This volume addresses the implications that academic interdisciplinarity in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has for research and pedagogy with a global reach. The Editors present a coherent, research-supported analysis of the influence of interdisciplinary research and methods on the way academics collaborate on courses, develop their careers and teach students. The hitherto prevalence of disciplinary silo-like approaches to academic and scientific issues is increasingly ceding ground to an interdisciplinary synergy of different methodological and epistemological traditions. In the context of ongoing trends towards interdisciplinarity in degree programmes and the increasing popularity of such degree programmes with students (e.g., bioinformatics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, neuropolitics, evolutionary finance, global studies, and security studies), academics and programme administrators need awareness of the skills needed to operate in interdisciplinary contexts.
Studies in this edited volume examine interdisciplinary communication practices, and identify how academic writing, teaching, language proficiency assessment and degree programmes are responding to changes in the broader social, institutional and political contexts of academia. As authors in the volume demonstrate, the discursive features, literacy practices and instructional modes, and the student experience of these emerging interdisciplines deserve systematic exploration.
This insightful volume sheds light on contexts across the globe and will be used by students studying EAP and ESP pedagogy or practice; academics in the fields of applied linguistics and higher education, as well as higher education faculty and administrators interested in interdisciplinarity in degree programmes.
Louisa Buckingham lectures in applied linguistics at the University of Auckland. She has a multi-disciplinary background, blending applied linguistics with the social sciences. Her research and teaching draw epistemologies typical of both disciplines and, where possible, she includes transdisciplinary components in course assessments. She is currently working on interdisciplinary projects related to ethnolinguistic diversity, and is collaborating with Jihua Dong on bibliometric projects.
Jihua Dong is Professor, Qilu Young Scholar, and Taishan Young Scholar in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Shandong University, China, where she teaches students from a wide range of disciplines. She has been involved in interdisciplinary research projects that merge applied linguistics with computer science and bibliometrics. She has also undertaken corpus-based analyses of interdisciplinary academic discourse.
Feng (Kevin) Jiang is Kuang Yaming Distinguished Professor in applied linguistics in the School of Foreign Language Education at Jilin University, China and gained his PhD under the supervision of Professor Ken Hyland at the Centre for Applied English Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His publications have appeared in most major applied linguistics journals.
