
Figure 7: Distribution of science and techniques metaphors
4.2.3.5. Environment metaphors
34 Environment metaphors are less numerous, and might refer to geology (29%),
agriculture (15%), landscape (15%), astronomy (11%) and travel (11%) as well as
building, city, world, and geopolitics (Figure 8).
35 Geology metaphors (epicentre, geological formation, crater, crust, erosion, chains,
tectonic, glacial), astronomy (crescent, satellite, radiates the energy) and landscape
metaphors (meandering paths, crevices labyrinths) associate the man-built building
with natural features of our planet, while agriculture (cultivating, fertile, sterile, field)
or building metaphors (inner sanctum, pantheon)8 associate two man-conceived
entities. These metaphors seem mainly visual, with geological formations and
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architecture sharing their structure of stone for instance, and very secondary to living,
arts and science metaphors.
36 Caballero (2006: 16) did not allocate her results to broad categories such as these, but
chose to highlight significant images in AD. She underlined the predominance of
organic, motion, textile, malleability and language metaphors among others.
Metaphors referring to life, movement, textile and language clearly stand out as
important target domains in our corpus as well. However, this alternative classification
in domains allows us to describe the great diversity of metaphors that may be used.
Figure 8: Distribution of environment metaphors
4.3. Communicational analysis
4.3.1. Metaphors, a special feature of the discourse community of architects
37 We have seen that the architectural reviews under study share common characteristics,
in particular the extensive use of metaphors. We will now analyse these linguistic
features in the light of the broader context.
38 Architects are part of a discourse community that shares ways of communicating and
ways of conceiving the world around them. According to B. Paltridge (2006: 24), a
“discourse community” is:
a group of people who share some kind of activity such as members of a club orassociation who have regular meetings, or a group of students who go to class at thesame university. Members of a discourse community have particular ways ofcommunicating with each other. They generally have shared goals and may haveshared values and beliefs. A person is often member of more than one discoursecommunity.
39 Architects and more specifically architects who have turned to writing building reviews
probably represent a real “discourse community” because they share the same kind of
activity they have embraced the roles of the architectus ingenio (who designs the
building) and architectus verborus (who speaks about architecture)9 as well as ways of
communicating (pictures, plans, verbal descriptions of architectural projects) when
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they describe and review buildings. Metaphors are a typical pattern in architectural
reviews, and can therefore be considered as an important discursive competence for
them to acquire during their period of study and training (Caballero 2014: 155). They
also show that architects and architecture specialists share ways to manipulate
language, and ways to conceive the world around them (Caballero 2006), i.e. schemata
(such as ARCHITECTURE IS A LIVING BEING). They also seem to share an aptitude to see
“things in terms of something else” more freely than other professional groups and to
use an interesting range of new creative metaphors.
4.3.2. What do metaphors reveal about architects’ strategies?
40 Architects share purposes as well: metaphors may reflect their desire to communicate
efficiently with the reader, to show and explain, to express power and identity.
4.3.2.1. Didactic purposes
41 The first main purpose of metaphors in reviews is to describe and explain projects to
the reader, suggesting what a building looks like, how it works and what the architect’s
intentions might have been. Pictures and sketches certainly play a central role in
building reviews, but metaphors are useful especially when “the images are not self-
explicit and lack illocutionary force” (Caballero 2006: 15):
The association between words and pictures characterizing architectural discoursein general has been explained both as a means of facilitating communicationbetween architects and lay people, and as a way of compensating for pragmaticweakness of graphic representation. (idem).
42 The pedagogical contribution of metaphors can be described with a few parameters
expressed in terms of cline rather than in absolute terms, following Caballero’s advice:
Representationality: capacity to activate representational, graphic information.
Structuring potential: capacity to project a part or a complete structure from source onto
target.
Animation potential: capacity to bring life or movement to the target.10
43 The first two parameters were suggested by Caballero (2006: 82), and the third added to
offer a complete picture of the metaphors under study. Amongst our 501 metaphors,
around 60% have a representational quality, activating information on the shape or
general appearance of something: for instance, one is able to infer what a “thistle
lamp” [13] looks like without knowing what it is. In our corpus of metaphors, 73% can
be considered to have a structuring potential: a metaphor like “at the heart of the plan”
[15] maps several characteristics of the heart (centrality, importance and relationship
of part to whole) onto the room. Further, 31% have an animation potential, suggesting
life and motion, such as “the building […] peels back” [7]. Most of our metaphors have
several characteristics as indicated below (Table 1).
Table 1: Examples of metaphors and their structuring, representational and animation potential
Structuring potential Representational potential Animation potential
Pure “Conceptual Metaphors” :
Ex. At the heart of
i.
ii.
iii.
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Pure “Image Metaphors”:
Ex. Crescent window
Mixed Conceptual and Image Metaphors:
Ex. Labyrinth, grid, pixelated, network, collage
Motion metaphors:
Ex. Lifting, peels back
Living Beings metaphors:
Ex. Snaking, gaucheness, austere, sensuous
Complex metaphors:
Ex. Light sources, light pours, light is funneled
4.3.2.2. Creative purposes
44 Paul Ricœur’s distinction between “living metaphors” and “dead metaphors” suggests
that the researcher can rate the expressive potential of metaphors. In linguistic terms,
living metaphors are more prone to disrupt semantic fields than dead metaphors
(Jeudy 2012), although in some cases dead metaphors, or rather “dormant metaphors”
(Black 1977: 439) might be revived, giving birth to a new conceptual network. In
cognitive terms (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), metaphors can be either literal metaphors,
that is “literal expressions structured by metaphorical concepts” (that correspond to
the normal way of thinking about things11), imaginative (that derive from a standing,
constitutive metaphor), or new imaginative metaphors (that create new meanings
outside our usual conceptual system). By applying these criteria to our corpus, we
obtain the following results (Figure 8).
Figure 9: Conventionality of architectural metaphors
45 Literal metaphors (19%) are so familiar that we hardly notice them: THE CENTRE IS THE
HEART for instance (“at the heart of the plan”, “the heart of the museum”), or TO
SUCCEED IS TO BEAR FRUIT (“the architectural delights of the Münster library can bear
further fruit”). Other words have become part of our everyday vocabulary (to be clad
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in, to be naked, to be embedded in) or of architectural lexis (skin, skeletal frame,
cladding, light wells, crescent window, the wing of a building, a steel ring, a satellite
town). A “skin” for instance refers to “a non-load-bearing exterior wall; often
composed of prefabricated panels” and, similarly, “a skeleton frame” refers to
something very technical – “any framework without its covering panels” (Harris 2006).
They have lost their figurative potential in AD.
46 Imaginative metaphors represent a large majority of the metaphors of our corpus
(59%). It clearly indicates that architectural metaphors rely on basic constitutive
metaphors such as SPACE IS TIME, A BUILDING IS A LIVING BEING, A BUILDING IS A
BODY, A BUILDING IS A TEXTILE, A BUILDING IS A CONTAINER or A BUILDING IS
LANGUAGE and that they are widely shared by architects. Architects can then elaborate
on these shared schemata, “this framework on which [architects] can lay information”
(Walmsley & Lewis 1993: 98 quoted in Ubeda Mansilla 2003: 35) which “define the way
they refer to a building”. Metaphors such as “cellular offices”, “chaotic and fragile
exoskeleton”, “narrow gutted offices”, “theatre of architecture” or “half-hearted
architecture” stand out in the reviews under study as being imaginative, but they rely
on constitutive metaphors that have become conventional and accepted among experts
(Ungerer & Schmid 1996: 149, quoted in Ubeda Mansilla, 2003: 39). As Ubeda Mansilla
points out, they are not used for explanatory purposes, but it is rather part of the way
of communicating about buildings, towns and architecture. They are “theory-
constitutive metaphors” (Boyd 1979) that point back to theoretical conceptions of
architecture (biomorphism, high-tech or metabolism movements for example) without
explicitly referring to any theoretical foundation because they have become a
traditional way of seeing things in the discourse community.
47 New imaginative metaphors represent 23% of our metaphors. Nearly a third of the
metaphors of our corpus are creations that are outside the frames of constitutive
metaphors. This suggests that authors wish to offer a personal interpretation of the
building. “Wet palimpsest”, “giant eggs”, “exploding bombs”, “giant mattress”,
“doghouses”, “pods”, “spouting ample landings”, “fish and chips”, “giant upward
wave”, “geological nougat” and all the other metaphors of this category are surprising
and entertaining, and wouldn’t be expected in a review or architecture at first sight.
48 Metaphors found in AD are part of the creative process that gives shape to a building.
Being an architect is to imagine or restructure shapes, ideas, semantic fields with new
associations (Jeudy 2012). Paul Ricœur (1994: 122) underlines how imagination is the
ability to create a semantic collision:
Imagination is apperception, the sudden view, of a new predicative pertinence. […]Imagining is first and foremost restructuring semantic fields. It is to useWittgenstein’s expression in the Philosophical Investigation, “seeing as…”.
49 This definition of imagination as the creation of a new semantic reality corresponds
quite well to the creative effort of the architect, who works with shapes, ideas as well as
words.
50 While the Cognitive Metaphor Theory has tried to show that metaphors may be shared
by people of a same culture or discourse community, it may have overlooked processes
of metaphoric creation. The reader is likely never to have heard innovative metaphors
such as “a perfunctory smudge” [6], a “geological nougat” [10] or “wet palimpsest”
building [1] before. These concepts have been thought of as characterising rather
complex building designs (Wee 2005: 366) but have no equivalent in the real world.
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Lionel Wee indicates that an incongruous scenario of octopi squeezing one another has
been used to explain a rather technical phenomenon of neural network computation.
In that case, the source is created for the purpose of explaining its target. The
expression “wet palimpsest” [1] has been used quite exclusively to describe the Giant
Interactive Group Headquarters in Shanghai, which, according to its author,
exemplifies the “architecture-segueing-into-landscape phenomenon that has been an
undercurrent in later 20th-century architecture” [1]. Metaphors, like buildings, may be
new made-to-measure linguistic creations meant to suit new ideas and invite
discussions.
51 Metaphors also mimic, on a linguistic level, how the architect is playing with shapes on
a formal level, therefore highlighting the artistic dimension of architecture. Indeed,
some passages of our reviews are almost lyrical and clearly participate in the myth of
architectural genius and creation. An example can be found in the explicit praise of the
revolutionary extension building to the Tel Aviv museum. Metaphors here celebrate
the power of true architecture:
We should not express surprise, but use such architects’ architecture (for whichthere is certainly a cultural and creative role) to attack our predilections, refreshour palates, encourage us to tackle geometries in a creative, rather than proceduralway and generally look at methods by which the occurrence of light, shade,direction and expectancy can be given flesh. [3]
52 Other reviews are keen on giving an account of space, time and light, on suggesting
atmospheres and sensations. The author here recreates his first encounter with the
building, which gives rise to quite a poetic depiction:
On a cloudy day, the building takes on the leaden hue of the sky, but with even a rayof sunshine, the glass and aluminium skin becomes an active surface of muted light.By night, the reticent character of the building is transformed. Lighted from within,the museum becomes a lantern – a glowing collage of shades of white created by themany combinations of clear and translucent glass – that promises to be particularlymysterious in the winter snow and fog. [12]
4.3.2.3. Expression of identity and power
53 The use of metaphors indicates a sense of belonging in the architectural discourse
community and a command of its linguistic codes, as some elaborate metaphors suggest
(“We could say that competitions are to everyday architecture what competitive sport
is to everyday fitness training” [31]). Some remarks made by Charteris-Black (2004)
quoted in Müssolf & Zinken (2009: 100) on political discourse may to some extent be
applied to AD, as metaphors can be a powerful way to “sound right” (make humour,
explain, suggest) and persuade. Some architectural metaphors are really humorous or
absurd (“The town on the couch” [11], “This (the building) was a Christmas stocking”
[30], “artificial grass turns parts of the landscape into giant mattresses” [14]), some are
rather dramatic (“movement through the building becomes an introverted journey”
[12], “the home as a vessel for collecting memories”[22]), and others express judgement
and evaluation (“well-baked architecture”[4]).
54 Metaphors are often seen as a way to communicate ideology and a sense of truth. They
are not right or wrong as such, but they can adequately fit one’s experience of a
building and as a consequence “acquire the status of a truth” and “have a feedback
effect” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 142) on the way people conceive and design new
buildings. By commenting on the innovative character of a building (A BUILDING IS A
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PEPPER-POT), by choosing the language of traditional architecture (TREE, BODY…) or
modern architecture (MOTION, ORGANISM, TECHNOLOGY…), metaphors are able to
convey larger conceptions of what architecture should be like and act like prescriptive
statements.
4.3.3. What do metaphors indicate about the specific genre of architectural
reviews?
55 “The building review,” as it is depicted by Caballero, is a genre as such that has the
following characteristics:
Its objective is to describe and evaluate the work of an architect;
It is highly structured, with an introduction, a description and a closing evaluation, each of
these steps having particular functions;
It contains both text and images;
It has a professional status. Personal implication is rather scarce;
It is aimed both at other architects as well as non-specialists interested in architecture.
56 Caballero (2006) shows that architectural reviews are different from other genres that
are rather text-centred: they are a subtle balance between text and images (sketches,
drawings, models, pictures…), that should be able to fulfil two main objectives – explain
how the building works, on the one hand, and on the other hand, present what the
building looks like. Readers have to be ready to go back and forth from text to image,
and to read both the “scientific” and the “naturalistic mode” of the review. Both
Ricalens-Pourchot (2010) and Roldán, Santiago & Ubeda Mansilla (2011) underline the
very special status of figurative language in reviews, where visuals already play an
important role.
57 Review number [7] can be used to show the uses of metaphors according to their
position in the text (Caballero 2006: 54). Metaphors are used to introduce the building
and give a first evaluation of it in the introduction (“A dark brick box perforated by
cool, pale light forms an austere yet serenely numinous setting for Lutheran worship in
a suburb of Stockholm”), to enrich the more technical description of the building, its
general structure (“The massing is blocky and severe, the volume clad in stark brown
brick and capped in a layer of concrete, which also forms the head of the huge
windows”), its materials (“However, the stone font is also embedded into the floor, its
base intricately woven into the brick in a complex tessellation”) or some parts or
components (“the principal liturgical elements stay rooted in its physical fabric as
reminders of the purpose of the building”) in the body of the text. Finally, they are used
in the closing evaluation (“The church both enriches and is enriched by a Swedish
tradition of an austere, ineffably elegant architecture of contemplation and a blending
of the humane and the existentially harsh. It comes as no surprise to learn that Celsing
is currently working on the Woodland Cemetery, where Asplund and Lewerentz created
the tradition in which he is so eloquently operating”). This text relies on the central
metaphors A BUILDING IS A BOX, A BUILDING IS A TEXTILE and the metonymy A
CHURCH IS A TABERNACLE, which highlight structural and visual aspects of the
building, along with the pictures.
•
•
•
•
•
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42
4.3.4. To what extent do metaphors reflect current trends in architecture?
58 Significant trends in the use of metaphors are linked to the way architects conceive a
building and architecture, and we would like to focus on three major tendencies of
contemporary AD.
59 First, metaphors implicitly convey an idea of what architecture is, or should be. They
have been used for two opposite objectives in AD in the past: to emphasise the scientific
side of the discipline, so that it may be considered as a precise, exact and respectable
knowledge, or on the contrary, to emphasise the artistic side of the discipline in order
to stress the role of genius and personal expression (Hale 2000). The results derived
from our corpus clearly indicate that the current trend is to present architecture as a
discipline of the liberal arts, where personal talent may create wonders with volume,
light and colour. The ratio of metaphors presenting architecture as art to those
presenting architecture as engineering is approximately 2 to 1: metaphors such as A
BUILDING IS ART or A BUILDING IS LANGUAGE that have been used, according to
Caballero (2006), since the 17th and 18 th century to reveal the beauty of architecture
rather than its techniques are more numerous than TECHNOLOGICAL metaphors. The
metaphor A BUILDING IS A MACHINE, mentioned by Caballero as a constitutive but
rarefying image of AD is fully absent from my corpus, which suggests that we have
moved away from the conception of architecture as the symbol of the machine-age,
that goes back to the British high-tech tradition for instance, to the Japanese
Metabolist group and to antecedents in New Brutalism for instance (Hale 2000: 15).
Even the metaphor A BUILDING IS A TEXTILE, that we have classified among technical
metaphors is usually presented as craftsmanship rather than mechanised production
(seam, seamless, enmeshed in, sewn, textured, dressed, draped over, fashioning, knit,
intrinsically woven into…). Apart from a few interesting examples of technological
metaphors (circuit of connection, datum, pop-up, pixelated surface, network), the
majority of reviewers have a rather romanticised view of architecture and the
architect’s role: this is clear in expressions such as “Bocconi is a deft choreography of
formal, material and even constructional contradictions” [10], or “The new museum is
as much mythical narrative as national monument” [12]. This is in tune with trends in
current architecture and the reaction against explicit functionalism “for the right of
expression above pure function” (Drew 1972: 32). Postmodernism and Robert Venturi’s
writings have marked the end of modernism’s motto “form follows function” and
reintroduced an emphasis on form, expression and symbolism in architecture.
Metaphors are linked to a very ideological conception of what the discipline of
architecture is or should be nowadays, which suggests that they have a clear
argumentative function.
60 This leads us to the second major discovery in our corpus that might be explained by
contextual knowledge: motion is omnipresent in AD. “Flowing openness” [15] and
“space flowing into the next” [17] have become usual ways for us to refer to space, if
the building is not personified: “buildings, each intent on drawing attention to itself”
[6]. According to Caballero, in the article “Form is motion. Dynamic predicates in
English architectural discourse” (Caballero 2009), it reflects a trend towards adopting
anthropomorphic views of buildings and towards understanding space according to our
movement through it. But more importantly, contemporary architecture seems very
keen on exploring this fragmentation of the building into dynamic shapes – Caballero
mentions the works of Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid – which might explain why
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metaphors expressing motion have been such an important feature of AD in the past
twenty years.
61 A last element which is worth commenting on is the new uses of the BODY METAPHOR
in our corpus. Certainly, the “body-image schema” is a typical human way to think
about the world around us (Pallasmaa 2005), but it also reflects characteristic trends in
current architecture. Architecture has been concerned with the body in diverse ways:
the visual analogy between the proportions of man and that of a building, as was
advocated by Le Corbusier in the golden days of modernism,12 has been replaced, in
more recent years, by a conception of the building as body, as a sensitive, even sensual
whole. This is the program of architects like Juhani Pallasmaa (2005: 39) who “proclaim
a sensory architecture in opposition to the prevailing visual understanding of the art of
building.” The idea that architecture is linked to the senses is becoming all the more
true today as digital techniques enable architects to build sound, light or warmth
sensitive architecture.13 The metaphor of skin, which connotes nearness, intimacy and
affection, is also omnipresent in our corpus (“The design of this skin is so complex” [2],
“the glass and aluminium skin becomes an active surface” [12], “The skin also absorbs
and diffuses the sky's light”[15]). The concept was linked with transparency, for
buildings of the modernist period. It continued to pervade AD during post-modernism,
but was at that time linked to new concepts of meaning, sign and narration. Today, the
notion of skin has pervaded very different domains (media theory, cultural studies,
biology, design, and philosophy). We now associate this concept with other senses than
just vision: touch, smell and taste, for instance, which enriches the metaphor with new
concepts of sensuous experience, according to Susanne Hauser (Gerber & Patterson
2013).
62 On the whole, language seems to adapt to modern conceptions of architecture, as an art
of self-expression that creates independent works of art, sensitive to their environment
and suggesting motion. Moreover, metaphors such as “pixelated surface” [8] or “pop-
up houses” [21] are unimaginable in reviews that are several decades old but are
present in our corpus. The latter refers to the evanescent, easy and quick appearance
and disappearance of the pop-up window to describe a short-lived ephemeral building
“here today and gone tomorrow” as the author puts it. We may formulate the
hypothesis that in the coming years, metaphors referring to the digital world are going
to appear in greater number, because we will start to conceive objects in terms of new
technologies and because buildings will suggest or explore the potentials of technology
in architecture, as on the WGBH headquarters in Brighton, Massachusetts, which
displays “digital skins”. In short, metaphors respond to new trends and they also
inform our conception of what contemporary architecture should be like.
5. Conclusion and perspectives
63 Among the innumerable approaches to metaphor, such as linguistics, psychology,
literary scholarship, critical theory, discourse analysis, social theory, anthropology,
historical study, neuroscience, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy (Stockwell 2010: 169, in
Burke 2014), we believe that ESP can successfully adopt a multidisciplinary approach of
metaphors as a textual, cognitive and communicative reality it their socio-cultural
context.
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44
64 It appears that the use of metaphors is central in architectural discourse and that
architects use a great variety of linguistic resources (verbal, adjectival and adverbial
metaphors alongside the traditional nominal metaphors) as well as more or less
expected conceptual mappings across domains. Typical architectural metaphors
include references to TEXTILE, LANGUAGE, MOVEMENT or LIFE, but other domains may
be referred to for their visual, structural or animation potentials. In architectural
reviews, cities and buildings may be referred to in a traditional way, with literal or
conventional metaphors that are part of architect’s shared schemata (“architectural
language” [7]), with imaginative metaphors that develop these primary metaphors
(“the tower […] lifted into conversation with the wider city” [29]) but also with new
imaginative metaphors that do not fit in pre-established schemata and are created ad
hoc (“This [building] was a Christmas stocking” [30]) This keen interest in creative,
poetic or entertaining metaphors goes alongside a desire to bring up an image, explain
and trigger further thoughts, imagination and discourse. It also expresses their
membership in the architectural community and their authority to describe and
evaluate the building in their own terms.
65 The characteristics of metaphors in our corpus have to be understood as an integral
part of the architectural review genre, whose images and text aim to describe and
evaluate buildings. Metaphors also have to be clearly situated in a socio-professional
perspective, as the markers of a discourse community of architects who share activities
(writing reviews), expertise (architectural creation) and purposes (show and explain) as
well as ways to express themselves and ways to see the world. Thirdly, many of these
metaphors reflect trends and interests in contemporary architecture and
contemporary thought – motion, new technologies, but also sensory experience and
self-expression – which clearly indicates that language and images change.
66 Our objective here was modest: to show the central role and the specific characteristics
of metaphors in AD based on a medium-sized corpus and to highlight contextual
elements. A computer-assisted treatment of a large-scale corpus based on samples from
different genres would enable us to draw statistical conclusions from the frequency of
metaphors in architectural reviews compared to other genres, such as research articles
in architecture, contracts, essays or commentaries of buildings by their architects, and
compared to everyday language. Another challenge would be to undertake a diachronic
study of metaphors in a specific genre and to demonstrate how very much metaphors
are related to specific periods of history and to the type of building which is described.
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APPENDIXES
Corpus of articles selected from The Architectural Review, 1996-2015
1. Giant campus. Lyall, Sutherland. May2011, Vol. 229 Issue 1371, pp.38–45, 8pp.
2. The jam in the donut. Betsky, Aaron. Jun2013 Supplement, pp.10–15, 6pp.
3. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art delightfully ruffles a few feathers. Cook, Peter. Sep2012,
Vol. 232 Issue 1387, pp.23–23, 1p.
4. Peak flow. Cook Peter. Jan2014, Vol. 235 Issue 1403, pp. 23-37, 14pp.
5. Munster library gives cause for great hopes for Bolles-Wilson's Milan project. Cook,
Peter. Jul2008, Vol. 224, pp.32–32, 1p.
6. Geological formation. Brittain-Catlin, Timothy. May2000, Vol. 207 Issue 1239, pp.
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50-53, 4pp.
7. Nordic light. Heathcote, Edwin, Jan2012, Vol. 231 Issue 1379, pp.26–34, 9pp.
8. Church of Sky. Slessor, Catherine. Feb2010, Vol. 227, pp.74–77, 4pp.
9. Santa Marta Lighthouse Museum. Slessor, Catherine. Mar2010, Vol. 227, pp.70–75,
6pp.
10. Ground and Sky. Slessor, Catherine., Mar2009, Vol. 225, pp.36–43, 8pp.
11. London Calling. Farrell, Terry, Sep2007, Vol. 222, pp.44–47, 4pp.
12. Iconic Kiasma. Lecuyer, Annette., Aug1998, Vol. 204 Issue 1218, pp.46–53, 8pp.
13. Cranbrook continuum. Lecuyer, Annette, Nov1997, Vol. 202, pp.76–81, 6pp.
14. Sextet in the city. Skene Catling, Charlotte. Architectural Review, May2014, Vol. 235
Issue 1407, pp.51–54, 4pp.
15. Light Reid. Weston, Richard. Apr2014, Vol. 235 Issue 1406, pp.56–71, 16pp.
16. Reference library. Prizeman, Oriel, Mar2012, Vol. 231 Issue 1381, pp.26–35, 10pp.
17. Literary Giant. Prizeman, Oriel. Nov2013, Vol. 234 Issue 1401, pp.54–65, 12pp.
18. I'll take the high road. Brearley, Mark. Mar2015, Vol. 237 Issue 1417, pp.20–21, 2pp.
19. Arc of light. Salter, Peter. Apr2013, Vol. 233 Issue 1394, pp.32–45, 14pp.
20. Palladio in the antipodes. Spence, Rory. Feb2000, Vol. 207 Issue 1236, pp.82–85, 4pp.
21. Tokyo Do-mino. Soane, James. Mar2013, Vol. 233 Issue 1393, pp.44–49, 6pp.
22. The future house is here. Teatum, Tom. Sep2013, Vol. 234 Issue 1399, pp.17–18, 2pp.
23. Brick and Mix. Woodman, Ellis. Sep2015, Vol. 238 Issue 1423, pp.87–93, 7pp.
24. Five Fold. Woodman, Ellis. Oct2014, Vol. 236 Issue 1412, pp.84–93, 10pp.
25. The key to the city. Buchanan, Peter. Jan1996, Vol. 199, pp.50–57, 8pp.
26. House of Retreat. Buchanan, Peter., Mar2006, Vol. 219, pp.68–73, 6pp.
27. Subterranean sushi. Wislocki, Peter. Sep1996, Vol. 199, pp.84–85, 2pp.
28. Home from home. Wislocki, Peter,. Jun1997, Vol. 201, pp.58–61, 4pp.
29. Sean O'Casey Community Centre. Rattenbury, Kester. Jun2009, Vol. 225, pp.62–69,
8pp.
30. Pattern Language. Rattenbury, Kester. Mar2014, Vol. 235 Issue 1405, pp.49–59, 10pp.
31. Creative leaps in the arena of architectural competitions. Moussavi, Farshid.
Feb2013, Vol. 233 Issue 1392, pp.27–27, 3/4pp.
32. White out. Mead, Andrew. Jan2013, Vol. 233 Issue 1391, pp.44–49, 6pp.
33. Casa das Histórias Paula Rego. Mead, Andrew. Nov2009, Vol. 226, pp.38–45, 8pp.
34. Alice Tully Hall. Kolb, Jaffer. Apr2009, Vol. 225, pp.54–59, 6pp.
35. Pio Pio Restaurant. Kolb, Jaffer. Oct2009, Vol. 226, pp.50–51, 2pp.
NOTES
1. The Royal Institute of British Architecture was created in 1834 for “the general advancement
of Civil Architecture, and for promoting and facilitating the acquirement of the knowledge of the
various arts and sciences connected therewith” <https://www.architecture.com/about/history-
charter-and-byelaws>.
2. ‘Tenor’ and ‘Vehicle’ are part of the terminology of I.A. Richards, in The Philosophy of Rhetoric(1965: 96), in the section "Lecture V: Metaphor.” Black (1955) developed his interactive model on
these distinctions.
3. The notion was introduced by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) and can be defined as a coherent
organisation of experience
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4. Capitals will be used throughout the article when referring to a specific domain, following the
convention established by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) in their seminal work.
5. Readers are architects (73%), students (13%), clients and other architecture-related professions
(14%). See <https://www.architectural-review.com/Journals/2013/07/24/l/u/n/The-
Architectural-Review-Media- Pack_2013_Digital-Version.pdf>
6. The domains of ARTS and LANGUAGE were analysed together because they both serve the idea
that architecture is art or self-expression.
7. Terms like “skeleton” or “wing” are not synecdoches in that these parts of the building do not
stand for the whole building. The whole building is understood metaphorically as a body, and the
metaphor of the body is extended to the parts of the building as well.”
8. It was decided that “the building is a pantheon” and “the room is an anti-materialist inner
sanctum” were metaphors that mapped the characteristics of religious buildings onto private
buildings; however, the domains are very close, which suggests that these expressions are less
metaphorical than others.
9. Rosario Caballero (2006) differentiates four different kinds of architects: the architectus ingenio,
who creates the new building, the architect sumptarius who provides the financial means to realise
it, the architectus manuarius who takes part in the construction and the architectus verborus who
talks about the projects and the finished buildings. The original distinction was made by John
Evelin, a prolific English writer of the 17th century.
10. The use of metaphors for their animation potential is not restricted to AD, because, as Lakoff
& Johnson (1980) indicate, it is a human tendency to project our own in-out orientation and our
ability to move into other physical objects.
11. They are not “dead” however, these metaphors we live by are extremely common by
definitions (Kövecses 2010; xi).
12. See notion of « modulor » as developed by Le Corbusier.
13. Paradoxically, technology therefore becomes synonymous of sensitivity and life.
ABSTRACTS
This paper discusses the diversity of metaphors that can be found in architectural reviews. The
study is based on a corpus of reviews taken from the British magazine The Architectural Reviewand published between 1996 and 2015. The aim is to offer a qualitative and quantitative analysis
of the metaphors that were found in the corpus. After exposing the theoretical framework that
enabled us to select our metaphors, we highlight their major characteristics, on linguistic,
conceptual and communicational levels. We will try to show the central role of metaphors in
architectural discourse and to answer the following questions: What does it reveal of the
discursive strategies of architects? What does it suggest of the functions of reviews in the
community of architects? And finally, to what extent are these images a repository of current
trends in architecture?
Cet article s’intéresse à la diversité des métaphores que l’on trouve dans le genre spécialisé de la
critique d’ouvrages architecturaux. Cette étude s’appuie sur un corpus de ce type de critiques,
publiées entre 1996 et 2015 dans la revue britannique The Architectural Review, afin de proposer
une analyse tant quantitative que qualitative sur la nature de ces métaphores. Après avoir
proposé un cadre théorique pour sélectionner ces métaphores spécifiques à l’architecture et les
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49
caractériser, nous proposons une description linguistique, conceptuelle et communica-tionnelle
de celles-ci. Nous cherchons à expliquer le rôle central des métaphores dans le discours
architectural et à répondre aux questions suivantes : que révèlent-elles des stratégies discursives
des architectes ? Quelles indications cela nous donne-t-il sur les fonctions d’une critique de
bâtiment en architecture ? Enfin, en quoi certaines images sont-elles propres à notre époque
contemporaine et reflètent des tendances actuelles en architecture ?
INDEX
Keywords: architectural review, English of architecture, genre analysis, metaphor, professional
domain, specialised domain
Mots-clés: anglais de l’architecture, domaine spécialisé, étude de genre, métaphore, milieu
professionnel
AUTHOR
CLAIRE KLOPPMANN-LAMBERT
Claire Kloppmann-Lambert est élève en Master 2 d’anglais de spécialité à l’École normale
supérieure Paris-Saclay et fellow d’ESPRI (École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay’s English for
Specific Purposes Research Initiative) pour l’année 2018. Son travail de recherche porte sur
l’anglais de l’architecture, plus particulièrement sur la métaphore et sur la caractérisation de
genres en architecture, d’un point de vue synchronique et diachronique. claire.kloppmann@ens-
paris-saclay.fr
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Adapting English for the specificpurpose of tourism: A study ofcommunication strategies in face-to-face encounters in a Frenchtourist officeL’anglais mis au service de l’échange d’informations touristiques : une étude desstratégies de communication dans des interactions en face-à-face au sein d’unoffice de tourisme français
Adam Wilson
Introduction
1 International tourism is one of the biggest industries in the world. According to the
United Nations World Tourism Organization, there were 1,235 million international
tourist arrivals in 2016, contributing to an industry worth $1,220 billion (€1,102 billion)
and representing 10% of the world’s GDP (UNWTO 2017). It is also one of the main
sources of employment around the world with the UNWTO estimating that 1 in 10 jobs
is in some way linked to tourism. As a truly international industry which is both
growing and diversifying consistently, tourism has been labeled as one of “the greatest
population movements of all time” (Bruner 2005: 10). It is then one of the most diverse,
far-reaching and lucrative industries – and employment sectors – in the world.
2 Research from various domains of study that focus on the English language – English
for Specific Purposes (ESP), English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) or English as a Foreign
Language (EFL) to name but a few – has consistently shown that English is often a key
resource in comparable intercultural, or multicultural, industries, often taking on the
role of a lingua franca to allow communication between diverse linguistic groups
(Jenkins et al. 2011). Naturally, work from these domains has also focused on tourism.
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However, up to present, this work has tended to be uniquely centred on training future
professionals through studies of English use in tourism training situations and/or the
elaboration of needs analyses for those professionals (Garcia Laborda 2003 or
Prachanant 2012, for example). Descriptions of in situ English language use drawn from
fieldwork undertaken in contexts of tourism are few and far between.
3 This is surprising given that tourism, as an ever-diversifying international service
industry, places huge importance on intercultural communication skills. These skills
are crucial for the elaboration, promotion, delivery and consumption of tourist
products, services and experiences. In comparable sectors (such as international
student mobility or international business), English plays a vital role and it would seem
fair to conclude that the tourism industry could constitute not only a key sector in
which English is used in intercultural communication, but also a prime destination for
users of ESP or ELF. In short, tourism accounts for one of the most widespread uses of
English for a specific purpose – in this case, the specific purpose of conducting the
business of tourism. This specialised activity could include welcoming, directing and
advising tourists or elaborating the tourist experience by ‘framing’ tourist destinations
and attractions, for example. Despite this, and the potential repercussions of this
situation, the role of English and its use remain relatively unexplored in the sector of
tourism.
4 This paper aims to take a first, exploratory step into studying in situ English use in a
context of international tourism. How do speakers draw on English as a linguistic
resource in this context? How is English used to help them co-construct meaning?
What are the linguistic features of this specific use of English? In answering these
questions, this article aims to contribute to an exploration of the use of English for the
specific purpose of tourism. While hoping to build on previous work in ESP, ELF and
other fields whilst also providing data and analyses that could be valuable in the
elaboration of linguistic training materials for tourism professionals, the nature of this
study is exploratory. The aim then is to make an initial attempt at describing English
use in this context, thus signalling potential avenues for future research without
claiming to provide a definitive account of English use in international tourism.
5 In the next section, a brief review of relevant literature on both the relationship
between language and tourism and English use in intercultural contexts is conducted.
Drawing on this review, it is shown how speakers in these contexts employ certain
communication strategies in order to construct and ensure understanding. Two of
these strategies – repetition and reformulation – are shown to be of particular interest
and thus form the basis for this study and its research questions. The fieldwork, data
and corpus used in this research are then outlined in section 3. The analysis provided in
section 4 shows how speakers employ certain online pragmatic strategies in order to
co-construct meaning in this context. The specific roles of repetition and reformulation
in this process are explored. Finally, a brief conclusion is drawn before a short
presentation of the potential interest of these findings for the ESP domain, both in
terms of research and teaching applications, is put forward.
1. Language and tourism
6 In recent years, a hive of activity has developed around the study of tourism in certain
branches of the social sciences, and linguistics has been no exception, with work often
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highlighting the central role that language plays in tourism. For example, a number of
researchers have focused on how language is fundamental in elaborating the “tourist
gaze” (Urry 1990) – that is, the visual and sensory experiences tourists encounter
through the “mise-en-scène” organised by destinations. Thurlow and Jaworski (2010)
explore how language and discourse, viewed as semiotic resources, are vital
components of the “tourist gaze” described above by showing how they contribute to
the elaboration of the tourist experience. Similarly, as language is a key tool in
marketing the products, services and experiences offered by a tourist destination, it
contributes significantly to the positioning of destinations on the tourist market and,
thus, to their image and identity (Heller et al. 2014, among others). In other words,
language is vital to the exchange of the intangible, semiotic elements that make up
tourism.
7 As well as this semiotic role, language also has huge importance as a more practical tool
in tourism situations. As in any service industry, language is essential for conducting
most of the business that is undertaken in tourism contexts. Communication between
hosts, guests, service providers, locals, businesses and all the other stakeholders
involved in tourism requires language use. In this respect, tourism is perhaps an
especially interesting case as certain specificities linked to the context create extra
challenges for the smooth running of such communication. For example, tourism is not
only an extreme example of an intercultural situation (and of language contact) but
encounters in this context are also very often “fleeting relationships” (Jaworski &
Thurlow 2010) in that the different participants only spend a very short amount of time
in each other’s company.
8 Despite these challenges and the fact that language plays a key role in tourism in both
semiotic and practical terms, very little work has been undertaken to study language
use in situ in this context. Up to present, studies have tended to focus on written and
other mediatised forms of text (Thurlow & Jaworski 2010, among others). Research
focusing on English has also addressed these issues by exploring the stylistic features of
English used in different types of tourism texts (Dann 1996; Manca 2008; Bruyèl-Olmedo
& Juan-Garau 2010 or Luzón 2016, for example). While this body of work has brought to
light how language contributes to the elaboration of the tourist experience, very little
is known about how participants in tourism contexts co-construct these experiences
together in face-to-face encounters. This article aims to take a first step in addressing
this concern by exploring how speakers draw upon certain linguistic resources in situ in
order to co-construct meaning.
2. Pragmatic strategies and English as a lingua franca
9 Although little work has been done on tourism in this respect, a large number of
studies have shown how English constitutes a key resource for in situ meaning making
in comparable situations of intercultural contact. Research focused on English as a
lingua franca (ELF) – that is, as a language of communication between speakers from
two or more different linguistic groups – in naturally occurring settings has shown how
speakers develop strategies at different linguistic levels in order to facilitate mutual
understanding (Jenkins et al. 2011 for an overview).
10 One key finding from ELF research focusing on pragmatics has been that speakers seem
to give precedence to understanding rather than to the form of what they are saying
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(Firth 1996, for example). Rather than aiming for ‘grammatically correct linguistic
forms’, speakers of ELF devote energy to developing pragmatic strategies in order to
understand others and make themselves understood. These strategies are used to
counter both real and potential obstacles that could impede the co-construction of
meaning. In other words, speakers prioritise the establishment and maintenance of
“common ground” (Stalnaker 2002), that is the presuppositions or knowledge shared by
interlocutors concerning, among other things, what is taking place in interaction, the
context of the encounter and the objectives or goals of the exchange. Establishing and
maintaining this common ground are key to the creation of mutual understanding.
11 Research from different disciplines has identified a large number of strategies that
facilitate this process, including clarification (Mauranen 2006), appeals for help
(Dörnyei 1995) or code-switching (Cogo 2009) to name but a few. However, the strategy
that has received the most attention is that of repetition (Mauranen 2006; Lichtkoppler
2007, and Björkman 2014, among others). For example, building on previous work,
Lichtkoppler (2007) explores the various pragmatic functions of repetition such as
gaining time, ensuring accuracy of understanding, providing prominence to certain
discursive elements or showing listenership. Mauranen (2006) highlights how
communicative problems can be managed through the repetition of items that
constitute obstacles to understanding. Across a number of studies then, repetition has
been shown to be a key strategy allowing speakers to manage understanding (and
potential misunderstandings) and thus facilitate the co-construction of meaning in
interaction.
12 Another strategy which has been relatively unexplored in ELF research but widely
studied elsewhere is that of reformulation. Reformulation, which can be defined as the
repetition of information using alternative linguistic forms, is at the heart of Pennec’s
(2017) corpus-based approach to studying discursive readjustment in English. Similarly,
repetition has been the focus of much research in the field of “exolingual
communication”. Exolingual communication (or communication exolingue) was an
extremely active research area in the French-speaking academic world in the 1980s and
which focused on similar issues to those found in ELF research. Exolingual
communication is defined as communication between speakers who do not (or do not
want to) share a first language (Porquier 1979). Studies in this field have examined how
the asymmetry of speakers’ linguistic repertoires manifests itself in interaction and
how speakers overcome this (Alber & Py 1986). One way in which asymmetry is both
manifested and overcome is through exolingual communication strategies,
implemented by participants to maximise mutual understanding (Desoutter 2009). A
large number of authors have dealt with different strategies which bear a striking
resemblance to those explored in ELF research: requests for help (Berthoud & Py 2003),
“semiotic generosity” (Porquier & Py 2004: 23) or repetition (Schmale 1988), for
example. Among the different strategies, reformulation has been shown, as discussed in
more detail below, to be particularly powerful in ensuring the co-construction of
meaning and can be used as both a preventive measure and a response to a problem in
interaction (Alber & Py 1986; de Pietro 1988).
13 In sum, different fields focusing on situations of language contact in which a language
is used as a lingua franca have identified the importance of using pragmatic strategies
to establish and maintain common ground in order to ensure mutual understanding.
Among these strategies, repetition and reformulation seem to play a particularly
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important role. They are thus central to the co-construction of meaning in such
contexts.
14 Despite the fundamental importance of meaning making in the elaboration of tourist
destinations, and the fundamental importance of pragmatic strategies to this process,
next to no research has been undertaken which focuses on such strategies in tourism.
The aim here will thus be to focus on these strategies in a context of international
tourism to show how they constitute one of the ways in which English is exploited as a
linguistic resource. In turn, this will show how English is used in situ to co-construct
meaning and, by extension, how it contributes to the elaboration of the tourist context.
Given the previous research presented above, the role of these strategies in elaborating
common ground will clearly be a key concern in exploring these issues. With these
elements in mind, the following research questions will be addressed:
How is common ground established and maintained by participants in face-to-face
interactions in a context of international tourism?
How do participants use pragmatic strategies, and more specifically repetition and
reformulation, in this process?
15 Answering these questions should help shed light on how English is used as a tool for
communication in this professional situation, how it contributes to the semiotic
elaboration of the context, and how these dynamics may have an effect on the language
itself, thus contributing to a provisional outline showing how English is used for the
specific purpose of tourism. In order to answer these questions, a corpus of naturally
occurring interactions from a context of international tourism was created and is
presented in the next section.
3. Fieldwork and research methodology
16 In order to answer the research questions set out above, this paper relies on data issued
from a long-term ethnographic fieldwork project undertaken between 2014 and 2016.
An ethnographic approach was chosen as it draws on an analytical framework which
sees language as an intrinsic, constitutive element of its context. In other words,
“language is context, it is the architecture of social behaviour itself” (Blommaert & Jie
2010: 7). From an ESP point of view, such an approach, requiring language to be studied
in its naturally occurring context, allows us to analyse English as an intrinsic part of
the specific purpose it is being used for and the specific context it is being used in.
17 The context chosen for this study was the Tourist Office and Convention Bureau (TO) of
Marseille, France. Marseille is a particularly interesting case for studying tourism as it
is currently reinventing itself as an urban tourist destination and international arrivals
have been increasing steadily over the past fifteen years (City of Marseille, 2016). This
intensification of activity has led to the tourism industry becoming more and more
important for the city, and authorities suggest that more than 14,000 jobs are directly
or indirectly linked to tourism (for a population of just about a million).
18 The TO was chosen as it is one of the key sites in which face-to-face encounters
between international tourists and tourism professionals take place. In 2016, 353,144
tourists visited the TO, 56% of whom came from outside France (City of Marseille, 2016).
The fieldwork comprised observations, interviews and document collection as well as
recording interactions between international tourists and the French tourist advisers
•
•
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working on the TO’s main information desk. This produced a corpus of 93 transcribed
and annotated audio recordings of interactions between international tourists and
tourist advisers. The data from this corpus, named the Corpus MITo (Wilson, 2016), are
the focus of this article. Of the 93 interactions, 26 take place in English. While this
constitutes a small corpus, these interactional data provide a valuable snapshot of
English being used for the specific purpose of international tourism in face-to-face
encounters. Due to the small corpus size, this study focuses on qualitative description
of relevant phenomena. Using the tools outlined above, these data are explored with a
view to showing how participants use the pragmatic strategies of repetition and
reformulation in order to co-construct the common ground, and thus the meaning,
required to fulfil the specific purpose in this context, that is, the elaboration of the
tourist experience.
4. Establishing and maintaining common ground atthe Tourist Office
19 Our analysis focuses on three strategies: online co-construction of utterances,
repetition and reformulation. It will be shown how these strategies play an important
role in overcoming real and perceived difficulties in communication, thereby
protecting said common ground. Together, these findings should constitute a first,
exploratory, step towards understanding the use of English for the specific purpose of
tourism.
4.1. Co-construction of utterances
20 While repetition and reformulation have been identified above as particularly
pertinent pragmatic strategies when establishing common ground, a fine-grained
analysis of the corpus reveals another important strategy that plays a similar role. At
the discourse level, participants engage in a strategy whereby they collaborate, in real
time, to construct utterances. This is what Mauranen (2006: 145) refers to as the
“general coconstruction of expressions,” sequences in which speakers finish or
elaborate upon other speakers’ utterances by “pooling relevant factual information.”
Mauranen focuses on this phenomenon as a strategy for preventing misunderstanding.
In the case of the TO, it seems to also have an additional function in allowing
participants to show their interlocutor that certain elements of the information being
discussed are shared, thus contributing to the elaboration of common ground. This
phenomenon can be found in 12 of the 26 interactions in English. Due to space
constraints, it is illustrated here through two clear, canonical examples.
21 The first example below is an extract from an interaction between a French tourist
adviser (CF7) and a Chinese tourist (T1). The exchange is drawing to a close as T1 opens
a new sequence by formulating the request at the beginning of this extract.
(1)1 T1: ok (.) and er one more thing (.) it's just that i know that here is pro- pretty closeto ah cassis (.) and i can see all the euh erm the: CF7: calanques? T1: yes calanques yes CF7: ok
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T1: so erm where if i erm want to book er a boat or something where can i go andwhat are roughly the price for that one
22 Through hesitation, T1 signals a potential communicative problem as she arrives at the
end of the first turn in this extract. CF7 attempts to repair this situation by suggesting
the word “calanques” (a well-known national park close to Marseille) in response to
what she (correctly) identifies as a word search by T1. This is explicitly ratified by T1
and the exchange continues on this topic. Beyond overcoming potential
misunderstanding, this interactive utterance finishing allows CF7 to signal that she has
understood the information offered by T1. This constitutes then an example of “pooling
relevant factual information,” as mentioned above: CF7 provides a description of a
tourist place, T1 provides the toponym. In collaborating in this way, the two
participants establish common ground by displaying the fact that they share
knowledge about Marseille and its tourist attractions. While this collaboration is never
explicitly addressed, it plays a fundamental part in the co-construction of meaning in
this interaction and allows the participants to continue in their objective of co-
constructing T1’s tourist experience (by discussing what she will visit and/or
describing Marseille and its attractions, for example).
23 While such co-construction of utterances may contribute to the establishment of
common ground regarding Marseille, this is not always the case. The following extract
shows how participants use the same strategy in order to establish common ground in
terms of the tourist experience more generally. Here, a French adviser (CF4) has just
finished presenting the different museums to two tourists, one Vietnamese (T2) and
one Italian (T3), when the question of pricing is brought up.
(2) T3: so what about the museums so it's the::: er so there's no er there's no discountwe need to ask for the ticket office (1.71) T2: is this discount for students? CF4: no this exhibition is this (.) er is ten euros (.) this is the most expensive errr ok(.) after for the mucem this is eight euros (0.93) T3: ok maybe there's a discount [for students] T2: [for students] CF4: yeah (.) you have to:: (.) yeah you have to show you:::r T3: yeah yeah yeah CF4: your student card T2: how many::: euro discount? CF4: e::r for mucem it's five euros instead of eight T3: uhuh
24 In this case, the main instance of utterance co-construction takes place between T3 and
T2. T3 begins to formulate an utterance suggesting that there may be a discount for
students which T2 completes (by overlapping T3’s original utterance). This clearly
displays a sharing of common ground between T2 and T3, no doubt influenced by T2’s
original reference to student discounts a few turns earlier. CF4 ratifies this
collaboration between T2 and T3 by offering a reply. However, she quickly signals a
potential communication problem through two false starts and a reformulation. While
this may suggest a word search, T3 immediately ratifies CF4’s turn by uttering “yeah
yeah yeah” to display understanding. This understanding is ratified by CF4 uttering the
words she was looking for, “your student card.” This extract shows a clear example of
co-construction and collaboration. The participants co-construct the discourse by
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finishing, or not finishing, each other’s turns. This collaboration at the discourse level
not only avoids potential obstacles to communication but also contributes to mutual
understanding by clearing displaying common ground in terms of a shared
comprehension of how pricing functions in most tourist attractions.
25 The two examples explored above show how the co-construction of utterances
contributes to establishing and maintaining common ground at the discourse level. In
this way, it constitutes a key strategy in assuring mutual understanding. By extension,
this contributes to the discursive construction of certain elements of the tourist
context. However, the data suggests that participants cannot rely solely on discourse-
level strategies to establish and maintain common ground. More often, this requires
the use of certain pragmatic strategies, two of which are discussed in the following
sections.
4.2. Other-repetition
26 As mentioned earlier in this article, repetition has been shown to be a key strategy in
allowing speakers to co-construct meaning. The aim of this article is to build on this
research by exploring data from a relatively unexplored context. This section looks at
how speakers at the TO use repetition as a pragmatic strategy to maintain their footing
on common ground. Interestingly, self-repetitions are relatively sparse in the corpus.
Therefore, the focus here is on other-repetitions, present in all but three of the
interactions in the corpus,2 and it is shown how the strategic use of other-repetition
(OR) can play a number of different roles in the development and protection of mutual
understanding.
4.2.1. Verifying and confirming understanding
27 One of the main functions of OR employed by participants in the corpus is related to
verifying and confirming understanding. On the one hand, speakers use repetition to
check either their own understanding or that of their interlocutor. On the other hand,
OR is also used to affirm an interlocutor’s or one’s own understanding following a
potential obstacle to interaction. Both of these strategies are explored in the examples
below.
28 This first example shows how OR is used by participants to check their own
understanding. This extract features a German-speaking Swiss tourist (T4) interacting
with a French-speaking adviser (CF1). They are discussing different attractions suitable
for children before T4 asks about buying transport tickets.
(3) CF1: there is a lot of errm (1.1) er (.) pai- er games= T4: =yep CF1: for the kids T4: ahhh ok= CF1: =and they have errr the-= T4: =kay= CF1: =the games T4: sounds good (.) so where do i get (.) tickets for the bus? CF1: i:n the bus T4: in the bus?=
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CF1: =yes= T4: =ok
29 CF1 responds to T4’s question regarding transport tickets with “in the bus.” This
utterance is repeated verbatim by T4 with a rising intonation. CF1 interprets this
repetition as a confirmation request in terms of understanding, which she ratifies in
the following turn. The fact that T4, in turn, produces a ratification suggests that his
initial repetition of “in the bus” was indeed an attempt to confirm his understanding of
CF1’s turn. Here then, OR is used strategically by a speaker to check his own
understanding, thereby avoiding potential communication roadblocks and maintaining
the common ground. Such use of OR has also been reported by Lichtkoppler (2007: 56)
who termed this function “ensuring accuracy of understanding” when describing ELF
interactions in a university international accommodation office. It is interesting to note
that such findings from a different context are reproduced in the context of
international tourism.
30 The following example shows a similar strategic use of OR. However, in this case, rather
than acting as verification, the multiple repetitions seem to constitute explicit
confirmations of understanding. This extract is taken from an interaction between a
French adviser (CF7) and a Japanese tourist (T5). CF7 is explaining how to get to a major
tourist attraction using public transport.
(4) CF7: or you can go (.) by bus with the bus number sixty T5: ok (.) just nearby it's not far CF7: yeah and you buy the ticket inside the bus T5: inside the bus CF7: and it's one eighty euro T5: one eighty (.) but if i buy (.) previously it's just like one fifty (.) or no CF7: if you buy in metro T5: yes CF7: if you go in the metro and you buy a ticket it's one fifty T5: one fifty ok CF7: yeah
31 There are three instances of OR is this extract, all of which seem to play the same role.
T5’s productions of “inside the bus”, “one eighty” and “one fifty” are all verbatim
repetitions of CF7’s previous turn (or a part of said turn). These examples of OR seem to
act like positive feedback, signalling understanding. They are never interpreted
otherwise – as clarification requests or signals of incomprehension, for example – by
CF7. Similarly, T5 does not manifest any sign that would suggest that these ORs be
interpreted in another way. This use of OR as positive feedback confirming
understanding is widespread throughout the corpus. Used in this way, OR constitutes a
strategy allowing participants to signal the continuing existence of common ground
between them.
32 The strategic uses of OR to both verify and confirm understanding can be seen in the
following extract. It is taken from the same interaction as in example (2). Here, the
tourists are asking about the different buildings which can be visited in Marseille when
T2 asks about one of Marseille’s most famous landmarks, Le Corbusier (or Cité
Radieuse).
(5) T2: how about the area of err le corbusier?= T3: =le corbusier?
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0.80) CF4: corbusier (.) it's (.) here T3: cité:: radieuse CF4: you have to take the bus number twenty one T3: ok
33 The first OR takes place when T3 repeats the name “Le Corbusier” in response to T2’s
initial interrogation. Coupled with a rising intonation, this acts as a verification on the
part of T3 to verify his understanding of T2’s production. The second OR takes place
when CF4 repeats “Corbusier” to ratify T3’s comprehension of T2’s utterance. Though
the audio data is not presented here, it is worth noting that there is no notable
difference in the pronunciation of “Corbusier” between the three speakers. It would
therefore seem difficult to argue that these repetitions constitute reformulations,
repairs or corrections in terms of pronunciation. This suggests that OR plays a
pragmatic role, allowing certain speakers to verify understanding and others to
confirm that understanding. This protects the common ground, ensuring a smooth
elaboration of mutual understanding.
4.2.2. Signalling and repairing misunderstanding
34 Alongside verifying and confirming understanding, analysis of the corpus shows that
OR has a second major strategic use among visitors and advisers at the TO: signalling
and repairing obstacles to understanding. As mentioned previously, Mauranen (2006:
133) shows how misunderstanding can be signalled through the “repetition of
problematic items.” This phenomenon, observed by Mauranen in ELF data from a
higher education situation, can also be found in the present corpus. Once again then,
phenomena observed in other ELF contexts can be found in international tourism. The
extract below provides a good example.
(6) T6: do you have some maps of the campings? (.) CF8: maps of the campings? T6: yes CF8: e::r T7: in france T6: in this region CF8: ah this region (.) je pense i don't think so but i'm going to see
35 This extract is from an interaction between two Portuguese tourists (T6, T7) and a
French tourist adviser (CF8). T6’s initial request comes after a long break in the
interaction in which CF8 was searching for documentation. CF8 repeats the final part of
T6’s utterance with a rising intonation. Initially, T6 seems to interpret this repetition as
a confirmation of understanding. However, when T6 ratifies this confirmation, CF8
gives feedback suggesting a breakdown in understanding, prompting reformulations
from both T7 and T6. It seems then that CF8’s repetition of “maps of the campings” is
not a confirmation of understanding but rather a repetition of an element that
constitutes an obstacle to comprehension. Thus, CF8 uses repetition as a strategy to
signal misunderstanding, that is, a temporary loss of common ground between the
participants. Interestingly, CF8 also signals the return of said common ground through
the use of OR. In the final turn above, she repeats part of T6’s previous utterance. This
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clearly acts as a ratification of understanding. It can be seen then how OR is used to
both signal misunderstanding and resolve such problems.
36 The following extract provides an example of very similar usage of the same strategy.
In this exchange between a Japanese tourist (T8) and a French adviser (CF1), OR is used
to both signal and repair misunderstanding. The interaction is drawing to a close and
CF1 is explaining the “Citypass,” a card offering reductions for certain attractions,
when T8 decides to buy one of the products on offer.
(7) CF1: and you have some er reduction in (.) some shops T8: mmhmm T8: ok i want a two- two days pass CF1: yes (1.2) one citypass for two days. T8: on::e?= CF1: =>one citypass< T8: ah one citypass yes
37 The repetitions appear at a crucial moment in the transaction. Following CF1’s
recapitulation of the product being sold, T8 repeats one of the crucial elements of
information: “one.” This repetition, accompanied by a rising intonation, seems to be
interpreted by CF1 as signalling misunderstanding. In response, CF1 repeats (and
simplifies) her utterance. This instance of repetition acts to resolve the
misunderstanding. T8 then confirms her understanding through the use of another OR.
Repetitions are used here to signal a risk to the common ground, to propose a solution
leading to its re-establishment and to ratify this solution, thereby re-establishing the
common ground.
4.2.3. Other-repetition as a feature of English use in tourism
38 Following the analyses of the corpus presented here, four strategic functions of OR can
be identified: verifying understanding, confirming understanding, signalling
misunderstanding and repairing misunderstanding. Clearly then, OR constitutes a
powerful strategy in terms of establishing and maintaining common ground between
participants. It therefore plays a fundamental role in the co-construction of meaning
and mutual understanding in this context.
39 As mentioned above, these conclusions largely echo research findings from other ELF
situations in that OR constitutes a clear characteristic of the English (as a lingua franca)
used in the context of the TO. While this may not be surprising, international tourism
remains a relatively unexplored context in terms of ELF and it is interesting to note the
existence of phenomena comparable with other contexts, despite the fact that the
defining characteristics of these situations may be somewhat different (see section 1).
If, based on this evidence, OR is to be considered as a pragmatic feature of in situEnglish use in a context of international tourism, it could be suggested that OR
constitutes a feature of English used for the specific purpose of tourism. In contributing
to the maintenance of common ground, OR contributes not only to mutual
understanding between participants but also to the discursive and semiotic creation of
the tourist context. This happens on two levels. Practically speaking, OR helps to
ensure the transmission of directions or advice that will shape a tourist’s actual
experience in Marseille. Discursively speaking, OR ensures that the semiotic
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constructions of tourism are communicated in the encounters between tourists and
advisers.
40 OR clearly constitutes a key feature, and strategy, of English use in tourism. However,
another feature can be identified through the analyses of the corpus collected at the
TO: reformulation.
4.3. Reformulation
41 As with repetition, qualitative analysis of the corpus reveals reformulation to be of
strategic importance to speakers at the TO. While reformulation is briefly referred to as
a common “corrective device” in situations of English learning by Jenkins (2012: 490),
its strategic function has been explored to a lesser extent in work focusing on ELF.
Research in the field of exolingual communication has studied the role of
reformulation as a key strategy in ensuring mutual understanding (de Pietro 1988).
Authors from this field distinguish reformulation within the same language (by
selecting alternative forms when “repeating” information) from reformulation through
the temporary use of another language or variety (Alber & Py 1986). Both forms of
reformulation are widespread in the present corpus, appearing in 20 of the 26
interactions, and are explored through the canonical examples below. It is shown how,
in much the same way as OR, different forms of reformulation contribute to the
maintenance of common ground between speakers, thereby contributing to the co-
construction of meaning.
4.3.1. Intra-code reformulation
42 The first form of reformulation that is considered can be termed “intra-code
reformulation” i.e. reformulation which takes place in the same language. In this first
extract, an American tourist (T9) has just asked about the boat trips (to the Frioul
islands) available with the “Citypass” tourist pass she has bought online. The French
adviser (CF6) explains that T9 must make a choice between the two trips advertised
online. This leads to a series of reformulations that function as a pragmatic strategy to
ensure understanding between the participants, protecting the common ground.
(8) T9: ok CF6: or to le frioul (.) so it's ONE or the other one you have to choose (.) so this is atimetable (.) leaflet for if castle (.) and information for the island of frioul? T9: ok so choose between these two? CF6: yeah if you want to do both (.) you have to pay an extra five euros T9: ok
43 First of all, CF6 self-initiates a reformulation by uttering “one or the other” followed by
“you have to choose.” This particular grammatical construction could be considered as
somewhat difficult, especially when the differences between the various forms in
English and French (CF6’s first language) are taken into account. Bearing this in mind,
it could be suggested that CF6 reformulates her own utterances as a preventive strategy
to avoid potential misunderstanding. In the following turn, T9 reformulates this
construction by adding “between these two.” This seems to be interpreted by CF6 as a
request for clarification, which she responds to by reformulating the proposition one
more time and adding extra information. In this extract, reformulation acts in a
number of strategic ways: preventing potential misunderstanding, requesting
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clarification and responding to communicative difficulties. Together, these three
strategic uses of reformulation help the interlocutors to maintain common ground.
44 The following extract shows a way in which strategic reformulation can help not only
maintain common ground but also actively establish it. This example features two Irish
tourists (T10, T11) exchanging with a French adviser (CF8) about the tourist buses that
tour the city.
(9) CF8 if you want to e::rm (.) to go up or go down T10 a:::h CF8 it's possible you have (.) several (.) stops T10 ahhh T11 ok CF8 you ca:::n stop here if you want uh (.) it's a little port with a restaurant typicallyerr o- of marseille T10 mmhmm CF8 and er um and after you you have to take this bus (.) you find find o:h and youhave the timetable here T10 o:::h so it's hop on hop off= CF8 =hop on hop off yes T10 ok T11 ok
45 In much the same way as in the previous example, the adviser (CF8) initiates a self-
reformulation. Her reformulation of “to go up or go down” seems to be a done in
response to T10’s ambiguous feedback. T10 and T11’s feedback to CF8’s reformulation
“it’s possible you have several stops” appears to suggest that the potential obstacle to
communication has been avoided. At this point, it seems that common ground has been
maintained and CF8 continues by giving more information. However, upon seeing the
timetable handed to them by CF8, T10 once again reformulates CF8’s initial utterance
by using the construction “hop on hop off.” This reformulation appears to suggest that
the common ground was not fully restored following CF8’s first reformulation attempt.
However, T10 immediately brings the exchange back on track with her reformulation
“hop on hop off” (the phrase used on the printed timetable she has just had handed to
her). This is immediately ratified by CF8 through the use of a strategic OR, and the
common ground is restored. In this example, reformulation acts as a strategy for
repairing obstacles to the co-construction of meaning, to the point of reinstating
common ground that had been temporarily lost.
46 The above extracts contain examples of both self-reformulation and other-
reformulation used as pragmatic strategies to facilitate mutual understanding through
the protection of common ground. In each of these cases, the reformulation is “intra-
code” in that the problematic items are reformulated in the same language (English).
Attention now turns to reformulations involving elements of languages other than
English.
4.3.2. Inter-code reformulation
47 The second type of reformulation under study is “inter-code reformulation”, which
involves using linguistic resources from languages other than English. Alber and Py
(1986) were among the first to identify the contribution of reformulations using
elements of another language (or code) to meaning making in their work on mainly
French-language exolingual interactions. More recently, Mondada and Nussbaum
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(2012) explored a variety of different situations of language contact to show how
speakers exploit various plurilingual resources in order to make themselves
understood in a process they term “linguistic bricolage.” Among other conclusions,
their analyses showed how speakers react to and solve communicative problems online
through the use of resources which are not part of the main language of interaction.
Regarding ELF, Hülmbauer (2009) discussed the role of plurilingual resources in both
the “correctness” and “effectiveness” of ELF as a language variety among international
students.
48 In the case of the TO, inter-code reformulations constitute a clear pragmatic strategy in
English-language interactions. While multiple cases cannot be studied due to space
constraints, the following extract provides a canonical example of inter-code
reformulation at the TO. In this encounter, two Spanish tourists (T12, T13) are engaged
in an interaction with a French adviser (CF1) when T12 asks a question about one of
Marseille’s most famous products: soap.
(10) T12: about (.) there is some e:::: /sup/ /i/ /supi/ /fæbriki/? (1.1) T12: /sup/? CF1: /sup/? T12: /marselsups/ (1.4) T12: /sabon/ [/sabo/- ] T13: [soap ] CF1: savon. T12: ah savon (0.7) CF1: /sabon/ no i don’t understand (1.2) T13: a soap (.) to wash (.) a soap CF1: AH YES savon= T2: =euheuh CF1: yes (.) so (.) if you want (.) in this street
49 As can be seen, T12 runs into some difficulty with the pronunciation of “soap.” Her
initial turn leads to an absence of feedback, so T12 repeats the same pronunciation. In a
strategic use of repetition, CF1 signals her incomprehension by reproducing the same
form. T12 adds information but this leads to another lack of feedback. Interpreting this
as incomprehension, T12 reformulates the problematic element with the production “/
sabon/” which sits somewhere between the French (savon) and Spanish (jabón) versions
of this lexical item. Simultaneously, T13 reformulates soap with a more “native-like”
pronunciation but this seems to go unheard. Despite initially seeming to ratify the
reformulation by repeating the French word “savon”, CF1 goes on to explicitly express
her incomprehension. T13 then reformulates “soap” once again, leading to CF1’s
ratification through the use of an inter-code reformulation by employing the word “
savon”.
50 It is clear that T12’s inter-code reformulation is used in a strategic manner with a view
to resolving misunderstanding. This example – one of a number in the corpus – shows
how reformulation using linguistic resources from another language constitutes a
pragmatic strategy speakers exploit (or attempt to exploit) in order to maintain
common ground and thus mutual understanding.
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4.3.3. Reformulation as a feature of English use in tourism
51 The exploration of the above examples reveals certain strategic uses of reformulation
in the corpus of English-language interactions between tourists and advisers at the TO
of Marseille. Firstly, reformulation can either be “intra-code” or “inter-code,” relating
to the exploitation of another English form or resources from another language
respectively. It has also been shown that participants can either self-reformulate or
other-reformulate. All of the aforementioned forms of reformulation play a strategic
role. The pragmatic functions enacted by reformulation include requesting clarification
and anticipating or repairing obstacles to understanding. By doing so, reformulation
contributes considerably to the establishment and maintenance of common ground. In
much the same way as repetition, reformulation proves to be a key strategy in the co-
construction of meaning between participants in this context.
52 Given its strategic importance, it could be argued that reformulation constitutes a
characteristic of the English used (as a lingua franca) in this context and, by extension,
a feature of English used for the specific purpose of tourism. Strategic intra-code and
inter-code reformulations contribute to mutual meaning making and thus to the
linguistic elaboration of the tourist context. As with OR, reformulation is a key feature
and strategy of English use in tourism based on the evidence presented here.
Conclusion
53 The main aim of this article was to take an initial, exploratory step towards studying
the in situ use of English in a context of international tourism. This was done through
close analysis of interactional data from an ethnographic fieldwork project undertaken
at the tourist office of Marseille (TO). Focus was given to English being used as a lingua
franca in encounters between (certain) international tourists and tourist advisers. The
objective of this paper was to explore how the speakers exploit linguistic resources in
order to co-construct meaning. By focusing on the elaboration and maintenance of
common ground, it was shown that speakers activate certain strategies in order to
facilitate this meaning making process. Three strategies were identified as being
particularly prominent: co-construction of utterances, repetition and reformulation.
Firstly, participants engage in the co-construction of utterances by collaborating in real
time through the pooling of linguistic resources and information in order to elaborate
utterances. This strategy, operating at the discursive level, allows participants to
establish common ground by displaying shared information. Secondly, it was shown
how speakers utilise repetition as a pragmatic strategy that can have various functions.
According to the data, repetition is used to verify and/or confirm understanding as
well as to signal and/or repair misunderstanding. Finally, reformulation was also
shown to play a similar pragmatic role by allowing speakers to request clarification as
well as to anticipate or repair communicative difficulties. All three of these strategies
were shown to play an important part in establishing and maintaining common ground
between the speakers which is central to ensuring mutual understanding. The
discursive and pragmatic strategies exposed in this article are thus shown to be key
resources for the co-construction of meaning that takes place between speakers in this
context. By extension, these strategies contribute to the elaboration of the tourist
experience itself, either through ensuring the smooth communication of practical
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details that will form the basis of a tourist’s visit to Marseille or by facilitating the
semiotic construction that constitutes an integral part of the tourist experience.
54 This final conclusion is particularly important as it shows how English can be used for a
specific purpose in this context. In other words, speakers at the tourist office draw
upon English for the specific purpose of tourism, both in terms of its practical
organisation and its semiotic elaboration. English can therefore be said to constitute a
set of linguistic resources that allows this specific purpose to be enacted, thus allowing
the elaboration of the particular context. What is more, the analyses presented here
would suggest that, in this case, the English used for this specific purpose has specific
linguistic features: the three discursive and pragmatic strategies identified above. As
mentioned in the analyses above, these strategies in many ways closely resemble those
found in other ELF/ESP contexts, whilst also presenting certain differences. They are
no doubt only the tip of the iceberg and more research is required in order to uncover
further strategies and/or other linguistic features of English used as a lingua franca in
international tourism. However, as in other contexts of ESP, this study has provided an
initial sketch as to how English becomes an integral part of the specific purpose –
tourism – for which it is being used. The evidence presented here takes an initial step
in showing how English can be considered to contribute to the undertaking of
international tourism as well as showing how its being used in this context produces
certain linguistic forms. Thus, in this case, English and its specific purpose become
somewhat inseparable; language and context become one.
55 The above conclusions could be important not only for future research in ESP but also
for its applications in terms of training and education. In much the same way as in a
needs analysis, the elements explored here give initial insight into the requirements of
tourism professionals (and tourists, for that matter) in terms of English language skills.
The discursive and pragmatic strategies laid out in this paper would constitute such
skills, suggesting that these skills should form part of the linguistic training of
professionals in this sector. While this is undoubtedly the case in a wide range of
training and/or language-learning situations, not all programmes incorporate such
pragmatic or discursive elements. Clearly, more research is required before any
measures are taken to implement such elements in training programmes in order to
confirm the findings of this paper and identify other linguistic features of English used
for the specific purpose of tourism. However, given that the findings presented here
mirror those of other ESP/ELF studies, it could be suggested that there is a growing
body of research pointing to the importance of such pragmatic and discursive elements
in the language learning or training process, hence their increasingly central role in
language learning and teaching.
56 In sum, this paper offers only a very first step towards describing English use for the
specific purpose of tourism. However, the conclusions drawn here suggest that more
research would be of profound interest for ESP scholars both from a scientific and
applied perspective. As discussed in the analysis, the phenomena described here are in
some ways very similar to those found in other situations of ESP/EFL whilst there are
also some differences in the way English is used in such situations and in this small
corpus. It would seem then that exploring English use in tourism could enrich the study
of how English is used for a specific purpose and how a specific purpose can have an
impact on English. In fact, given the significance of tourism as a social phenomenon,
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the impact of such work could go far beyond this, potentially unveiling central aspects
of the influence language can have on society and society can have on language.
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APPENDIXES
Transcription conventions
(1.1) Pause (in seconds)
(.) Short pause
: Prolongation
- False start/interruption
? Rising intonation
[] Overlapping speech
= Speech in quick succession
>< Slower speech
ONE Loud speech
// Phonetic transcription
Note: Given that upper-case letters are used to identify loud speech, lower-case letters
are used for all other speech, even where graphic conventions would require a capital
letter (such as in the use of proper nouns). An effort is made to transcribe each
utterance as closely as possible. Therefore, any “non-standard” or “erroneous” English
constructions or forms are reproduced as uttered. Similarly, any “filler” or “hesitation”
noises are transcribed in order to be as close as possible to the sounds produced by the
speakers.
NOTES
1. See the Appendix for a guide to the transcription conventions used throughout.
2. It should be noted that the three interactions without any other-repetitions are extremely
short (under 15 seconds).
ABSTRACTS
This article explores some uses of English for international tourism. Tourism is one of the biggest
industries in the world, yet little work has focused on how non-native speakers use English in
face-to-face encounters in this context. This paper studies how speakers co-construct meaning in
English through an analysis of interactional data drawn from an ethnographic fieldwork project
undertaken at the tourist office of Marseille (France). It is shown how speakers deploy certain
discursive and pragmatic strategies in order to elaborate and maintain the common ground
necessary for mutual understanding. Three strategies are identified as being particularly
prominent: co-construction of utterances, repetition and reformulation. It is shown how these
strategies contribute not only to the co-construction of meaning but also to the practical and
semiotic elaboration of the tourist experience. These findings are then briefly applied to the field
of ESP research and teaching.
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L’objectif de cet article est de proposer un premier pas vers l’étude de l’anglais du tourisme
international. Le tourisme constitue l’une des plus grandes industries du monde mais
l’exploitation de l’anglais par des locuteurs non-natifs dans des interactions en face-à-face dans
ce contexte reste relativement peu explorée. Cet article vise à montrer comment les locuteurs co-
construisent du sens en anglais. Ce travail s’appuie sur l’analyse de données interactionnelles
issues d’un travail de terrain ethnographique entrepris à l’Office de tourisme et des congrès de
Marseille (France). Il apparaît que les locuteurs emploient certaines stratégies discursives et
pragmatiques afin d’élaborer un terrain d’entente nécessaire pour l’intercompréhension. Trois
stratégies dominent – la co-construction d’énoncés, la répétition et la reformulation – et elles
contribuent en outre à la co-construction du sens et à l’élaboration pratique et sémiotique de
l’expérience touristique. Ces résultats sont enfin appliqués à la recherche en anglais de spécialité
et à de possibles applications pédagogiques.
INDEX
Keywords: communication strategy, English for tourism, interaction in English, pragmatics
Mots-clés: anglais du tourisme, interaction, pragmatique, stratégie de communication
AUTHOR
ADAM WILSON
Adam Wilson is currently maître de langue in the Département d’études du monde anglophone
(DEMA) at Aix-Marseille University and affiliated with the Laboratoire Parole et Langue (LPL
UMR 7309). He defended his PhD thesis, dealing with the sociolinguistic dynamics of
globalisation, in 2016. His on-going research continues his work on this theme by focussing
especially on language use in tourism. [email protected]
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Le corpus comme aide à la rédactionde résumés scientifiques pour desétudiants LANSAD : une approchecomparativeUsing a corpus for abstract writing in ESP classes: a comparative approach
Laura-May Simard
Introduction
1 Les étudiants qui aspirent à intégrer le monde de la recherche doivent maitriser
l’anglais académique et ses codes. C’est l’avis de Swales (1997 : 374) quand il compare
l’anglais à un carnivore puissant (English as a Tyrannosaurus Rex) qui engloutit les autres
habitants des pâturages de la linguistique académique. Ce constat est toujours
pertinent, si ce n’est plus, vingt années plus tard, alors qu’un nombre croissant de
cursus universitaires incluent une formation en anglais (Millot 2017 : 70).
2 Si l’anglais scientifique est régulièrement enseigné, nous proposons d’explorer une
méthode encore peu utilisée dans les salles de classe, mais reconnue comme ayant des
résultats positifs (O’Sullivan 2007 ; Chambers 2010 ; Boulton & Tyne 2013) : le data-
driven learning, tel que nommé par un des précurseurs de cette approche, Johns (1991).
Cette méthode, aussi appelée « apprentissage sur corpus » (ASC) par Boulton et Tyne
(2013), utilise des corpus pour l’enseignement langagier. L’étudiant se positionne alors
typiquement comme un chercheur et le professeur comme un guide dans un
apprentissage qui se fait au rythme des découvertes dans le corpus. Afin de décrire
cette dynamique d’apprentissage, Chambers (2010 : 15) rappelle la métaphore du
détective Sherlock Holmes utilisée par Johns (1997 : 101) qui « souligne le rôle plus actif
et plus autonome de l’apprenant dans cette nouvelle approche ».
3 Dans le cadre d’un cours d’anglais scientifique qui vise notamment l’apprentissage de la
rédaction du résumé de recherche (ou « abstract »), nous voulons essayer de mesurer
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l’apport qu’un corpus spécialisé peut avoir comparé à un outil plus usité des étudiants :
le dictionnaire en ligne. Nous proposons ici une étude comparative de l’utilisation de
ces deux ressources pour la rédaction d’un résumé.
4 Après une première partie dédiée au cadre théorique, nous présentons le cadre
méthodologique et institutionnel de cette expérience. La troisième partie consiste en
une analyse de l’utilisation des deux ressources par des étudiants en master. La
dernière partie de cette étude propose une discussion et des applications pédagogiques
des résultats.
1. Cadre de l’étude
1.1. Les recherches en apprentissage sur corpus
1.1.1. Un domaine en plein essor, mais peinant à s’exporter
5 Dans leur panorama rétrospectif de l’ASC en 2013, Boulton et Tyne parlent d’une
« révolution corpus » en citant McCarthy (Boulton & Tyne 2013 : 97 ; McCarthy 2008 :
564). Il est vrai que depuis sa popularisation par Johns dans les années 1980, l’ASC n’a
cessé de se développer (Chambers 2005 : 111) de concert avec la linguistique de corpus.
6 Même si la recherche en ASC ne cesse de se développer et de démontrer les avantages
de l’outil corpus, les résultats publiés par les chercheurs ne semblent pas avoir de réel
impact sur les politiques pédagogiques de l’apprentissage des langues en France et
ailleurs. (Cazade 2001 ; Bernardini 2000 ; Römer 2006 ; McCarthy 2008 ; Boulton & Tyne
2013). L’ASC offre des perspectives intéressantes, mais trop peu explorées par les
enseignants. Ce phénomène explique très certainement la véritable croisade entreprise
par certains chercheurs, qui se sont donné une « mission corpus » (Römer 2009). En
effet, on comprend cette position en lisant le raisonnement d’O’Sullivan :
An understanding of the implications and relevance of corpus use for pedagogymay help teachers and learners overcome this resistance, and hence accelerate theprocess of “percolation” (McEnery & Wilson 1997 : 5) or the “trickle down” (Leech1997 : 2) of corpus research to language teaching and learning. (2007 : 269)
1.1.2. Des résultats positifs à nuancer
7 Nombre d’expériences effectuées en ASC montrent des résultats encourageants (Sun
2003 ; Chambers & O’Sullivan 2004 ; Chambers 2005 ; Koo 2006 ; Boulton 2010 ; Mueller
& Jacobsen 2016 ; Boulton & Landure 2016 ; Kennedy & Miceli 2017) ; néanmoins on
trouve également des critiques à leur égard.
8 Premièrement, malgré les résultats avancés, nombreux sont les chercheurs qui
déplorent une trop grande distance entre recherche et pratique : « the direct exploitationof corpora in the EFL classroom is unusual » (Aijmer 2009).
9 De plus, la nature même de certaines de ces études, qui utilisent des questionnaires et
entretiens avec des étudiants comme unique source afin de confirmer l’apport des
corpus, ne permet pas de résultats quantitatifs autres que concernant l’attitude des
étudiants, comme le soulignent Boulton et Tyne (2013 : 100) en se référant notamment
à Sun (2003). Il faut noter que ces études purement qualitatives ne représenteraient que
moins d’un quart des études publiées en linguistique appliquée selon Richards (2009), et
que le domaine est tout à fait abordable avec des outils quantitatifs tels que les
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statistiques. Les recherches quantitatives et avec des méthodes diverses sont en plein
développement (Boulton & Cobb 2017), la présente expérience s’inscrit dans cet élan.
1.2. Apprentissage sur corpus : applications pédagogiques
10 Dans cette section, nous proposons un rapide aperçu des applications pédagogiques que
peuvent avoir les corpus. Au vu du large choix de types de corpus et d’approches
d’utilisation, plusieurs exercices, visant des compétences différentes, sont possibles
avec un corpus. Chambers parle de l’éventail de choix et mentionne notamment « des
projets [qui] ont vu le jour dans lesquels un corpus sert de base à des exercices de
reconstitution (Mangenot 2000) ou à la révision d’un texte écrit par l’apprenant
(O’Sullivan & Chambers 2006) » (2010 : 10). Nous commencerons par parler de
l’enseignement et de l’apprentissage avec un corpus : comment ils informent les
pratiques pédagogiques et comment ils peuvent aider les apprenants d’une langue.
L’aide à la rédaction étant l’objet de notre étude, on s’attardera plus en détail sur
l’utilisation des corpus dans ce contexte-ci. Sans proposer ni détailler des exercices
précis à réaliser avec corpus, les applications possibles sont évoquées succinctement.
1.2.1. Enseignement et apprentissage avec un corpus
11 Les corpus peuvent être utilisés de manière indirecte pour l’enseignement ; ils
informent notamment les créateurs de matériel pédagogique (Boulton & Landure 2016).
De plus, les corpus d’apprenants ont également vocation à informer les pratiques des
enseignants (Flowerdew 2001). De Cock et Tyne (2014 : 138-145) présentent plusieurs
études visant à mieux comprendre les difficultés des étudiants et à informer les
pratiques d’enseignement.
12 Le A de ASC, l’apprentissage, illustre les cas où le corpus sert à sensibiliser les étudiants
à la manière dont la langue est utilisée. Harwood (2005) avance que le but premier de
l’utilisation de supports pédagogiques (dont le corpus) en anglais de spécialité est de
sensibiliser les étudiants aux principales caractéristiques du discours universitaire. En
effet, les corpus peuvent être utilisés en classe pour faire de l’analyse de discours ou
simplement pour explorer des faits de langue (appartenant à un genre particulier ou
non selon si on utilise un corpus général ou spécialisé).
13 Chambers (2010 : 13) va dans ce sens, mais indique que le corpus peut également
constituer une aide précieuse à la rédaction :
La plupart des enseignants-chercheurs qui ont étudié l’emploi de corpus par leursétudiants se sont concentrés sur l’apprentissage des langues en général plutôt quesur l’apprentissage de la compétence plus spécifique qu’est l’écriture.
14 C’est par ailleurs ce que nous cherchons à analyser dans la présente étude. Ces deux
utilisations du corpus ne sont cependant pas mutuellement exclusives. Kennedy et
Miceli suggèrent d’ailleurs que l’utilisation guidée d’un corpus pour un exercice de
rédaction permet de développer la sensibilité linguistique des étudiants et de les
entraîner à se poser les bonnes questions (2017 : 111).
1.2.2. Aide à la rédaction
15 De nombreuses études démontrent que le corpus peut être utilisé comme une ressource
pour la rédaction (Kennedy & Miceli 2001 ; Lee & Swales 2006 ; Boulton & Landure 2016 ;
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Boulton & Cobb 2017), même avec des étudiants de niveau plus faible (Frankenberg-
Garcia 2014 ; Mueller & Jacobsen 2016). De plus, il a été écrit que l’utilisation d’un
corpus spécialisé pour enseigner la rédaction d’un genre spécialisé permet aux
étudiants d’améliorer leurs compétences de rédaction (Landure 2004 ; O’Sullivan &
Chambers 2006) et de disposer d’exemples directement liés à leur contexte de rédaction
(Chambers 2010). La question qui se pose alors est celle de la comparaison du corpus à
d’autres ressources plus classiques (notamment les dictionnaires).
16 Si le dictionnaire est une ressource plus pertinente pour vérifier l’orthographe d’un
mot (Chambers & O’Sullivan 2004 : 166), il n’en est pas forcément de même pour l’usage
des prépositions, qu’un corpus pourra éclairer (ibidem 167-8). Dans son étude
qualitative de l’utilisation de corpus, dictionnaires et dictionnaires de synonymes, Koo
(2006) demande à ses étudiants de paraphraser un article de presse en utilisant ces
différentes ressources. L’exercice de rédaction est souvent réalisé en combinant les
ressources, mais les étudiants utilisent néanmoins l’outil corpus plus fréquemment
(47,4 % du temps), notamment pour chercher des collocations. Landure, dans une étude
comparant dictionnaire bilingue, corpus général et corpus spécifique, conclut que les
dictionnaires, tout comme les corpus, « ne peuvent répondre à tous les besoins »
(2014 : 316) tout en précisant que les dictionnaires ne permettent pas de faire des
recherches de collocations ou d’expressions idiomatiques spécifiques. Mueller et
Jacobsen (2016 : 5) indiquent que des études récentes montrent que les données offertes
par un corpus peuvent être plus utiles que des données plus classiques. Il faut toutefois
préciser qu’un nombre croissant de dictionnaires incluent des exemples et des données
linguistiques directement issus de corpus (Frankenberg-Garcia 2015 : 490), les
dictionnaires ne sont donc plus aussi éloignés d’un contexte authentique qu’avant.
Cependant, Frankenberg-Garcia (2014) souligne la nécessité pour les apprenants d’avoir
accès à de multiples exemples (au moins trois) afin d’améliorer leur production. Ceci
n’est pas le cas dans tous les dictionnaires incluant des exemples tirés de corpus. Enfin,
la combinaison des ressources pour la production semble être la solution la plus
bénéfique au vu des apports différents des dictionnaires et des corpus (Landure 2004 ;
Koo 2006 ; Frankenberg-Garcia 2015).
17 Ces résultats positifs doivent néanmoins prendre en compte les « retours
d’expérience » des étudiants, qui sont parfois négatifs (Pérez-Paredes et al. 2012 : 489).
Certains déplorent des interfaces trop compliquées (Mueller & Jacobsen 2016 : 8),
d’autres la difficulté à se positionner comme « chercheurs en linguistique » lors de
l’utilisation du concordancier (Kennedy & Miceli 2017 : 93). Les difficultés lors de la
prise en main du concordancier et de la formulation d’hypothèses sont en effet des
freins courants à la bonne utilisation du corpus (Kennedy & Miceli 2001 ; Bernardini
2000 ; O’Sullivan & Chambers 2006). La présente étude cherche à confirmer, ou non,
certains de ces résultats dans le cadre d’un exercice de rédaction d’un genre spécialisé
(le résumé d’article de recherche) avec accès à une seule ressource ; on ne pourra ainsi
se prononcer sur les bénéfices de la combinaison d’un dictionnaire et d’un corpus.
2. Méthodologie
18 L’expérience consiste à demander aux étudiants de faire un travail de rédaction (d’un
résumé) avec accès à un corpus de résumés ou un dictionnaire bilingue en ligne. Les
étudiants doivent également remplir un journal de bord dans lequel ils détaillent toutes
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leurs recherches. Deux questionnaires, un en début de semestre visant à préciser le
profil des étudiants puis un en fin de semestre afin d’avoir un retour sur la formation et
l’expérience, permettent de compléter les données présentées.
2.1. Cadre de l’expérience : contexte et public
19 L’étude s’inscrit dans un contexte universitaire d’apprentissage de la rédaction du
résumé. L’expérience présentée a été mise en place dans le cadre de vacations à l’École
normale supérieure Paris-Saclay (ENSPS) au cours du premier semestre de l’année
universitaire 2016-2017. L’ENSPS est une grande école sélective accueillant des
étudiants de divers domaines, à partir de la L3, sur concours ou dossier. Les deux
classes ayant participé à l’expérience ont eu une formation de vingt heures en anglais
scientifique. Dans le cadre du nouveau diplôme de l’ENSPS mis en place en septembre
2016, chaque étudiant, quel que soit son parcours, doit passer une certification
d’anglais scientifique conçue par le département d’anglais : le SWAP (Scientific Writing
Assessment Program). Cette certification, qui se veut professionnalisante, est en partie
centrée sur la connaissance du genre du résumé et certaines des six sections font appel
à une connaissance de la phraséologie employée ou encore des différentes étapes du
résumé. La préparation au SWAP mène à une introduction au genre du résumé, sa
phraséologie et son style. Comme tous nos étudiants sont formés au SWAP (ou
reçoivent une formation similaire), ils abordent l’exercice de rédaction d’un résumé,
que nous leur proposons dans le cadre de cette étude, avec un bagage de connaissances
non négligeable, qu’il faut prendre en compte dans l’analyse des résultats.
20 Le public est constitué de vingt-quatre étudiants inscrits en master et dans deux
parcours distincts à l’ENSPS. Le premier groupe est composé de dix étudiants en M1
Sciences sociales, la majorité des élèves ayant un niveau « avancé », selon les
coordinatrices des cours LANSAD de l’ENSPS. Le deuxième groupe est composé de
quatorze étudiants en M2 Génie mécanique, dont le niveau d’anglais est plus faible ;
certains d’entre eux ont une langue maternelle différente du français, ce qui peut avoir
une incidence sur leurs productions en anglais. Les métadonnées concernant les
participants sont consignées dans un tableau (Annexe 1) L’ensemble des étudiants a
reçu la même formation à la rédaction du résumé et à l’utilisation du corpus. Tous les
étudiants ont été informés lors du premier cours de l’étude et ont accepté d’y participer
tout en étant assurés que leurs travaux seraient anonymisés. La majorité des étudiants
ont vocation à faire de la recherche dans le cadre de leur profession ; ils se sont
montrés pour la plupart réceptifs à un cours d’anglais de la recherche et à l’utilisation
d’un nouvel outil.
2.2. Ressources utilisées
21 Le choix des deux ressources a pour but de permettre une évaluation de l’apport d’un
corpus par rapport à un outil plus classique. Nous avons initié nos étudiants à
l’utilisation d’un corpus spécialisé (de résumés), premièrement car ils devaient pouvoir
s’en servir pour l’expérience, mais également car le but du cours est de les sensibiliser
aux outils qu’ils peuvent utiliser pour parfaire leur anglais scientifique.
22 Le corpus spécialisé utilisé avec les étudiants est constitué d’une partie d’un corpus de
résumés d’articles scientifiques compilé par Anthony Saber, directeur du département
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de langues à l’ENSPS, en utilisant les outils avancés de recherche bibliographique et
d’exportation des références de ScienceDirect. Ce corpus de résumés est divisé en dix
sous-corpus par domaine (biologie, chimie, linguistique, médecine, etc.). Nous avons
choisi de travailler avec deux sous-corpus dans les domaines de nos étudiants : Sciences
sociales et Génie mécanique. Nous justifions ce choix d’un corpus relativement
restreint (382 942 mots) en nous appuyant sur les travaux de plusieurs chercheurs
(Tribble 2001 ; Flowerdew 2004 ; Charles 2007) qui considèrent qu’un corpus restreint
est plus adapté dans le cadre d’enseignements en anglais de spécialité. De plus, Aston
(1997) considère que l’utilisation d’un corpus restreint est un bon premier pas vers des
corpus plus larges et permet de comprendre les enjeux de l’ASC. Le corpus de résumés
utilisé contient 1 995 résumés (1 000 en Génie mécanique et 995 en Sciences sociales)
pour un total de 382 942 mots. Nous avons utilisé le concordancier en ligne IMS Corpus
Workbench (Evert & Hardie 2011)1 plutôt qu’un concordancier à télécharger tel que
Antconc pour des raisons pratiques. En effet, nous avons encouragé les étudiants à
utiliser le corpus chez eux et nous pensions que le fait de devoir télécharger une
application sur leur ordinateur serait un frein. Le corpus a été mis en ligne sur IMS
(plateforme par ailleurs utilisée pour les cours de linguistique de corpus de l’UFR EILA
de Paris 7) et protégé par un mot de passe. Le concordancier offre plusieurs outils, mais
nous n’en avons présenté que deux en détail aux étudiants : standard query, qui permet
de chercher une suite de mots dans le corpus et d’avoir accès à toutes les occurrences
de celle-ci, et l’outil collocation, qui permet de chercher les collocats les plus fréquents
d’un mot ou d’une suite de mots. Les étudiants étaient vivement encouragés à se servir
du corpus chez eux après la première approche que nous allons détailler dans la section
2.3.2. C’est à la suite de cette très courte introduction à l’outil corpus que nous avons
demandé aux étudiants de réaliser l’exercice qui sert pour l’étude.
23 Afin de juger l’apport qu’un outil tel que le corpus peut avoir sur la rédaction d’un
résumé, il est nécessaire d’avoir un « témoin » auquel comparer les écrits avec corpus.
Le dictionnaire en ligne WordReference (WR) a été retenu pour plusieurs raisons. Les
étudiants connaissent tous cet outil et beaucoup (79,2 %) le citent comme une ressource
régulièrement utilisée, une initiation en classe n’était ainsi pas nécessaire. Le
fonctionnement de WR est éloigné de la mise en contexte d’un corpus spécialisé. Enfin,
ce dictionnaire, bien que très complet, concerne l’anglais général alors que le corpus ne
contient que des éléments d’anglais scientifique et du genre du résumé.
2.3. Mise en place de l’expérience
24 L’exercice de rédaction mis en place essaye de répondre à une volonté de rigueur
méthodologique tout en se pliant au cadre institutionnel (notation des étudiants,
disponibilité de la salle informatique, nombre d’heures à dédier à l’expérience…). Après
avoir présenté plus précisément les questionnaires soumis aux étudiants, nous
expliquons en premier lieu comment nous avons initié les étudiants à l’outil corpus,
puis nous présentons l’exercice en détail.
2.3.1. Questionnaires de début et de fin de semestre
25 Les étudiants ont rempli deux questionnaires en début et fin de semestre. Le premier
visait principalement à recueillir des informations à leur sujet (profil, connaissance de
l’anglais, connaissance des corpus) et a permis l’élaboration du tableau 5 (Annexe 1)
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présentant le profil des étudiants. Le deuxième questionnaire, plus long, demandait aux
étudiants de donner leurs sentiments sur l’expérience. Ils devaient premièrement
répondre à des questions avec une échelle de Likert en quatre points à propos de la
prise en main du corpus, de son utilisation, de la rédaction avec corpus et puis de
l’exercice de rédaction de résumés à proprement parler. Les étudiants pouvaient
ensuite écrire un commentaire libre au sujet de l’outil corpus tel qu’il avait été présenté
en cours.
26 Il n’est pas possible de présenter toutes les données dans cette étude et nous avons
décidé de ne mentionner les résultats de ces différents questionnaires que pour
illustrer notre propos, le cas échéant.
2.3.2. Première approche du corpus : exercice guidé et pratique autonome
27 Une majorité (70,8 %) des étudiants ignorait ce qu’était un corpus au début du semestre
et tous étaient de nouveaux utilisateurs. La question de la première approche se posait
et nous devions notamment faire un choix entre approche libre ou guidée. Dans son
étude de 2007, Charles parle également de ce dilemme en opposant les bénéfices de
l’approche guidée (résultats plus exploitables et interprétations guidées) à ceux de
l’approche libre (rôle de chercheur [Johns 1991] et d’explorateur [Bernardini 2001] pour
l’étudiant).
28 Tout comme Charles, nous avons choisi une première approche guidée afin de
sensibiliser les étudiants le plus tôt possible à un outil qui ne leur est pas familier :
Providing a controlled introduction to concordancing with a limited number ofconcordance lines and a clearly defined set of questions can assist students, notonly to gain specific answers to the questions posed, but also to develop theirsearching and interpreting techniques. (2007 : 297)
29 De plus, le temps constituait un facteur crucial. En effet, les contraintes d’organisation
du cours et d’accès à la salle informatique nous permettaient seulement deux heures de
sensibilisation au corpus et il fallait que celles-ci soient les plus efficaces possible, étant
donné le défi que représente la consultation d’un corpus pour des étudiants non initiés
(Pascual Pérez-Paredes et al. 2012). Nous voulions surtout sensibiliser les étudiants à
l’utilisation de l’outil, tout en continuant de travailler sur le genre du résumé. Tout
comme Sun (2003), nous avons choisi d’allier une introduction théorique à une mise en
pratique. Après une brève explication de deux des principaux outils du concordancier
(voir 2.2), nous avons choisi de donner aux étudiants une liste d’expressions souvent
relevées dans les résumés à compléter par des collocations trouvées grâce au
concordancier. Par exemple, « this study… » devait être complété par des verbes
adéquats. Cet exercice permet aux étudiants de comparer l’intérêt des deux
fonctionnalités et de se familiariser avec l’interface du concordancier. Les étudiants
devaient ensuite se servir du corpus pour essayer de corriger un résumé rédigé à la
maison. Ils étaient guidés pendant la séance s’ils avaient des questions ou des
problèmes de prise en main.
2.3.3. L’exercice de rédaction - comparaison entre l’apport d’un corpus et d’un
dictionnaire de traduction en ligne (WordReference)
30 L’exercice de rédaction est réalisé par les deux groupes séparément et les groupes ne
communiquent pas entre eux. Chaque étudiant dispose d’un même article de presse du
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journal britannique The Guardian2 détaillant une étude sur l’origine de la sociabilité des
chiens et donnant toutes les informations nécessaires à l’écriture d’un résumé
correspondant. Plusieurs facteurs ont déterminé ce choix. Premièrement, les domaines
de la biologie zoologique et de la génétique ne sont pas maîtrisés par nos étudiants, ce
qui signifie qu’aucun d’entre eux n’a un avantage de connaissances phraséologiques ou
terminologiques lors de la rédaction. Ensuite, le style journalistique dans lequel est
rédigé l’article n’est pas ce qui est attendu dans un résumé d’article scientifique, ce qui
les oblige à reformuler l’information afin de respecter le genre attendu. Enfin, l’article
comprend 550 mots et la langue est accessible, ce qui est primordial pour éviter autant
que possible que l’exercice soit moins bien réalisé par certains en raison de problèmes
de compréhension. Les étudiants disposent d’une heure pour rédiger un résumé
correspondant à l’article sur ordinateur.
31 Chaque groupe est divisé en deux, un demi-groupe a accès au corpus de résumés et
l’autre à WR. À la suite de désistements d’étudiants, les groupes sont légèrement
déséquilibrés : sur 24 étudiants, 13 travaillent avec le corpus et 11 avec WR. Nous
veillons à ce que le niveau des étudiants dans chaque sous-groupe soit le plus équilibré
possible afin que ce facteur ne soit pas trop important dans les résultats statistiques. La
figure 1 indique la répartition des étudiants selon la ressource et le niveau.
Figure 1. Répartition des étudiants selon la ressource et le niveau d’anglais
32 Outre le résumé, il est demandé à chaque étudiant de rendre un deuxième document,
que nous appelons un « journal de bord »3, dans lequel sont consignées toutes les
recherches faites avec la ressource à disposition. De plus, ils doivent mettre en gras
tous les passages du résumé écrits avec l’aide de la ressource.
33 Les consignes sont les suivantes :
Write an academic abstract for the following article. You have to write the abstractas if you were one of the scientists on the research team. During your work, you willhave access to [resource]. Please put in bold any part of your abstract that you willhave written with the help of this resource. You also have to create a separate document in which you will write down anythingyou looked up with the resource.
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34 Cet exercice nous permet d’avoir vingt-quatre résumés contenant les mêmes
informations ainsi que des explications sur l’utilisation de la ressource pour vingt-trois
résumés, un étudiant n’ayant pas jugé nécessaire d’utiliser le corpus.
2.4. Traitement des données
2.4.1. Compilation du corpus d’apprenants
35 Comme nous l’avons mentionné précédemment, l’exercice mis en place permet de
constituer un corpus de résumés d’apprenants (désormais CA) de 7 440 mots. Afin de
faciliter la lecture des résultats, chaque résumé est nommé comme suit : Numéro
d’anonymat_Ressource_Domaine_Version. Par exemple, le résumé de l’étudiant 1 qui
est en Sciences sociales et a eu le corpus comme ressource est nommé : 1_C_SS. Notons
par ailleurs que la taille restreinte du corpus nous permet de faire nos analyses sans
outil, mais simplement en passant en revue chaque résumé.
2.4.2. Analyses quantitatives et qualitatives avec plusieurs sources
36 Ces dernières années, le développement des technologies et de la recherche en ASC a
mené à une multitude d’approches afin de comprendre comment les étudiants utilisent
le corpus. Ces données sont essentielles pour compléter les résultats d’une étude
comme celle-ci (Pérez-Paredes et al. 2011 : 249). L’enregistrement en temps réel des
pratiques de recherche des étudiants (Park & Kinginger 2010) et l’utilisation des
historiques de consultations couplés à des questionnaires et entretiens (Landure 2014)
font partie des méthodes de collectes de données sur l’utilisation des corpus par les
apprenants.
37 Suivant une méthodologie proche de celle de Kennedy et Miceli (2017), nous avons
choisi de demander aux étudiants de rendre compte de leurs recherches au fil des
travaux demandés. Les étudiants ayant tous eu accès à une formation en anglais
scientifique et à la rédaction du résumé, il nous semble que l’utilisation de la ressource
est la variable la moins problématique à étudier. En effet, tout passage contenant des
erreurs (ou, au contraire, des choix particulièrement judicieux) et qui n’est pas attribué
à l’utilisation de la ressource ne peut être analysé dans le cadre d’une étude de l’apport
du corpus à la rédaction. Ce n’est qu’en s’intéressant à ce que produisent les étudiants
en utilisant leur ressource que nous pouvons tirer des conclusions véritables sur
l’apport de ces ressources. C’est pourquoi nous analysons les productions des étudiants
dans le cadre de l’utilisation de la ressource (autrement dit, les passages qu’ils ont mis
en gras).
38 L’ensemble de ces données nous permet de chercher des réponses aux questions
suivantes : Comment la ressource (corpus ou WR) est-elle utilisée ? Cette utilisation
entraîne-t-elle une amélioration ou est-elle source d’erreur ?
3. Utilisation des ressources par les étudiants
39 Nous proposons d’étudier la manière dont les étudiants se servent de la ressource à
laquelle ils ont accès, ainsi que l’efficacité de cette utilisation. Les résultats proviennent
des journaux de bord tenus par les étudiants pendant l’exercice. Les statistiques
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d’utilisation de la ressource sont d’abord présentées, puis le type de recherches mené
pour chaque ressource et enfin l’efficacité des ressources.
3.1. Résultats statistiques
40 La figure 2 indique la répartition du nombre moyen de recherches et de leur utilisation
par ressource. L’utilisation de la ressource se calcule en observant le nombre de
passages mis en gras dans le résumé par l’étudiant.
Figure 2. Utilisation des recherches par ressource pour la rédaction
41 On peut voir que si les étudiants utilisant WR font légèrement plus de recherches en
moyenne, la tendance s’inverse pour les recherches utilisées. Nous verrons si ce
phénomène peut s’expliquer par la manière dont la ressource est utilisée.
3.2. Modes d’utilisation de la ressource
42 Il convient maintenant de se pencher plus en détail sur la manière dont les étudiants
font leurs recherches, c’est-à-dire la manière dont ils se servent de la ressource pour
faire des recherches. Pour cela, nous nous servons des journaux de bord des étudiants.
Ces journaux ne sont pas tous écrits de la même manière, et certains étudiants
n’utilisent pas de métalangage pour expliquer leurs recherches.
43 Nous avons néanmoins identifié trois types de recherches pour la ressource corpus
(collocation, standard query et vérification) et quatre types de recherches pour la
ressource WR (synonyme, anglais vers français, français vers anglais et orthographe). Tableau 1. Types de recherches effectuées avec les ressources
Corpus
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CollocationL’étudiant se sert de la fonction collocation sur le corpus afin de voir les collocats
d’un mot ou d’une expression.
Standard
Query
L’étudiant cherche toutes les occurrences du mot ou expression avec l’outil
« standard query » et tire des conclusions des résultats en les voyant tous.
Vérification
Ceci est une sous-catégorie de recherche que nous avons cru bon d’identifier.
L’étudiant dit avoir utilisé le corpus expressément pour vérifier une intuition, il
cherche à confirmer que sa formulation est correcte.
WordReference
Synonyme L’étudiant cherche les synonymes d’un mot.
Anglais vers
français
L’étudiant se sert de WR pour traduire de l’anglais vers le français, principalement
pour comprendre l’article du Guardian.
Français vers
anglaisL’étudiant se sert de WR pour traduire du français vers l’anglais.
Orthographe L’étudiant se sert de WR pour vérifier l’orthographe d’un mot.
44 La figure 3 illustre la répartition du type de recherches menées avec le corpus. On peut
voir que les recherches de type « standard query » sont les plus courantes (30
recherches). Ceci s’explique probablement par le fait que c’est l’outil le plus immédiat
sur le concordancier et les étudiants ne sont pas forcément à l’aise avec l’outil
collocation.
Figure 3. Répartition du type de recherches faites sur corpus
45 Nous étions avec les étudiants lors de l’exercice et avons proposé à ceux utilisant le
concordancier de les aider s’ils avaient du mal à manier l’outil, sans pour autant les
aider dans leur choix de recherches ou l’interprétation des résultats. Le plus faible
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nombre de recherches de collocation n’est normalement pas dû au fait que les
étudiants avaient oublié la technique permettant de chercher des collocats.
Figure 4. Répartition du type de recherches sur corpus par nombre d’étudiants
46 Nous ne nous attendions pas à trouver autant d’utilisations du concordancier pour
« vérification » et avions surtout présenté l’outil comme un moyen de trouver des
expressions ou termes. Comme l’indique la figure 4, six étudiants sur les treize utilisant
le concordancier ont utilisé cette fonction, ce qui indiquerait que même après une
courte prise en main, ils se sentaient assez à l’aise avec l’outil pour s’en emparer eux-
mêmes et l’adapter à leurs besoins.
47 Maintenant que nous avons vu les fréquences d’utilisation et la manière dont les
ressources sont utilisées, la dernière étape de notre réflexion consiste à essayer de
mesurer l’efficacité de la ressource.
3.3. Efficacité de la ressource pour la rédaction
48 L’efficacité de la ressource est calculée en utilisant le nombre de recherches utilisées et
le nombre de recherches efficaces. Nous considérons qu’une recherche est efficace si
elle ne se trouve pas dans un passage avec une erreur qui lui est liée.
49 Dix étudiants ont fait des erreurs en lien avec la ressource utilisée (5 des 124 étudiants
sur corpus et 5 des 11 étudiants sur WR). Le pourcentage d’efficacité moyen avec le
corpus est 78,68 % contre 72 % pour l’utilisation de WordReference. L’utilisation du
corpus mène à une rédaction légèrement plus efficace que celle de WR, ce résultat
semble indiquer que l’utilisation du corpus de résumés est plus efficace pour éviter les
erreurs dans un résumé qu’un dictionnaire de langue générale, l’écart restant modeste.
Comme le soulignent Mueller et Jacobsen, il faudrait idéalement pouvoir comparer
l’utilisation de ces deux ressources pour chaque erreur afin de statuer précisément sur
l’utilité du corpus face à celle du dictionnaire (2015 : 18).
50 Notons que les deux ressources ont un pourcentage d’efficacité supérieur à la
moyenne : dans les deux cas, l’utilisation de la ressource n’est pas principalement
source d’erreur. Il est difficile de dire si l’utilisation entraîne une amélioration de la
rédaction en ne regardant que ces chiffres. Il faudrait savoir ce que l’étudiant aurait
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écrit avant l’utilisation de la ressource afin de faire une comparaison avec le résultat
final ; nous n’avons pas de données de cette nature.
51 L’outil corpus étant l’objet principal de cette étude, nous allons d’abord commenter
certains cas d’utilisation efficace du corpus. Puis nous présenterons les cas d’utilisation
inefficace du corpus et un cas d’utilisation inefficace de WR qui aurait pu être amélioré
avec un accès au corpus.
3.3.1. Utilisations efficaces du corpus
52 Comme nous venons de l’indiquer, le corpus est principalement utilisé de manière
efficace (dans 78,68 % des cas). Nous n’allons pas développer tous les cas d’utilisation
efficace (il y en a 37), mais nous nous concentrons sur certains exemples qui présentent
un intérêt particulier et que nous recensons dans le tableau 2.
Tableau 2 . Utilisations efficaces du corpus
Étudiant Recherche Résultat
3_C_SS
standard query “hypothesis” This paper investigates the hypothesis
standard query “experiment”An experiment was conducted to examine
how dogs cooperate with humans
standard query “interest” This is a topic of great interest for the field
standard query “encourage”
That’s why we encourage further
investigation to start with other breeds of
dogs
6_C_SS
Classified : j’ai cherché ce mot pour
savoir s’il était bien employé dans ce
sens/contexte
Their reactions were recorded and the
different behaviors were classified
Associated + préposition
Yet, four of these have been previously
associated with an opposite behavior in
humans.
Could be + verbe : j’ai voulu vérifier le
temps du verbe qui suivait could beOur investigation could be extended to other
breeds of dogs for more reliability
13_C_GM
Collocation database: Responsible genes are responsible for canine interest in
humans
Collocation database: Experiment Experiments were conducted
53 Standard query
L’étudiant 3 se sert de la fonction standard query afin de trouver des contextes
d’utilisation de certains mots (hypothesis, experiment, encourage et interest). Dans chaque
cas, la recherche lui permet une rédaction sans erreur et avec un langage adapté au
genre visé.
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54 Par exemple, pour le mot interest, une recherche permet de trouver des contextes
d’utilisation tels que :
Figure 5. Extraits de concordancier pour interest
Thermally-enhanced grouting can be of
significantinterest
in a high thermal conductivity ground (such as
saturated sand)
Bone is a topic of great interest for researchers
many instructors are adding elements
of highinterest
to students to their teaching materials and
activities
55 L’étudiant s’est sûrement inspiré de ce type de cas d’utilisation pour en venir à sa
propre mise en anglais : This is a topic of great interest for the field.
56 Collocation L’étudiant 13 a utilisé l’outil de recherche de collocations. On ne sait malheureusement
pas quelle partie du discours il recherchait, mais on peut se douter qu’il voulait trouver
un verbe dans le cas du mot experiment. Le verbe conducted est en effet le verbe le plus
fréquent dans le contexte de experiment. On ne sait ce que l’étudiant cherchait pour
responsible, mais sa recherche lui a sûrement permis de trouver la bonne préposition
(for) car c’est le mot qui entre en collocation le plus fréquemment avec cet adjectif.
57 Vérification
Comme nous l’avons stipulé, nous ne nous attendions pas à ce que les étudiants se
servent autant du corpus pour effectuer des vérifications.
58 L’étudiant 6 s’est servi du corpus pour vérifier deux aspects différents de la langue.
Pour le mot classified, il voulait vérifier que le contexte d’utilisation était le bon, il s’agit
donc d’une recherche liée au lexique. Pour could be, en revanche, c’est le temps du
verbe qui suit qui intéressait l’étudiant. Le corpus sert afin de vérifier de la grammaire,
et cela fonctionne.
59 Ces différents exemples nous permettent d’avancer que des étudiants aux niveaux
variés (C1+, C1 et B2 respectivement pour les étudiants 3, 6 et 13) peuvent utiliser le
corpus de différentes manières en obtenant des résultats très satisfaisants. Nous avons
vu des cas d’utilisation du corpus pour des phénomènes de langue (le temps d’un
verbe), mais aussi de genre résumé (des collocations liées au genre scientifique). Notons
que les vérifications présentées sont très simples et sont effectuées en une étape, on
peut donc stipuler qu’elles sont a priori accessibles à tout étudiant, si tant est qu’il se
pose de telles questions, comme le remarquent également Kennedy et Miceli (2017).
Cette remarque nous amène à évoquer maintenant les utilisations inefficaces du corpus
et à analyser certains exemples où, justement, le niveau d’anglais de l’étudiant semble
être une barrière que le corpus ne peut aider à surmonter totalement.
3.3.2. Utilisations inefficaces du corpus
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Tableau 3. Utilisations inefficaces du corpus
Étudiant Recherche Erreur
1_C_SS
Collocation :
The paper F0E0 Paper
describes
The paper describes the methodology we used.
14_C_GM
Verification :
On future works =>
correct
On future work, more experiments will be performed to
refine these results
23_C_GM
Standard query :
Several…nounsThey are severals genes
Standard query :
Sliding…nounsThree transparent sliding plastics covering a treat
Standard query :
Allow…preposition
Identifying…nouns
The result observed allow identifying of five genes
60 Le tableau 3 présente des utilisations inefficaces du corpus. Nous allons commenter le
cheminement de ces étudiants.
61 Étudiant 1 Cet étudiant a utilisé le corpus trois fois, dont une fois de manière inefficace. L’étudiant
a utilisé la fonction collocation pour chercher des collocats de paper. Le verbe describe
en est bien un ; on trouve treize occurrences de paper describes dans le corpus. Le choix
de paper describes est donc a priori correct. Ce qui pose problème est le contexte plus
large d’utilisation. L’étudiant écrit the paper describes the methodology we used. ce qui
constitue une erreur de transfert de contenu car cette phrase laisse à penser que seule
la méthode est décrite dans l’article, et non toute l’expérience.
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Figure 6. Résultats dans le concordancier pour paper describes
62 On voit dans les résultats du concordancier (figure 6) pour une standard query de paper
describes que ce qui vient après paper describes est une description des contenus de
l’article, plus ou moins détaillée. Le mot method est listé comme une première étape
(First, the paper describes suitable methods…), ou fait partie d’une présentation du plan (the
paper describes the proposed method, its stimulation and experimental results.) Si l’étudiant
avait suivi sa première recherche de collocation par une recherche de paper describes en
contexte, il aurait peut-être évité son erreur.
63 Étudiant 14 Cet étudiant a utilisé le corpus quatre fois, dont une fois de manière inefficace (il a donc
un pourcentage d’efficacité de la ressource de 75%). On trouve un élément notable dans
son utilisation menant à une erreur : l’expression *on future works, qu’il dit avoir
confirmée comme correcte avec le corpus, ne donne aucun résultat. En effet, une
vérification de cette expression lui aurait normalement confirmé qu’elle est erronée et
l’aurait empêché de commettre une erreur. On ne peut savoir ce qui s’est réellement
passé quand l’étudiant a fait sa recherche. L’expression future works donne un
résultat qui ne permet pas de confirmer que *on future works est correct. Ici c’est donc
une mauvaise utilisation de la ressource qui mène à une erreur.
Figure 7. Extrait du concordancier pour future works
Finally , this paper is concluded with possible future works .
64 Étudiant 23 Cet étudiant, de faible niveau, a utilisé le corpus cinq fois lors de la rédaction, dont trois
fois de manière inefficace (il a donc un pourcentage d’efficacité de la ressource de
40 %). Toutes ses recherches sont des standard query et nous allons nous intéresser aux
deux dernières (allow et identifying) qui ont mené à la phrase : *The result observed allow identifying of five genes.
65 Cette phrase contient deux erreurs de grammaire : il y a un problème d’accord sujet-
verbe, ainsi qu’un problème de forme grammaticale (on ne peut faire suivre allow d’une
forme en –ING seule dans cette phrase). La première erreur est très courante en
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grammaire et l’étudiant connaît cette règle, elle n’est pas directement due à la
ressource et n’est pas comptée comme telle. Le corpus comporte quarante occurrences
de allow qui permettent de voir son contexte grammatical d’utilisation : allow + GN5 + TO
+ VERBE ou alors allow + GN. Il est possible que l’étudiant ait compris cela et ait essayé
de faire une structure nominale en OF. Néanmoins, cette structure est fausse à cause de
l’absence d’article défini et car on utiliserait plutôt identification que le gérondif
identifying dans ce cas-là.
66 Si l’étudiant pense maîtriser cette structure alors il n’a pas de raison de faire des
recherches à ce propos, comme le souligne également Frankenberg-Garcia (2014). De
plus, il ne serait pas sans doute guère aisé pour un étudiant maîtrisant mal la langue de
faire des recherches de ce type afin de confirmer des structures grammaticales. Le
corpus n’aura pas suffi à combler les lacunes linguistiques de l’étudiant.
3.3.3. Utilisation erronée de WR rectifiable avec le corpus
Tableau 4. Cas d’utilisation inefficace de WR pour l’étudiant 17
Étudiant Recherche Erreur
17_WR_GMSynonyme of Experiment => discovery - empiricism -
experiment - research - testing – trial
Research was made in two
steps.
Dogs were tested in the first
part of experiment
67 L’étudiant 17 avait accès à WR et s’en est servi deux fois, dont une fois de manière
inefficace. Sa recherche de synonymes de experimentation mène à trois erreurs.
68 Pour *research was made in two steps, le verbe made n’est pas une collocation habituelle
de research. De plus, le mot research aura tendance à être défini dans ce contexte. Le
corpus propose par exemple :
Figure 8. Extrait du concordancier pour research was
The experimental research was divided in two series
The research was conducted in two stages .
69 On voit la présence du défini et de verbes plus fréquents dans ce type de contexte :
divided et conducted. L’étudiant n’avait pas accès au corpus et ne pouvait donc pas voir
ces résultats. Il est possible que l’utilisation du corpus lui ait évité ces erreurs.
70 Pour *Dogs were tested in the first part of experiment, là encore il y a un problème de
détermination, experiment doit être défini. Une recherche de the first part of dans le
corpus met ce phénomène en avant.
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Figure 9. Résultats dans le concordancier pour the first part of
71 Il faut tout de même rappeler que nos réflexes sur corpus ne sont pas forcément les
mêmes que ceux des étudiants : nous ne pouvons être sûre que l’étudiant 17 aurait
pensé à faire les recherches que nous venons de présenter. De plus, si l’étudiant ne
pense pas se tromper sur la détermination de the first part of experiment, il n’a pas de
raison de faire une telle recherche, comme nous l’avons souligné dans le cas de
l’étudiant 23.
72 Les différentes analyses effectuées au cours de cette partie nous permettent d’avancer
plusieurs raisons pour lesquelles le corpus peut être inefficace. Il est possible que
l’étudiant fasse une erreur d’utilisation (étudiant 14) et dans ce cas nous n’avons pas
assez d’informations pour comprendre cette erreur et proposer une amélioration de la
méthode. Un étudiant peut également formuler ses conclusions trop rapidement
(étudiant 1) et, dans ce cas-là, il est probable que des tutoriels plus complets sur
l’exploitation des résultats permettraient une amélioration de l’utilisation de l’outil
corpus, c’est également ce que pensent Landure (2014) et Kennedy et Miceli (2017).
Enfin, il est possible que les difficultés langagières de l’étudiant (étudiant 23) ne lui
permettent pas de résoudre certains problèmes rencontrés avec le corpus. Notons par
ailleurs que si l’apprenant ne pense pas avoir commis une erreur, il ne fera pas de
recherches. La connaissance langagière peut être un frein à l’utilisation du corpus.
Kennedy et Miceli abondent dans ce sens :
We recognize that during corpus investigations by language learners, there isconsiderable room for error due to lack of knowledge of the target language. (2001: 88)
4. Discussion
4.1. L’étude de l’utilisation de la ressource : un angle prometteur
73 Notre étude ayant lieu dans le cadre d’une formation en anglais scientifique et avec des
étudiants régulièrement confrontés à des écrits scientifiques en anglais, il était évident
que chaque étudiant avait un bagage de connaissances différent en anglais scientifique.
Une étude de leurs écrits en tant que tels n’aurait pas permis de discerner l’apport du
corpus (ou de WR) de leur propre apport lors de la rédaction du résumé. La méthode
que nous avons utilisée (étude des recherches avec la ressource, puis des recherches
utilisées et enfin de l’efficacité de cette utilisation) nous semble être un moyen
satisfaisant d’avoir des résultats permettant de statuer sur l’apport du corpus et la
manière dont il est utilisé.
74 De plus, les données permettent une meilleure compréhension du rapport au corpus
même si elles ne présentent qu’une vision incomplète de la réflexion des étudiants face
au corpus. C’est ce que soulignent également Kennedy et Miceli :
There were no feasible mechanisms for capturing completely the use the studentsmade of CWIC6 (including searches they deemed not useful) at any time and fromany place, let alone their intentions and thought processes. (2017 : 96)
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75 Les journaux de bord des étudiants permettent d’entrevoir leur processus de réflexion.
Nous avons noté que ceux-ci n’ont pas tous le même niveau de détails. Néanmoins, ce
sont des « coulisses » non négligeables dans l’étude de l’utilisation du corpus pour la
rédaction.
4.2. Applications pédagogiques
76 Une étude de terrain avec des étudiants est source de nombreuses remises en question,
mais également d’inspiration. Nous détaillons ici nos deux intuitions pédagogiques les
plus importantes à la fin de cette étude. Nous voulons insister sur la
multifonctionnalité du corpus, mais également présenter des pistes pour un cours
d’introduction à l’ASC.
4.2.1. Outil de rédaction et d’apprentissage
77 Nous avons mentionné que le corpus peut aider à l’apprentissage, à la rédaction, mais
également à la création de supports pédagogiques. Nous traitons les deux premiers
aspects ici, puis reviendrons sur le dernier point dans un second temps.
78 Si le corpus a des bénéfices directs pour la rédaction chez nos étudiants, nous avançons
également que celui-ci leur permet de développer leurs connaissances langagières.
L’effet le plus évident du corpus est sûrement l’apprentissage de la lexicogrammaire
(quand un étudiant cherche un verbe qui entre en collocation avec results par exemple).
Ceci est soutenu par Boulton et Cobb (2017 : 385) : « When it comes to the languageobjectives themselves, we found large or medium effects for vocabulary and lexicogrammar. »
79 Cependant, nous pensons également que le corpus a permis aux étudiants de
développer leurs capacités de réflexion linguistique : par exemple, en analysant des
lignes de concordancier ou en faisant des vérifications avec le corpus. Ceci se voit dans
la réflexion menée par certains dans le journal de bord (voir notamment les étudiants 6
et 15 en Annexe 2). Si ces résultats ne font que confirmer ce que nous savons déjà, il
pourrait être intéressant de s’en servir afin de convaincre un public moins
enthousiaste : les étudiants. En effet, dans le questionnaire de fin de semestre, la moitié
des étudiants pense que le corpus n’aide pas à apprendre la langue.
4.2.2. Conception d’un cours d’introduction à l’ASC
80 Les contraintes de l’environnement dans lequel nous avons fait cette étude ne nous ont
pas permis de faire une introduction au corpus aussi développée que nous l’aurions
aimé. Les étudiants ont d’ailleurs été plusieurs à faire des remarques allant dans ce sens
dans les questionnaires de fin de semestre.
81 Il ne faut pas oublier que les étudiants se servent déjà d’outils informatiques pour
l’apprentissage des langues et beaucoup utilisent Google comme un concordancier :
Learners are already involved in using information and communication technology(ICT) to search for answers to their language questions, especially via the use ofGoogle as a “concordancer” for the Web as “corpus” (Chinnery 2008; Kilgarriff &Grefenstette, 2003). Properly conceived DDL activities can build on these existingbehaviors, refining them and using them as a way in to corpus work (Boulton 2015).(Boulton & Cobb 2017 : 4)
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82 Il semblerait donc judicieux d’utiliser ce phénomène comme point d’entrée dans le
monde de l’ASC. Nous avons eu l’impression que certains étudiants ne voyaient le
corpus que comme un outil présenté à des fins précises ; une introduction présentant
Google comme un outil linguistique et le comparant à d’autres corpus permettrait peut-
être de les convaincre de l’accessibilité de l’outil corpus et des spécificités de chaque
type de corpus.
83 Nous pensons qu’une introduction plus efficace devrait également inclure des exemples
de bonnes (3.3.1) et de mauvaises (3.3.2) pratiques d’étudiants comme ceux que nous
avons développés dans les sections mentionnées. De manière générale, une initiation
devrait permettre aux étudiants de se familiariser avec l’outil corpus, mais également
d’en comprendre l’utilité et les enjeux. Au vu des résultats de l’étude, nous suggérons
d’insister sur le A de ASC : un corpus est un outil de rédaction/correction, mais
également (et principalement ?) un outil d’apprentissage. En effet, les 91 % des
étudiants convaincus de l’apport d’un corpus pour la rédaction d’un résumé sont à
contraster avec les 48 % d’étudiants déjà mentionnés qui ne croient pas que le corpus
aide à l’apprentissage de la langue et ne perçoivent donc les bénéfices de l’outil que
dans le contexte d’un exercice de rédaction.
Conclusion
84 Cette étude a été conçue pour mesurer l’apport d’un corpus lors d’un exercice de
rédaction. Nos résultats nous permettent d’avancer que, dans notre échantillon, les
étudiants, même de niveau plus faible, parviennent majoritairement à se servir
efficacement de cette ressource et viennent confirmer l’apport supérieur d’un corpus
face à un dictionnaire dans le cas d’un exercice de rédaction spécialisé. En revanche,
l’étude des cas d’utilisation inefficace et le retour des étudiants nous indiquent qu’une
formation plus poussée à l’utilisation d’un corpus serait bénéfique. C’est pourquoi nous
pensons que la « mission corpus » de certains chercheurs essayant de convaincre les
enseignants de familiariser leurs étudiants à cet outil est justifiée et pourrait permettre
aux étudiants de profiter de ressources disponibles autrement inexplorées. Le manque
d’enthousiasme de certains étudiants en fin de semestre est potentiellement dû à une
frustration face à un outil pas assez bien maîtrisé. De plus, notre étude montre que dans
le cadre d’un exercice de rédaction d’un genre spécialisé, un dictionnaire en ligne de
langue générale (comme WR) ne permet pas forcément d’avoir de bons résultats et a
des limites parfois liées à la spécificité de la langue. Notre étude indique également
qu’un corpus peut avoir un apport pour différents aspects d’une langue pour un public
hétérogène. Enfin, même si cette étude ne présente pas de données sur l’utilisation à
long terme du corpus, on peut noter que 66,7 % des étudiants ont affirmé qu’ils
aimeraient utiliser des corpus spécialisés à l’avenir dans le cadre de leurs études.
85 Comme nous l’avons déjà mentionné, nous pensons que le processus de réflexion de
l’étudiant lors de l’utilisation d’un corpus est une piste très enrichissante pour créer du
contenu pédagogique. Nous avons essayé d’étudier ce processus, mais nous devons
reconnaître que, même avec les journaux de bord des étudiants, certaines de nos
interrogations quant à leur cheminement intellectuel restent sans réponse. De plus, le
petit échantillon d’étudiants avec lequel nous avons travaillé ne nous permet que
d’avancer des pistes de réflexion et non des certitudes. Enfin, les contraintes
temporelles de l’étude nous empêchent de savoir si les étudiants continuent d’utiliser
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un corpus sur le long terme. Plus de données sur la manière dont différents étudiants
de différents niveaux et domaines accomplissent différentes tâches avec un corpus
pourraient aider à convaincre que l’outil corpus n’est pas destiné qu’à un public
spécifique dans un contexte particulier.
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ANNEXES
Annexe 1 ; Profil des étudiants
Tableau 5. Profil des étudiants
ÉtudiantRessource
utilisée
Niveau
d'anglais
Langue
maternelle
Niveau
d'études
Matière
étudiée7
1_C_SS Corpus B1 Français M1 SS
2_WR_SS WR C1+ Français M1 SS
3_C_SS Corpus C1+ Français M1 SS
4_WR_SS WR C1 Français M1 SS
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5_C_SS Corpus C1+ Français M1 SS
6_C_SS Corpus C1 Français M1 SS
7_C_SS Corpus C1 Français M1 SS
8_WR_SS WR C1 Français M1 SS
9_WR_SS WR B1 Français M1 SS
10_WR_SS WR C1+ Français M1 SS
11_C_SS Corpus C2 Français M1 SS
12_C_GM Corpus C1 Français M2 GM
13_C_GM Corpus B2 Français M2 GM
14_C_GM Corpus B2 Arabe M2 GM
15_C_GM Corpus C1 Français M2 GM
16_WR_GM WR B1 Arabe M2 GM
17_WR_GM WR B2 Français M2 GM
18_WR_GM WR C1- Français M2 GM
19_WR_GM WR B2 Français M2 GM
20_C_GM Corpus C1- Arabe M2 GM
21_WR_GM WR C1- Français M2 GM
22_WR_GM WR B1 Arabe M2 GM
23_C_GM Corpus B1 Français M2 GM
24_C_GM Corpus B1 Arabe M2 GM
Annexe 2 : Journaux de bord des étudiants
NOTES
1. La plateforme a été installée à l’Université Paris Diderot pour des besoins de recherche
(CLILLAC-ARP) et d’enseignement (UFR EILA).
2. < https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/29/secret-of-connection-between-dogs-
and-humans-could-be-genetic> (consulté le 4 janvier 2017)
3. Nous avons consigné l’intégralité des journaux de bord, sans modification, dans le tableau 6 en
annexe 2.
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4. Il y a 13 étudiants sur corpus mais l’un d’entre eux n’utilise pas la ressource ; ainsi 12 s’en sont
servis.
5. GN : groupe nominal
6. Contemporary Written Italian Corpus
7. SS : Sciences Sociales / GM : Génie Mécanique
RÉSUMÉS
L’essor de l’apprentissage sur corpus dans le monde universitaire peine à se refléter dans les
pratiques pédagogiques. Ce phénomène est notamment imputable au manque de lien entre
recherche et pédagogie. La présente étude cherche à combler un vide informationnel quant à la
manière dont les étudiants LANSAD se servent d’un corpus spécialisé. Nous proposons de
comparer l’apport d’un corpus spécialisé à celui d’un dictionnaire en ligne dans le cadre de la
rédaction de résumés scientifiques. Les données au sujet de l’utilisation des ressources par les
étudiants permettent de démontrer que l’outil corpus est efficacement utilisable par tous, même
en contexte spécialisé, et qu’il est une source d’apprentissage langagier. Néanmoins, une
initiation en amont semble nécessaire afin que les apprenants puissent se servir de cette
ressource le mieux possible. À cet effet, des activités d’introduction au corpus sont proposées.
Des études similaires à celle-ci sont requises afin de mieux comprendre l’interaction de l’étudiant
LANSAD avec le corpus.
The popularity of data-driven learning popularity among academics has yet to reach the
classrooms. This phenomenon can be attributed to a gap between research and teaching. This
study’s aim is to fill an informational void about the way ESP students use a specialized corpus.
We compare the advantages of using a specialized corpus when writing academic abstracts vs.
using an online dictionary. Data about the students’ use of the resources indicate that a corpus
can be effectively used by all, even in a specialized context, and that it can develop the linguistic
knowledge of its users. A proper initiation is nevertheless necessary to enable the learners to
fully exploit this resource adequately; examples of introductory activities to corpora are given.
Similar studies are required for a better understanding of the ESP student’s relationship to
corpora.
INDEX
Mots-clés : apprentissage sur corpus, didactique de l’anglais de spécialité, LANSAD, rédaction de
résumés d’articles de recherche, TICE
Keywords : academic abstract writing, data-driven learning, ESP didactics, ICTE
AUTEUR
LAURA-MAY SIMARD
Laura-May Simard, agrégée d’anglais, a donné des cours à des spécialistes d’autres disciplines à
l’École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay. Elle est en poste dans le secondaire au lycée Louis-le-
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Grand à Paris. Elle est membre d’ESPri (ENS Paris Saclay’s English for Specific Purposes Research
Initiative) pour l’année 2018. Ses recherches portent sur la didactique des langues et l’utilisation
des TICE, plus particulièrement dans le secteur LANSAD. [email protected]
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RecensionsBook reviews
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Maurizio Gotti, Stefania Maci,Michele Sala (eds.), Ways of Seeing,Ways of Being: Representing the Voicesof TourismBern: Peter Lang, 2017
Adam Wilson
RÉFÉRENCE
Gotti, Maurizio, Stefania Maci & Michele Sala (eds.). 2017. Ways of Seeing, Ways of Being:Representing the Voices of Tourism. Bern: Peter Lang AG. 469 pp. ISBN 978-3034-33032-9.
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1 Aside from certain notable exceptions
(Cohen & Cooper 1986; Dann 1996),
tourism remained relatively unexplored
in the field of linguistics for a long time.
However, since the turn of the
millennium, interest in tourism from a
linguistic perspective has grown
exponentially (see Thurlow & Jaworski
2010, Heller et al. 2014 and Held 2018, for
example). Many authors have shown
tourism to be a key site for studying the
relationships between language, culture
and society. For instance, it has been
shown how language plays a key role in
the elaboration of the tourist experience
which can in turn have important
sociocultural repercussions (Thurlow &
Jaworski 2010). Dann (1996) even posits
the existence of a specific “language of
tourism.” These examples are but a small
selection of the increasing and
diversifying research centring on language and tourism.
2 Maurizio Gotti, Stefania Maci and Michele Sala’s 2017 edited volume Ways of Seeing,Ways of Being: Representing the Voices of Tourism continues in this vein, bringing a sizeable
and timely contribution to the field. According to the editors, the book aims to “give
voice to the various and different perspectives in the investigation of tourism in its
written, spoken, and visual aspects” (p. 11) with a special focus on the different
interactions between tourism promoters and (prospective) tourists. Constituting the
latest instalment in Peter Lang’s popular and influential “Linguistic Insights” series, the
book is made up of nineteen chapters from twenty-two contributing authors spread
across four thematic sections.
3 The main contributions are preceded by Maci and Sala’s editors’ introduction, in which
they offer a brief “what’s what” of current research into tourism before presenting
each chapter. Although the research review offered by Maci and Sala is short, it is up to
date and comprehensive, capturing the complex nature of tourism and covering both
classic and recent studies in linguistics and beyond.
4 The first section of the book is entitled “Multimodal representations of the tourist
experience” and consists of four contributions. The first chapter, written by Maria
Vittoria Calvi, focuses on what she names “new travel guides,” online travel guides in
which tourists can actively participate. In what will become a key underlying theme of
the book, Calvi underlines how developments linked to the Internet have led to tourists
becoming more than simple consumers of tourism texts in that web-based travel guides
allow tourists to contribute, thus becoming producers of texts for others. Calvi
conducts a critical genre analysis on a selection of Spanish new travel guides, showing
how the use of personal narratives leads to them having a “thicker” perspective (p. 43)
when compared with the “impersonal, directive discourse” (p. 43) of traditional tourist
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guides. She exposes how tourist writers push and cross genre boundaries in an effort to
shape their identities as travellers.
5 The second contribution is that of Sabrina Francesconi. She explores how destination
image is formed through multimodal processes in video travel diaries relating to the
Italian region of Basilicata. Whilst the conclusions of this contribution are highly
interesting – the identification of an interdiscursivity between promotional and
narrative discourses, facilitated by the innovative nature of the genre – it is perhaps
the excellent introduction to the methodology of video analysis that may be of most
interest to researchers in the field. It constitutes an accessible introduction to a set of
pertinent techniques that are potentially unfamiliar to many.
6 Following this, Lucia Abbamonte and Flavia Cavaliere examine how the Italian island
of Capri is framed for tourists through its official website. The authors opt for an
original and interdisciplinary analytical framework in order to explore the visual and
verbal strategies employed. Following an analysis rich in examples, they conclude that
the verbal level is often “backgrounded” (p. 97) in the multimodal texture of the
website, whereas the visual level proves itself to be more engaging.
7 In the final chapter of the first section, Maria Cristina Aiezza offers a contrastive
analysis of the rhetorical and linguistic choices present on tourist offer coupons. This
highly original research object is justified by the claim that, in the current digital
climate, such coupons are becoming more and more central in the tourist experience.
Through an engaging presentation of examples using annotated screen grabs, Aiezza
discusses the structures and content of tourist offer coupons and shows how they often
contain elements of the “language of tourism” (Dann 1996). She concludes that these
coupons build on other promotional tourist texts, thus contributing to the tourist
experience.
8 All four contributions in the first section underline how the web is transforming the
way we “do” tourism, and especially the fact that tourists are gradually shifting from
being passive consumers to active producers of tourist texts and experiences. Similar
questions are at the heart of section two, entitled “Digital Communication in Tourism”,
which is the largest section of the book, comprised of six contributions, reflecting the
current principal focus on digital communication in studies investigating language and
tourism.
9 Stefania Maci’s contribution begins the section with a look at how tourism industry
operators and tourism consumers interact on social networks. Maci offers clear, well-
presented examples from two famous airline companies, through which she shows how
web users shift from being consumers to producers of content by reacting to
publications by tourist industry operators. Aside from this main conclusion, she also
focuses on “liking” photos as a social practice and highlights memes as a unique
language phenomenon which is often exploited for marketing purposes.
10 Girolamo Tessuto keeps to the web-based theme by investigating rhetorical move
structure and communicative purpose in online tourism press releases. Through a
quantitative corpus linguistic approach, the author shows how these press releases
display an increasingly conventionalised structure, closely resembling that of
journalistic text, save for the inclusion of certain promotional elements.
11 Maria Cristina Paganoni’s contribution centres on luxury travel blogs, aiming to
uncover the “linguistic cues and discursive turns” (p. 181) used to construct codes of
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luxury. She highlights the use of very similar linguistic techniques across many texts,
including a number of well-known tourism discourse features such as euphoria,
stereotypes or mythologies. Paganoni makes an especially interesting observation in
explaining how authenticity – a key element of most tourist texts – is “now mostly
deflected upon bloggers, their identity performances, their experience of place and
their relationship with like-minded publics” (p. 188) rather than being sought after in
the framing of places or experiences.
12 The next chapter, authored by Chalita Yaemwannang and Issra Pramoolsook, deals
with a recent and growing phenomenon: companies responding to customer
complaints on social networks. Focusing in this case on hotels, the authors highlight
how these complaints, as a form of electronic word of mouth, can have a considerable
influence on a future tourist’s trip. Responding to such criticism is thus a delicate task
and Yaemwannang and Pramoolsook build on previous work by Zhang and Vásquez
(2014) to identify the communicative moves made by hotels when doing so.
13 Kim Grego’s contribution deals with an original object, namely the representations of
senior citizens in tourism discourse. Bringing together elements from linguistics and
marketing studies, the author analyses an EU call for projects aimed at developing
tourism for senior citizens as well as certain projects submitted in response to that call.
She shows how age is never directly referred to but presented through negative and
positive identity themes which are manipulated by the different project actors for their
own ends. Grego provides a welcome critical approach by showing how senior citizens
themselves are often excluded from the discourse that is supposed to target them.
14 In the final part of this section, Alessandra Vicentini focuses on child-free tourism and
its discourse as examples of the increasing diversification of the tourist market. She
compares the discursive presentation of child-free holidays on tour operators’ websites
and in British newspaper articles. Whereas tourism companies tend to focus on
justifying child-free tourism in an effort to inform and persuade potential clients,
newspapers tend to discuss the ethical and moral implications of such tourism.
Vicentini also notes how child-free tourist discourse often co-exists with linguistic
elements pertaining to luxury, exclusivity and peacefulness, highlighting the fact that a
certain target market is being addressed: “affluent, childless senior or young couples,
who may be expected to be large spenders on goods and services” (p. 242).
15 The third section of the book is entitled “Cultural aspects related to the language of
tourism.” Though the title may be considered slightly vague, it accounts for the
diversity of research objects and approaches on offer in the five contributions.
16 Luisanna Fodde opens the section with an exploration of the “accessibility” of tourism
texts. Fodde highlights how authenticity is key to constructing the tourist experience.
Through examples taken from tourist guidebooks focussing on Sardinian tourist
attractions, she highlights how narratives play a key role in making the discourse of
authenticity accessible to tourists. However, the data sources go unpresented,
sometimes making it difficult to grasp the main focus of the research.
17 The following chapter, written by Paola Catenaccio, constitutes one of the highlights
of the volume. Dealing with the original theme of “dark tourism,” Catenaccio explores
the discursive framing of Ground Zero as a tourist attraction by analysing the website
of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The author shows how memorialisation is achieved
through emotional arousal, provoked by certain discursive strategies. She highlights
how certain features of tourism language are kept on the periphery, suggesting that
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“such touristification is not free of contestation and unease” (p. 288). Catenaccio also
proposes a highly interesting conclusion in which she discusses the ideological
implications of the discursive framing of Ground Zero, suggesting that the fact that the
visitor is framed as an emotional, rather than political, being leaves the way clear for
forced alignment to the dominant ideology of the museum and hinders political
understanding of 9/11. This is an excellent contribution, underlining how discourse is
central in framing the tourist experience whilst also dealing with a socially relevant
destination.
18 Giuliana Diani’s chapter adds to the focus on travel blogs as key for the marketing and
consumption of tourism issue tackled elsewhere in the book. She proposes an analysis
of how American travel bloggers represent the cultural heritage of Florence. Adopting
a mixed corpus linguistic and discourse analysis approach, Diani uncovers a high
percentage of lexis related to cultural heritage in the blogs, as well as a large number of
positive evaluating adjectives. She suggests that bloggers use informative and historical
details to add credibility to their writing whilst subjective narration allows them to
seem personally and emotively involved in the experience. This contribution is heavy
in examples, so much so that certain examples are given with no (or next to no)
analysis, and the conclusions are, by the author’s own admission, “predictable”
(p. 299).
19 Daniela Cesiri and Francesca Coccetta continue the Italian theme with a comparison
of how tourist promotion of Venice varies according to target market. The authors
compare two websites – the official Venice tourism website aimed at a broad
population of tourists and a website aimed specifically at museum goers – in order to
establish the techniques used by the sites to attract visitors. Each author takes a
radically different approach, giving rise to a contribution that draws from corpus
linguistics, visual analysis, and genre analysis. While the ambition is laudable, the
contribution often reads like two separate chapters, rendering the reading experience
rather confusing. Nevertheless, the authors conclude that both websites display a
certain mismatch between text and visuals, creating confusion in terms of their
intended aims, functions and targets.
20 Judith Turnbull provides the final contribution to this third section with an
interesting look at how tourism texts contribute to the “destination image” of Rome.
Combining linguistic analysis with elements taken from tourist studies and analysing a
selection of Internet texts dedicated to Rome, Turnbull shows how affect is used less
than cognitive appreciation, suggesting that the focus of tourism texts remains on
places rather than emotions. While suggesting that the tourist texts studied are
predictable, she nonetheless identifies features used to give the destination image a
distinctive character, such as marked lexis, personal appraisals, and humour.
21 The final section of the volume is dedicated to a theme which also appears in the earlier
sections: the language of tourism in social media. Donatella Malavasi’s contribution
explores the language of sustainable tourism. The introduction is particularly
interesting as the author links the development of sustainable tourism to the general
recent increase in awareness of social and ecological responsibility. Malavasi analyses
the key discursive strategies from the promotional websites of prominent sustainable
tourist destinations. In doing so, she puts forward an unusual and innovative focus on
function words, showing how these words are used in discursive patterns that
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contribute to the persuasiveness of the text. The analysis provides a novel and valuable
insight into the language of tourism that goes beyond lexis.
22 Erik Costello’s contribution presents a comparative study of different promotional
texts representing the Italian city of Padua. Focusing on adjective use, Costello
compares four corpora of promotional texts written by both native and non-native
English speaking professional writers, as well as native and non-native university
students. Costello highlights some differences in adjective use between the groups.
English learners use the highest number of adjectives whilst texts written by native-
speaker professionals have the highest ratio of adjectives when compared with other
word types. Non-native speakers are shown to be more creative in coining otherwise
unattested adjectives while native-speaker professionals were shown to use “a larger
number of refined, sophisticated as well as idiosyncratic adjectives” (p. 390), though
the criteria by which “refined” and “sophisticated” are defined by the author may be
discussed. Costello also offers an analysis of the different types of adjective used by
each group and a look at the different patterns of pre-modification. In discussing the
implications for teaching future tourist professionals, Costello highlights how such
research could help students avoid potential pitfalls and become sensitive to key
discursive strategies.
23 The following chapter, written by Miguel Fuster-Marquez, offers an analysis of the
discourse of US hotel websites. In analysing how these sites try to “convert lookers into
bookers” (p. 401), Fuster-Marquez focuses on their use of lexical bundles and their
variations. The author shows how certain lemmas can “interrupt” lexical bundles in
order to add information without changing the discursive meaning. Lexical bundles,
and certain variations thereof, are shown to be central units for hotel writers. While
the substantial explanation of the theoretical bases of lexical bundles will be welcomed
by non-specialists, it eats into precious space that could have been used for further
analysis.
24 The final contribution is Jorge Soto Almela’s study on the notion of “experience” in
tourism promotional campaigns. Using the approach of semantic prosody – meaning
extended over more than one word or linguistic item – the author explores how
sensory words are key to the discursive elaboration of the tourist experience. He shows
how strong positive semantic prosody surrounds the notion of experience in tourist
texts whilst also observing that “unique” is the lemma that most commonly occurs with
“experience,” highlighting the importance of framing the tourist experience as special
and singular. Almela thus proposes an interesting new take on some of the classic
themes of research into language and tourism.
25 Gotti, Maci and Sala’s volume provides researchers interested in language and tourism
with a collection of high-quality studies that take on a wide range of research objects
through the lenses of a number of different approaches and fields. Corpus linguists and
discourse analysts will find particular interest in the volume, given the prominence of
those particular approaches. The recurrent character of such methodologies gives the
volume a certain coherence which is sometimes difficult to find in such edited works,
and the understandable, and pertinent, focus shared by many chapters on web-based
material contributes to this consistency.
26 Despite these positive aspects, certain criticisms could also be made. Aside from certain
counter examples, the book is fairly Euro-centric, focussing on only a handful of
European countries. Whilst this is not necessarily a problem, and may indeed be useful
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for those working in places that are heavily represented in the contributions – e.g. Italy
– perspectives obtained from elsewhere may have added depth.
27 Although Maci and Sala’s introduction alludes heavily to the sociocultural
repercussions of tourism and the resulting critical stance of much sociolinguistic
research into tourism, very few of the contributions adopt such a stance. Whilst
potentially beneficial for some, tourism can also be seen as a destructive phenomenon
both ecologically and socioculturally. For example, Thurlow & Jaworski (2010) show
how tourism positions tourists as a de facto privileged class bestowed with symbolic
capital, contributing to social inequality by segregating and stratifying tourists and
locals. Elsewhere, Kelly-Holmes & Pietikaïnen (2014) explore how local languages and
identities can become “commodified” in tourism, leading to social tensions between
hosts, tourists and other stakeholders in the tourism industry.
28 The discourse of tourism plays a key role in creating and maintaining such negative
dynamics and linguistic research has an important part to play in exposing and
deconstructing these processes. The fact that very few authors tackle such problems
here feels like a missed opportunity.
29 Finally, although subtitled “Representing the Voices of Tourism” and aiming to “give
voice to the various and different perspectives in the investigation of tourism in its
written, spoken, and visual aspects” (p. 11), there is little to no analysis of spoken
language anywhere in the book. This has been characteristic of linguistic research
focused on tourism across the years, with most studies concentrating on textual or
visual sources, as is the case here. This is a shame as it creates a heavy focus on the
“before” and “after” of the tourist experience. Comparatively speaking, little is known
about what happens linguistically “during” the tourist experience. Studies focusing on
the way in which tourists use language and discourse in situ – both with locals and with
other tourists – could have shed light on this key aspect of tourism.
30 However, these criticisms should not take away from the fact that Ways of Seeing, Ways
of Being: Representing the Voices of Tourism is a rich, thought-provoking and expansive
contribution to the linguistic study of tourism. The inclusion of such a volume in the
Linguistic Insights series points to the promising growth of work in tourism in
linguistics and this book will no doubt be of interest to scholars studying tourism both
within ESP and beyond.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
COHEN, Erik & Robert L. COOPER. 1986. “Language and tourism”. Annals of Tourism Research 13/4,
533–563.
DANN, Graham. 1996. The Language of Tourism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Wallingford: CAB
International.
HELLER, Monica, J. PUJOLAR & A. DUCHÊNE. 2014. “Linguistic commodification in tourism”. Journal ofSociolinguistics 18/4, 539–566.
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HELD, Gudrun (ed.). 2018. Strategies of Adaptation in Tourist Communication. Linguistic Insights.Amsterdam: Brill.
KELLY-HOLMES, Helen & S. PIETIKAÏNEN. 2014. “Commodifying Sámi culture in an indigenous tourism
site”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18/4, 518–538.
THURLOW, Crispin & Adam JAWORSKI. 2010. Tourism Discourse. Language and Global Mobility. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
ZHANG, Yi & Camilla VÁSQUEZ. 2014. “Hotels’ responses to online reviews: Managing consumer
dissatisfaction”. Discourse, Context & Media 6, 54–64.
AUTEURS
ADAM WILSON
Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, LPL UMR 7309, [email protected]
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Magdalena Sowa, Jaroslaw Krajka, Innovations in Languages for SpecificPurposes – Innovations en langues surobjectifs spécifiques, Present challengesand future promises – Défis actuels etengagements à venir Bern: Peter Lang, 2017
Shona Whyte
RÉFÉRENCE
Sowa, Magdalena & Jaroslaw Krajka. 2017. Innovations in Languages for Specific Purposes -Innovations en langues sur objectifs spécifiques. Present challenges and future promises - Défis
actuels et engagements à venir. Bern: Peter Lang. 343 pp. ISBN 978-3631-71921-3.
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1 Innovations in Languages for Specific
Purposes: Present challenges and future
promises is a volume of seventeen articles
in French or English edited by Polish
academics Magdalena Sowa and Jaroslaw
Krajka of Maria Curie Sklodowska
University in Lublin. It is published by
Peter Lang in the collection Lubliner
Beiträge zur Germanistik und
Angewandte Linguistik, with series
editors Janusz Golec and Hans-Jörg
Schwenk. The series showcases Polish
research in literature, culture, linguistics,
as well as foreign language didactics and
applied linguistics. This appears to be the
first volume which is not either in German
or about the German language.
2 The editors’ introduction is a short
preface provided in both French and
English versions. The articles have an
abstract in English, and references and author bios are given at the end of each chapter.
There is no general reference list or index to the volume.
Summary of main content
3 The articles are organised into six sections: cross-linguistic dimensions, course design,
tasks and skills, teaching resources, digital tools, and assessment. Each includes two to
four chapters in French, English or both, for a total of seventeen articles (eight in
French, nine in English) by twenty authors including practitioners, researchers, and
teacher educators. The seven articles contributed by researchers based in France are all
written in French and deal with French for specific purposes. Of the remaining papers,
half are by Polish authors, four in English and one in French, and the remaining five are
in English, from authors in Spain, Italy, and Turkey.
4 The authors in this collection are concerned with a variety of specific purpose domains,
including business, law and social sciences, medicine and technical sciences, and
academic or teacher preparation papers. Similarly, the approaches adopted differ from
chapter to chapter such that the volume offers an eclectic collection. Contributions
range from theoretical papers concerning the nature of language for specific purposes
(LSP) didactics and its relation to other fields (Challe, Luzón, Richer), through chapters
on LSP methodology covering needs analysis, specific competences, course design, and
pedagogical concerns (Belliet & Mangiante, Campoy-Cubillo, Carras, Chojnacka,
Gajewska, Kozlova & Rodríguez-Inés, Mourhlon-Dallies, Parpette, Plastina) to empirical
studies involving materials design, discourse analysis, and learner attitude surveys
(Dzęciol-Pędich, Kiliçkaya, Komur-Thilloy & Musinova, Luczak, Mokwa-Tarnowska). I
examine each of these broad areas in turn, beginning with the empirical studies.
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Empirical research
5 Three of the chapters which involve the analysis of data are concerned with student
attitudes to LSP needs and practices. Luczak conducted a small-scale action research
study to investigate students’ needs in English for Legal Purposes, both in recruitment
interviews and in their current positions. Seventeen trainees in Polish companies or
international accounting firms responded to four open-ended questions, and findings
revealed that during the recruitment process they participated in oral interviews and
performed translation tasks, while once in post they were particularly involved in
drafting contracts, writing reports, and corresponding with clients. The author draws
conclusions for the design of writing activities in university legal English courses.
6 At the other end of the LSP design process, Mokwa-Tarnowska investigated student
satisfaction with technology-mediated instruction. She presents the results of an
attitude survey conducted with some 250 students at proficiency B2/C1 in a range of
disciplines at Gdańsk University of Technology. The students took online language
modules at the Language Centre involving technologies such as Kahoot and Thinglink
to increase multimodal learning and interactivity, then completed a post-course
questionnaire including seven mainly yes/no questions (e.g., can you learn technical
English with the materials developed in Thinglink?). Respondents were generally
positive in their answers, although the author concedes that no information on
learning outcomes is available.
7 A third attitude study used interviews to collect data. Kiliçkaya examined students’
views of peer assessment of microteaching tasks which she implemented in a TEFL1
course at Mehmet Akif Ersoy University in Turkey. Content analysis of semi-structured
interviews with thirty-two mainly female students identified problems related to
friendship bias and feelings of illegitimacy as novice teachers, but also advantages for
discouraging "free riders” (individual students who fail to pull their weight in group
work) and with respect to the development of pedagogical skills.
8 Two further chapters involved the constitution of a corpus of LSP-related materials and
analysis of data with an eye to LSP pedagogy. Dzęciol-Pędich analysed ten blogs for
and by business English teachers. She found examples of classroom materials and
lesson plans, discussion of needs analysis but little reference to content knowledge, and
information on conferences and seminars for professional development. Perhaps as
befits this specific domain, she found material was often directed at the business sector,
that is, professional language training as opposed to state school or university contexts,
and that business English bloggers were also inclined to promote their own commercial
publications.
9 Something of an outlier in this category, and the only one in French, Komur-Thilloy &
Musinova present a comparative analysis of recipes published in English, French,
Polish and Russian magazines. Sixty-four recipes are analysed in terms of composition
(i.e., main elements), segmentation (i.e., layout), and communicative situation (i.e.,
lexico-grammatical choices), highlighting crosslinguistic differences which the authors
suggest make the corpus useful for genre analysis in the L2 classroom.
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LSP methodology
10 Turning to LSP methodology, a main focus of much of the volume, four key chapters
are on French. Parpette, whose seminal work with Mangiante (2004) is frequently cited
by French contributors to this volume, offers an authoritative account of French for
Specific Purposes (FSP = français sur objectifs spécifiques, FOS). She describes five steps in
programme design: i) need for language education, ii) analysis of situation, iii) needs
analysis for both internal and external stakeholders, iv) synthesis of requirements, and
v) design of teaching materials. She describes this as "a common sense approach
without theoretical problems” (p. 56) and gives the examples of medical French (Fassier
& Goy 2008) and French for academic purposes (Français sur objectifs universitaires, FOU).
She also discusses institutional factors constraining FSP activities which conspire to
make course creators the main actors, and highlights the growing role of students of
French as a foreign language as potential FSP course creators.
11 Carras and Mourlhon-Dallies provide further discussion of teacher and learner
expertise in FSP contexts. Mourlhon-Dallies discusses matching exercises drawing on
Work Analysis and Workplace Studies, moving from simple lexical and grammatical
exercises to richer tasks which draw on discourse features and interrogate professional
practice. She claims that the adaptation of matching exercises offers a useful middle
ground between commercial textbooks and more sophisticated specific purpose needs.
Since the technique is drawn from the repertoire of the general language teacher, it is
especially appropriate for language teachers who may not feel fully legitimate in a wide
range of specific professional contexts. Carras analyses two examples of FSP courses,
again paying particular attention to the instructor, whose three main functions, she
argues (i.e., to transmit information, organise learning activities, and evaluate
learners), are compromised by learners’ generally superior subject knowledge. She
emphasises the need for teachers to accept a distinction between linguistically and
professionally appropriate utterances.
12 The question of assessing LSP learning is addressed in more detail in a chapter by
Beillet & Mangiante. This paper discusses evaluation both in terms of student
feedback on LSP courses and teacher assessment of learning outcomes, using as a case
study a French for academic purposes course at the University of Artois.
13 Five more chapters, this time written in English about ESP, also tackle questions of LSP
methodology. Moving from broader to narrower perspectives, Campoy-Cubillo
examines listening comprehension from a number of angles related to language
teaching and testing in ESP and EAP contexts, and with particular reference to video.
She draws on the seminal work of Lynch and Vandergrift on (academic) listening,
Biber, Paltridge and Swales on LSP genre, and Ockey and Wagner on video texts in
English as a Second Language (ESL) testing to propose an integrated framework for
teaching and assessing multimodal listening in LSP contexts. Gajewska discusses new
policy in Poland with respect to LSP teaching which places additional demands for
materials development on instructors. She draws on Mondada’s (2002) work on
professional talk and workplace interaction as situated action, and sees university LSP
as fertile terrain for the development of effective teaching and learning materials.
14 In the first of two chapters involving corpus linguistics, Kozlova & Rodríguez-Inés
report on the Expert Field Environment Collaborative Training (EFECT) project on LSP
teaching in social sciences at the Universita Autonoma de Barcelona. The authors
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brought together teaching materials drawing on existing practice and specialised
corpora in the area of social studies to create a corpus which is searchable by students
and teachers for LSP teaching and learning.2 The authors offer recommendations for its
exploitation both for data-driven learning (Boulton 2015) and teacher education
(Krajka 2007) which bear comparison with another recent corpus created by Johnson
(2017) in Italy.
15 Different methods were used by Plastina in her chapter on a six-week English for
Medical Purposes (EMP) course, which employed data-driven learning techniques to
teach pain descriptors to graduate students in clinical pathology at the University of
Calabria. Fifteen participants created and analysed their own “Pain corpus” using
AntConc tools, and completed guided learning tasks to refine their understanding
(concordance lines, comparison with BNC collocations). In the same EMP domain,
Chojnacka offers a careful analysis of the affordances of mobile learning, specifically
the use of vocabulary tutors on smartphones. She reviews a previous study of user
feedback on the application Memrise and discusses the development of a new tool, the
Mobile Medical English Companion, drawing on Stockwell and Hubbard (2013). The
paper outlines technological and pedagogical considerations and offers a model of
“matrix components” to inform discussion between practitioners and software
developers.
Theories in LSP didactics
16 The theoretical chapters, two in French and one in English, draw on a wide range of
bibliographic references to offer an overview of different areas of LSP teaching. Challe
offers a wide-ranging theoretical overview of historical approaches to research in
teaching French for specific purposes, contrasting French research by Schön and
Bronkart with more practically oriented work on methodology and discourse domains
(Selinker and Douglas 1985) in the English-speaking world. She accords special
attention to the teacher, whom she views as a conductor who orchestrates learning in
complex specific purpose contexts. Richer, too, underlines the complexity of much
work in LSP. He makes the argument that the action-oriented approach which
underpins the Common European Reference Framework for Languages (CER) is more
appropriate to FSP than communicative approaches are. He draws heavily on Le
Boterf’s (2011) management guide to adapt Chomsky’s (1965) concept of competence
for professional contexts, which he then applies to the CER framework to propose a
model for FSP didactics incorporating elements of both. Luzón takes a different
approach, turning instead to English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and calling on Jenkins,
Mauranen and Seidelhofer, and especially Finnish research in Business English as a
Lingua Franca (BELF) by Kakaanranta and Louhiala-Salminen. Like Carras, she
emphasises the importance of communicative competence and pragmatic awareness, as
opposed to narrower proficiency measures and native-speaker norms.
Strengths and weaknesses
17 It should be clear from the above summary that this book offers a wide range of
perspectives on its topic, drawing on a variety of specific domains, methodological
approaches, and teaching contexts in two major European languages and in five
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countries. The editors underline the "diversity of target learners and instructional
contexts” (p. 9) in their introduction, as well as their ambition to provide a “forum for
exchange of experiences of researchers and practitioners from a number of countries”
(p. 10). Perhaps inevitably, the reader has a sense of fragmentation and dispersion:
What possible connection can there be between EFL teacher training in Turkey, a
contrastive analysis of recipes in French and Russian magazines, or the English needs of
Polish graduates in law? A stronger editorial hand might have helped with this
difficulty, which is, of course, common to many LSP research collections. As it is, this
reader had the impression of a book of two halves: French authors writing in French
about French, and other European researchers working on English in Poland and
elsewhere. A more analytical introduction and choice of subsections, more efforts to
make links between chapters, and certainly an index would have been appreciated.
Indeed there is no information on peer review, a process which can offer useful
opportunities for such cross-fertilisation and thus aid the reader in developing a
coherent overall perspective on the studies offered in the collection.
18 However, the eclecticism of the book is also a source of strength. One of the virtues of
the collection is its treatment of a number of key issues in LSP research across several
chapters, thus providing a range of perspectives from a variety of contexts of use. The
role of the language teacher is one important dimension, tackled notably by Parpette
and Carras. Another concerns learner autonomy, particularly with respect to corpus
linguistics approaches involving data-driven learning (Kozlova & Rodríguez-Inés, and
Plastina), but also regarding the potential of technology-mediated learning
(Chojnacka). A third important strand is perhaps evaluation and assessment, discussed
by Belliet and Mangiante in terms of course design, but also by Carras and Mourlhon-
Dallies with respect to classroom teaching. A rich and timely collection, Innovations inlanguages for specific purposes should offer something of interest to many ASp readers.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
BOULTON, Alex. 2015. “Applying data-driven learning to the web”. In Leńko-Szymańska, A. & A.
Boulton (eds.), Multiple Affordances of Language Corpora for Data-driven Learning. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 267–295.
CHOMSKY, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
FASSIER, Thomas & Solange TALAVERA-GOY. 2008. Le français des médecins. Grenoble: PUG.
JOHNSON, Jane Helen. 2017. “The SocWoC corpus: Compiling and exploiting ESP material for
undergraduate social workers”. In Sarré, C. &. S. Whyte (eds.), New developments in ESP teachingand learning research, 133–151.
KRAJKA, Jaroslaw. 2007. ‘Corpora and language teachers: from ready-made to teacher-made
collections”. CORELL: Computer Resources for Language Learning 1, 36–55.
ASp, 73 | 2018
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LE BOTERF, G. 2011. Repenser la compétence. Pour dépasser les idées reçues : quinze propositions. Paris:
Éditions Eyrolles.
MANGIANTE, Jean-Marc & Chantal PARPETTE. 2004. Le français sur objectif spécifique. Paris: Hachette
Français Langue Étrangère.
MONDADA, Lorenza. 2002. “Interactions et pratiques professionnelles : un regard issu des studies of
work”. Studies in Communication Sciences 2/2, 47–82.
SELINKER, Larry & Dan DOUGLAS. 1985. “Wrestling with ‘context’ in interlanguage theory”. Applied
linguistics 6/2, 190–204.
STOCKWELL, Glenn, & Philip HUBBARD. 2013. “Some emerging principles for mobile-assisted
language learning”. The International Research Foundation for English Language Education, 1–15.
NOTES
1. Teaching English as a Foreign Language
2. This corpus is available at <http://efect.projectesainternet.com/>.
AUTEURS
SHONA WHYTE
Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, BCL, [email protected]
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Alissa J. Hartig, Connecting Languageand Disciplinary Knowledge in Englishfor Specific Purposes: Case studies inlawBristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, 2017
Anne-Marie Barrault-Méthy
RÉFÉRENCE
Hartig, Alissa J. 2017. Connecting Language and Disciplinary Knowledge in English for SpecificPurposes: Case studies in law. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. 208 pp.
ISBN 978-1783-09850-7.
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1 This book, which explores the
relationship between linguistic and
disciplinary knowledge, belongs to the
“New Perspectives on Language and
Education” series co-edited by two major
professors of language-in-education, Viv
Edwards, from the University of Reading,
United Kingdom, and Phan Le Ha, from
the University of Hawaii at Manoa, United
States. Alissa Hartig’s study is truly
international in scope: it examines the
development of international students’
legal writing competence, builds on her
in-depth knowledge of disciplinary
language and content, reflects her acute
engagement in the international legal
English research community, particularly
legal writing, and aims at enriching
discipline-specific language, whose
acquisition is widely advocated (e.g. Hyland 2011).
2 Alissa Hartig explores how disciplinary and linguistic knowledge interact in the context
of Teaching English as a Second Language. Considering the tension between language
and content in ESP, particularly in law, how does knowledge of the law of non-common
law countries affect the learning of English and of common law? What happens when
ESP teaching builds on discourse-specific concepts in order to improve language and
legal skills? The book is conceived as a breath-taking inquiry into how a focus group
composed of four international students expands their legal writing skills. It is divided
into two parts, followed by a conclusion and an epilogue. The first sets the theoretical
framework, while the second consists in an analysis of the students’ linguistic
productions.
3 The first chapter elucidates the main ESP concepts. Hartig distinguishes discourse-
relevant concepts, which are explicit, and discourse-structuring concepts, that are
more implicit. Subject matter knowledge includes disciplinary knowledge, with its two
aspects, content and epistemology. The study focuses on multilingual legal writers in
the United States, whose L1 and culture are commonly viewed as liabilities and their
acculturation as desirable. The book aims at meeting the need for more qualitative,
classroom-based research advocated by various authors.
4 The second chapter deals more specifically with the conceptual frameworks that shape
legal genres. Analysing the literature, the author indicates that legal literacy develops
by identifying authority. She adds that such literacy is not always uniform in a given
national context, taking the example of France where law reasoning is taught
differently at Sciences-Po and HEC. She then presents research on how experts and
subexperts solve a legal issue differently, suggesting that legal English requires some
degree of expertise in law. Hartig presents the IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application,
Conclusion) model used at US law schools to teach legal reasoning. The structure of
memoranda is commonly presented as follows: Question, Short answer, Statement of
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facts, Discussion (overview of paragraphs, thesis paragraph, rule explanation, rule
application, and conclusion).
5 Hartig reviews the literature on legal literacy of the increasing number of international
Master of Laws (LLM) students in the US. She notices a gap on how students transfer
their prior legal training knowledge and presents the two models that incorporate
language and disciplinary knowledge in ESP for law. The first favours the learning of
general syntactic structures and specialised vocabulary, thus reducing legal language to
lexico-grammatical features. The second, centred on the acquisition of linguistic
concepts, legal concepts and legal culture, is more comprehensive. Therefore, the
development of legal literacy can be said to be deeply rooted in a discipline and a local
legal culture.
6 The third chapter addresses methodological issues. Content-Based Instruction (CBI)
was chosen as it helps connect language and legal concepts. CBI has been applied in
several areas of Second Language Acquisition, particularly to a “common core”
approach to genre, but much less so in ESP. The chosen discourse-structuring concept
is stare decisis, the doctrine according to which precedent binds any future legal
decision, in the context of a legal writing course on the genre of the legal memorandum
in a common law jurisdiction. Precedent is a discourse-structuring concept for both
linguists and lawyers, while discourse-relevant concepts are more strictly the domain
of lawyers. Hartig’s theoretical framework is the cognitive linguistics theory of
conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2002) that relates common law concepts to
linguistic concepts such as negation, tense, and syntax. Facts from the precedent case
and the rule statement are expressed linguistically and differ depending on whether
the lawyer acts for the defendant or the plaintiff. Therefore, students may
misunderstand the genre of the rule statement and the lawyer’s positioning. The
author then describes the context of the study, which is an LLM legal writing course for
international students. The course itself is composed of CBI and individual meetings to
help revise assignments.
7 Concretely, students followed a textbook on the genre of the legal memorandum with
weekly readings and writing assignments on specific parts of the memorandum. Each
CBI course consisted of a presentation of a concept and of some discourse-analysis
activities through in-class pair-work. Students were presented with the theoretical
model, a five-circle diagram representing the mental spaces at play during the
interview with a client and which include client case, definition, precedent case, office
and courtroom. They were asked to relate the rule explanation paragraph to the spaces.
The following week, students identified how the mental spaces were blended in each
section of the legal memorandum. The CBI course was supplemented by weekly
meetings that were audio and video recorded. Language professors asked law Teaching
Assistants (TAs) for confirmation of the legal meaning of certain terms, and plain
English legal writing was addressed separately by law professors. Legal writing classes
focused on writing for the US legal community.
8 The second part of the book is more substantial and consists of case studies in keeping
with socio-cultural theory (Vigotsky 1978), which holds that the psychological process
of learning is worth investigating. Learner engagement is also considered through
activity theory (Lantolf & Pavlenko 2001) which seeks to understand what an activity
means to the individual. Four main participants were selected from two non-common
law countries, China and Saudi Arabia, and were observed from a variety of angles,
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including assignments, interactions with peers, and grades. The research examined
which sections of the legal memorandum were the most difficult. Participants’ contexts
were considered. Changes in interpersonal functioning were also evidenced.
9 Chapter four deals with Hong, the first participant. Hong evolved from searching for
statutes, which is irrelevant in a common law context, to being able to infer the rule
based on precedent. A recent law graduate and a qualified lawyer, Hong was to move
back to China after the end of the course. Pre-memo written data showed that Hong
misunderstood the rule statement as deriving from statutes, instead of from case law.
Her writing was also more a narrative summary than the statement of a legal principle.
She went from not having a deep understanding of the genre of the rule statement, in
which she expected to find the statutes, and being unwilling to accept any negative
feedback on her rule statement, to gradually improving her grasp of the genre. She was
also more confidently interacting with other students and with Hartig, and kept
improving until the end of the semester, and she was eventually able to more
substantially connect linguistic form and content and to making relevant suggestions
to other students. Hartig ascribed Hong’s progress to using precedent set rules in the
first CBI session as a threshold concept (Myer & Land 2006), which induced qualitative
and quantitative transformation of the learner, effectively making Hong more
autonomous. Cognitive interference was quite high in respect of language and
conventions of the genre.
10 Chapter five revolves around the case of Weixin whose progress, by comparison, was
more limited. Weixin had more professional experience than Hong and was following
the LLM programme in order to improve her English. She was able to infer a rule from
precedent, knew the importance of case law and had acquired some knowledge of the
concept of stare decisis through her background study of common law in China. This
chapter focuses on the genre of the rule application paragraph. At first, Weixin failed to
understand the rules of the genre and merely quoted irrelevant case law. The following
assignment showed inconsistencies. Weixin, who seemed to be obsessed with form
and unable to focus on content, relied on rule statements instead of writing conclusions
aimed at a client; she copied and pasted whole sections of precedent cases with little
coherence. Though a language lesson on comparisons helped, Weixin’s writing still
lacked homogeneity at the end of the semester. She kept misunderstanding the fact
that the memo was aimed at a senior lawyer rather than at a client, the point of
drawing comparisons between cases, and the fact that the task involved a fictitious
case. She also found it difficult to draw an abstract rule from a specific case. Language
wise, Weixin seemed more interested in correctness than in meaning. Her limited level
of English hindered her comprehension of precedents and her writing. Her knowledge
of another national legal framework interfered and made her make false assumptions, a
problem not restricted to international students and common among subexperts.
Hartig ascribes Weixin’s limited proficiency to her legal training in her home country
and to the influence of TOEFL preparation, in which she had to make binary decisions
as to language correctness, irrespective of the writer’s intention.
11 Chapter six deals with Bader, who came from Saudi Arabia, had four years’ work
experience and intended to take a doctorate in law to become a top executive in his
home country. As a native speaker of Arabic, Bader had spent eighteen months on an
intensive language programme in California. At the beginning of the programme, he
was aware of how common law courts used analogic reasoning to solve cases. His ability
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to carry out the tasks varied with his confidence. Surprisingly enough considering his
level of abstraction, he repeatedly failed to stick to the prescribed template for the rule
explanation paragraph. His writing thus appeared to be disorderly while he clearly had
a deep understanding of what was expected in memos. He was able to explain why he
deemed preferable an unorthodox paragraph organisation. He tried to understand the
conventions of the genre rather than just what was right or wrong. At the fifth
individual meeting, he produced a restatement that was too broad. He later explained
that he did not know whether he should focus on those outcomes of the case that were
pertinent for the client, or on more general matters. Bader showed perfectly able to
derive a rule from a case, but then missed some deadlines. Overall, he acquired the
legal concepts that the course targeted and saw language as a means for making
meaning.
12 In the next chapter, Hartig describes how Alima’s professional practice did not improve
significantly during the semester. Alima, also from Saudi Arabia, had little professional
experience and no training in writing for professional purposes. At first, she found it
difficult to distinguish such legal categories as elements, crime, and factors and to
decide which details from unredacted cases taken from legal data bases were relevant.
Another difficulty came from her confusing prepositions. She also framed her first
memorandum for herself rather than for a client, not following the conventions of the
genre. Hartig then presents Alima’s efforts to cope with her difficulties in
understanding the genre, focusing on irrelevant details, being lost in a twelve-page
case, and missing some key vocabulary. Alima failed to transfer structure across memo
paragraphs, as she wrote them with no clear holding sentence, until Hartig pointed the
issue, which improved Alima’s writing. Alima eventually managed to produce a
satisfactory memo but still lacked autonomy, excessively relying on external help and
seemingly unwilling to put the necessary effort to improve. She also spent much time
travelling. At the end of the course, Alima believed, like Weixin, that legal writing was
more about mastering synonyms and less about legal concepts. She thus failed to fully
develop an ability to “think like a lawyer” which was the objective of the course but
was not matching her own personal goals, even though such objective was within her
reach.
13 The conclusion, spanning across chapter eight and a section entitled “conclusion”
examines how different learners engage differently in local discourse practices. Hong
immersed in the role play and significantly improved her writing as she was learning to
distance herself from her prior training. Weixin stuck to a binary approach towards
language correctness, which hindered her progress. Bader internalised and used the
constraints of the genres for making meaning. Alima was not interested in the non-
strictly linguistic aspects of the tasks. Learners’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds
both helped and interfered in the development of their legal writing. Professional
experience and legal training influenced task performance. The content of the legal
writing course seemed irrelevant to those students who had no intention to stay in the
US. Emotions also played a role in competence development. Hartig notes that the
learners showed some resistance towards certain structural features of the genres,
whose rationales had to be explained.
14 The author also reflects on her own transformations as an instructor and calls for more
action-research on other discourse-structuring concept, more cognitive linguistics
studies of genres, more law faculty engagement towards local writing practices. To her
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mind, learners seem to misunderstand important concepts and even their discipline as
a whole, which she sees as problematic. She also notices major lexico-grammatical
errors, particularly as regards indirect speech. She provides examples of how to
increase student engagement. In conclusion, she calls for a replication of her study in
subjects other than law, and maybe less local, such as Science and Medicine.
15 The book makes for fascinating reading as it represents an extreme in the intertwining
of language and subject-matter knowledge. From a pedagogic point of view first, the
author benefited from the renewed support of such stakeholders as programme
administrators, law faculties, law TAs, while certainly showing an acute awareness of
the tension between language and legal content, particularly in law. While admitting
that the boundary between subject matter and language knowledge is problematic in
ESP in general, she makes repeated references to Howe’s warning “not to tread on
lawyers’ land” (Howe 1993: 152). Before she started working on the study which led to
the book, she had attended two semesters of the legal writing class, had already worked
on the legal cases she used in her course, and had co-authored an online course on
common law analysis and language.
16 Paradoxically, such close cooperation at local level that makes teaching so coherent is
also the main weakness of the project. Language seems to be considered here as
subservient to the overarching objective of helping students integrate into the US
lawyers’ community. On reading the four participants’ profiles, though, one realises
that none of them saw themselves as part of such community, but intended instead
mostly to go back to their country and work in transnational organisations. The
pedagogic intervention thus failed to take into account the concept of imagined
communities (Norton 2001) which would have been fruitful here to anticipate non-
participation. In the chapter entitled “implications for research and teaching” Hartig
recognises that the course could have been more internationally focused, and suggests
that the potential international students offer in an “internationalisation at home”
perspective (Wächter 2003) has failed to be explored. The IntlUni Erasmus project, an
academic network of thirty-eight universities that dealt with the challenges of the
multilingual and multicultural learning space in the international university, published
recommendations as part of its final outcomes that hinted at possible ways to meet the
needs of those international students who resisted discourse-structuring concepts. Two
recommendations in particular would have been relevant:
develop measures to manage and leverage diversity in order to help all actorsincrease their awareness of the effects of cultural diversity in the multilingual andmulticultural learning space and move towards intercultural learning outcomes.(Lauridsen & Lillemose 2015: 12)
17 and
[d]evelop internationalized curricula, where appropriate, includinginternationalized learning outcomes which are aligned with adequate assessmentpedagogies, to enhance the graduate profiles of students and the employability ofgraduates. (ibidem)
18 All along the book, internationalisation seems to be considered more of a one-way
process, which Hartig admits, from the law school which gives future law professionals
the keys to be international, to the students, supposedly less international. This is all
the more paradoxical as the taught disciplinary concepts are relevant not just locally,
but also internationally, procedural law being eventually quite similar across common
law countries, which shows the unity of common law as a system.
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19 The robust methodology remains a major quality of the book. Each case study contains
numerous transcripts of interactions which allows to follow participants’ progress. This
will undoubtedly pave the way for further attempts to more closely link language and
culture in other ESP fields, while taking into account international learners’ and
learning contexts.
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VYGOTSKY, Lev Semenovich. 1978. Mind in Society: The development of higher psychologial
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WÄCHTER, Bernd. 2003. “An introduction: Internationalisation at home in context”. Journal of
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AUTEURS
ANNE-MARIE BARRAULT-MÉTHY
Université de Bordeaux, EA 3816 FoReLL, Université de Poitiers, anne-marie.barrault-methy@u-
bordeaux.fr
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