Building Bridges: Experiencing mediation in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP)

The inclusion of mediation in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2001; 2018) has attracted considerable attention in the area of language teaching and learning. As a key social, cultural and linguistic component of contemporary communication, mediation forms part of the plurilingual and pluricultural competences that communicators need for successful contemporary communication in diverse contexts. Taking a theoretical and empirical perspective, this paper argues that unless mediation finds its way into language learning, students will struggle to develop such competences. To support this argument, the paper examines both key literature in the area of mediation and the results of piloting mediation tasks at the University of Westminster in London-UK. It offers research-informed taxonomies of mediation strategies for linguistic and interpersonal bridging and exemplifies how these can be applied to English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP). The paper closes with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities that incorporating mediation into the ESAP class offers practitioners