Professional Communication
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PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION
INTRODUCTION
Language for special or specific purposes (LSP) was earlier the main term used for research on communication in professional settings. The history of this field reveals an early theoretical interest in the description of various sublanguages, which are assumed to exist within the general language system in response to specific professional needs. Early studies were concerned with the written products e.g. with specific terminology, text types and registers. Over time, however, there has been a growing interest in the communicative processes involved, and in their psychological and sociological dimensions, with a theoretical shift towards sociolinguistics, social constructivism, ethnography, conversation analysis and critical linguistics. Studies have dealt with spoken as well as written discourse and with the complex and diversified interplay between these media. The term professional discourse or professional communication is preferred to delineate this wider field. The early LSP traditions developed mainly within foreign language departments, with their orientation towards analysis of the language system. Practical problems relating to translation, standardization of terminology and design of technical and commercial documents were dealt with. This connection between the study of foreign languages and professional communication still exists, though the problems focused on have shifted somewhat. The earlier interest in language differences has made way for an interest in problems relating to language-in-context, and a sociological approach has been used both for macro analysis of organization structure and for micro analysis of workplace interaction. This has meant a gradual acknowledgement of the complexity and multimodality of interaction at work and a broadened methodological frame. In a gradually more globalized professional world, we also find that the cross-cultural dimension, in all its social complexity, is becoming more and more central.
N. Van Deusen-Scholl and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 4: Second and Foreign Language Education, 83–95. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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B R I T T- L O U I S E G U N N A R S S O N E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
The use of language for special purposes is of ancient origin, stemming from the human need to moderate language to suit different types of activities. The systematic study of LSP and the establishment of LSP as a field of academic inquiry, however, has a much shorter history. The oldest branch is concerned with the study of terminology. In the early years of this century, German engineers elaborated lists of terms used within different fields, and the theoretical work of Eugen Wüster in the 1930s laid the foundations for international collaboration to standardize terminology (cf. Wüster, 1970). It is not as easy, however, to determine when the study of texts for specific purposes began. We can find individual studies on business, legal and scientific languages,
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