ESP Across Cultures

This present volume constitutes the third online edition of ESP Across Cultures. The decision to change from a paper-based to an online edition has undoubtedly been beneficial in terms of enjoying greater visibility within the international academic community. One thing that has not changed over the years, however, since the inception of the journal in 2004, has been the policy of double-blind peer reviewing, which means that only a selected number of the papers submitted end up as being published. There are seven papers in the current issue, each one analysing a particular aspect of English for Specific Purposes from a cross-cultural perspective. The first paper, by Hmoud S. Alotaibi, focuses on research article introductions in Arabic, analysing the extent to which scholars writing in Arabic in the sphere of education adhere to the CARS (Create A Research Space) model delineated by John Swales which was elaborated in particular with regard to the academic conventions widely adopted in the English-speaking world. Instead of restricting the investigation to the introductory section as past studies in this field did, the author examines all of the subheadings and he concludes that all introductions include Move 2 in a subheading entitled the Problem of the Study, a result that contradicts previous findings where the paucity of Move 2 was common in non-English RAs, and especially in Arabic ones. Patrizia Anesa analyses the websites of the main arbitration centres operating in Asia from a textual perspective to define how they are discursively constructed and can be used as promotional tools, thereby helping us to evaluate the importance assumed by internationalization processes or by local cultural elements in promoting a particular centre as a seat for international arbitration. She concludes that while some scholars argue that we are witnessing the ‘Asianization’ of arbitration, with the increasing bargaining power of Asian parties, on the other hand a phenomenon of ‘Universal Arbitration’ is also emerging, i.e. a form of convergence of how disputes are resolved so that parties of any nationality can operate in the same way with ever fewer language barriers. In their paper, Mahmood Reza Atai and Fatemeh Asadnia examine the communicative and promotional function of university homepages by looking at the ‘university overview’, ‘university mission statement’, and ‘university introduction at a glance’ genres, using a corpus of 210 texts selected from homepages of the top 500 universities ranked by the Academic Ranking of World Universities. The findings demonstrated that the three genres shared communicative purposes, functional units, certain moves and steps, socio-academic contexts, and discourse community members that led to the formation of a genre set. Gaetano Falco explores ways of using comics in an MA course on translation of economic texts as a means of stimulating the interest of language students with no economics skills in order to introduce economics-related lexis and improve thematic competence in general. He observes that empirical research has shown that films and comics can indeed be useful resources to teach economic translation to students with no skills in economics. However, the author warns that the use of comics for educational purposes may have its drawbacks, e.g. when students deal with complex sign systems which embody complex economic concepts, where often the humorous element is lost. In her paper, Irina Khoutyz describes the differences in how scholars present their findings in research articles (RA) in international journals in English and in Beyza Björkman Christian Burgers Jan Chovanec Anda-Elena Cretiu Erika Dalan John Douthwaite Hanem El-Farahaty Said Faiq Silvia Ferreri Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez Pedro Fuertes-Olivera Giuliana Garzone Christoph Hafner Ruba Khamam Anna Loiacono Geraldine Ludbrook John McRae Susan Petrilli Silvia Pireddu Tarja Salmi-Tolonen Jeffrey Segrave Charlotte Taylor Margherita Ulrych John Kenneth White Jessica Williams I hope you will enjoy the current issue of this journal and will make the most of the free access to all past issues. Christopher Williams (Chief Editor) 6 FOREWORD local journals in Russian. She then looks into the reasons for these differences, seeking explanations from the sociocultural contexts in which these RAs were written, as well as providing advice to local authors as to how to make their RAs more competitive at the international level. The differences include the apparent lack of structure of Russian RAs with respect to English RAs; the tendency in Russian authors not to specify the purpose in writing a paper; and the tendency of Russian authors to present the methodology used in less detail compared with English RAs. Luisella Leonzini investigates the use of verbal and visual metaphors in economic- media discourse within the context of the euro crisis by studying the correlation between linguistic and pictorial metaphors and text-image intersemiotic relations. The research is based on a cross-analysis of English and Italian editorial articles published between 2009 and 2012. In both corpora, metaphorical realizations frame the economic crisis which hit the single currency and the eurozone in 2009 as a partial collapse and hint at a possible return to stability in the form of a recovery. The aim of this paper is to analyse the collapse/caduta and recovery/ripresa metaphors across languages in the press. Ian Robinson reports on using corpus linguistics to aid students in writing a creative text. He looks at the available literature to help understand what is meant by ‘creativity’. A worksheet was prepared using a corpus linguistic analysis of modern, English versions of the stories of the Brothers Grimm. This worksheet was constructed with the use of a specialized corpus, and a stop-list was created which contained single words as well as word clusters found in the tales. Students were then asked to select some of these words and phrases to help them write stories which were then analysed, and a follow-up questionnaire was used to elicit the students’ perceptions concerning creativity. The author concludes that creativity is essential in EFL and that it is something to be fostered in students