Introduction

The field of English for academic purposes (EAP) is positioned within the wider field of ESP (English for specific purposes). Figure 1 displays the two main subdivisions of ESP: EAP, the main focus here, and, to a much lesser extent, EOP (English for occupational purposes, addressing students' perceived future needs in the workplace). What sets apart EAP from general English courses, for the most part, is the focus on students' needs, which are discovered through target situation analysis (objective needs focusing on the tasks and activities students will be using English for) and present situation analysis (more subjective‐type needs attending to personal information about the learners such as previous learning experiences, and so forth, and their current level of competence).

Key debates in the literature on EAP have raised both theoretical and practical issues regarding the essential nature of EAP and its ability to target students' needs. These issues are first discussed and then followed by an overview of the five main approaches underpinning EAP pedagogy: study skills, grammar and vocabulary, discourse/genre, academic literacies, and critical EAP.

Generic or Specific Attributes in EAP?

Proponents of the “common core” hypothesis maintain that there exists a generic set of skills, linguistic structures, and vocabulary found across a range of academic texts, regardless of discipline and genre, that are transferable from one academic discipline to another. Other EAP researchers, though, most notably Hyland (2006, 2009), reject the concept of a generic skill set, such as “academic English” or “business English,” making a strong case for “specificity” on account of disciplinary variation.

EAP researchers from opposing camps have analyzed computerized corpus data (i.e., large databases of academic text) to support their respective positions. For example, Coxhead's (2000) corpus‐based research of vocabulary items in a 3.5 million‐word corpus composed of written academic texts drawn from the disciplines of arts, commerce, law, and science supports the “common core” hypothesis, with its extraction of common core vocabulary items forming an academic word list. However, Hyland and Tse's (2007) corpus analysis of seven key genres of academic writing (research articles, textbooks, doctoral dissertations, and so on) points to a discipline‐based specific lexical repertoire. Other ESP studies of textbooks and research articles in which word lists from specialist disciplines are compared with Coxhead's academic word list also favor sets of discipline‐specific lexis, with the majority of these studies published in English for Specific Purposes. Perhaps, in the common core debate, a key point to note is that all these studies rely on different types of corpora and use different software for analysis, so it is not surprising that the findings differ and that this area is still fraught with controversies regarding the essential nature of EAP.

It is important to note, however, that the question of specificity is not purely determined through text‐based analyses, often supported by quantitative corpus‐based evidence. It is also revealed through more qualitative, ethnographic enquiries (e.g., interviews and observations) of the context in which the discourse is socially embedded (see Paltridge, Starfield, & Tardy, 2016, for an in‐depth discussion of this ethnographic perspective). As Hyland (2002, p. 390) states: “Disciplines have different views of knowledge, different research practices, and different ways of seeing the world, and as a result, investigating the practices of those disciplines will inevitably take us into greater specificity.”

Arguments for and against implementing either generic or more specific EAP courses are summarized in Basturkmen (2010). For example, a highly specific EAP course may not be very motivating for undergraduate students, but be deemed as highly relevant by postgraduate students engaged in writing dissertations. Moreover, in reality, it is not often logistically possible to implement a narrow‐angle course since the students are not a homogeneous group. The ongoing debate on common core versus specificity is an important one and will be taken up in the following discussion on the different pedagogic approaches to EAP, including a brief overview of their philosophical and theoretical orientations.

Approaches to EAP

Discourse/Genre

Following the “register analysis” approach, the next major development in EAP, particularly in the field of EST, took a discourse‐based orientation, linking particular forms with particular rhetorical functions, such as defining, classifying, and so forth (Trimble, 1985), an approach underpinning much of the academic study skills materials described in the first section. However, the first discourse‐based study to truly examine “specificity” in EAP, in Hyland's sense, was Tarone, Dwyer, Gillette, and Icke's (1981) study with its focus on the rhetorical and communicative purposes of the passive in research articles from the field of astrophysics.

Move 1: Establishing a territory

Step 1 claiming centrality (and/or)

Step 2 making topic generalization(s) (and/or)

Step 3 reviewing items of previous research

Move 2: Establishing a niche

Step 1A counter‐claiming (or)

Step 1B indicating a gap (or)

Step 1C question‐raising (or)

Step 1D continuing a tradition

Move 3: Occupying the niche

Step 1A outlining the purposes (or)

Step 1B announcing present research

Step 2 announcing principal findings

Step 3 indicating RA (research article) structure

Tarone et al.'s study marked a watershed in the field of EAP and was followed by Swales's (1990) development of the concept of genre (a genre is conceived as a particular communicative event which has a specific communicative purpose recognizable by the users of the genre's discourse community). The Swalesian tradition of genre analysis has had a profound and lasting influence on EAP applied linguistics research and teaching, such as the CARS (create a research space) model for article introductions, as outlined in Table  1. Building on Swales's work on genre, Johns (1997) advocates a “socioliterate” approach to academic literacy in which students come to grips with academic genres through drawing on their own experiences with genres and discourse communities to aid them in interpreting, producing, and critiquing texts from various academic contexts.

Another textual approach to genre is that of the “Sydney school” associated with Halliday's systemic‐functional lingustics (SFL), in which genres are defined as staged, goal‐oriented social processes. This approach is anchored in the need to teach socially valued genres, which are classified according to various rhetorical functions (e.g., explanation, description) based on linguistic criteria. An example of the SFL approach to pedagogy is Hussin's (2002, p. 30) task‐based instructional model for writing nursing care plans in the clinical part of trainee nursing programs in the academy (see Figure 2). In this teaching–learning cycle learners are offered support through “scaffolding” and repeated cycles (if necessary), thus increasing their knowledge of the content and context of the genre.

While the Swalesian and SFL approaches to genre accord importance to the textual aspect, the rhetorical genre studies approach tends to privilege the dynamic social and ideological context but at the same time does not neglect rhetorical and linguistic features. Bawarshi and Reiff (2010) lay out instructional guidelines for encouraging students to move repeatedly between analyzing the genre (i.e., identifying patterns in the genre's features) and the context (i.e., identifying the values and goals of the genre).

Conclusion

The above overview of the five main approaches to EAP shows how much the field of EAP has evolved over the last 50 years. Issues regarding generic versus discipline‐specific pedagogy and more critical perspectives have also been raised. Three key developments which will no doubt have influence over the conceptualization and implementation of EAP in future years are the increasing interdisciplinarity of subjects: for example, physics in medicine, the role of English as an academic lingua franca, and the application of digital media (e.g., blogs and wikis) and corpus resources in the continually evolving and dynamic field of EAP.

SEE ALSO: Corpus Analysis of Business English; Corpus Analysis of Key Words; Genre and Discourse Analysis in Language for Specific Purposes; Needs Analysis and Syllabus Design for Language for Specific Purposes; Vocabulary and Language for Specific Purposes; Writing and Language for Specific Purposes

The internationalization of higher education (HE) has led to a noticeable increase in the number of courses and degrees taught through the medium of English. One of the main reasons is the fact that HE is a lucrative industry. As a result, there is a need to internationalize curricula as part of the strategy to attract students from different parts of the world to universities in varying locations of the globe. Another reason is that nations want to be active players in the knowledge economy and thus there is the need to be able to access and contribute to the latest advances in the field of science and technology. All of these align with the need to attract international students and staff and to publish and be cited internationally, both important criteria of the Shanghai Jiaotong and the Times Higher ranking schemes for universities.

The increase in the number of programs taught in English in continental Europe has been documented in a series of studies conducted by Wachter and Maiworm (2008, 2014) which show a rise in English‐taught programs from 725 in 2001 to 8,089 in 2014. The authors stress, however, a number of points: first, despite this dramatic increase in English‐taught programs, only a small proportion of students (1.3%, representing 290,000 students) are actually enrolled in these programs; second, some 80% of these programs are at master's level; and, third, that the countries of northern Europe provide the most programs and southern Europe the least. Nevertheless, this rapid increase of English in HE in Europe and, as will be shown below, Asia, would appear to confirm Coleman's prediction that “it seems inevitable that English, in some form, will definitely become the language of higher education” (Coleman, 2006, p. 11).

In the European context, this relatively sudden and rapid shift to English‐medium programs is one consequence of the Bologna Process, named after the Bologna Declaration signed on June 19, 1999 in Bologna. The main aim of the Bologna Process is to create a European higher education area (EHEA) which will facilitate academic cooperation and staff and student exchange within Europe. The adoption of English as the common language to facilitate academic cooperation and exchange has led to the argument that “what emerges unambiguously is that in the Bologna Process, internationalization means English‐medium higher education” (Phillipson, 2009, p. 37).

In order to attract international students, many countries in Asia have also opened their doors to a model of transnational education with collaborative links with foreign institutions of higher learning, a move that itself necessitates a change in language policy from national languages to English.

Two recent developments are encouraging a Bologna‐like move to ensure degree programs converge. The first is the agreement reached in 2012 at the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit to seek ways in which to facilitate staff and student mobility across the universities of the region. The second is that the Association of Southeast Asian (ASEAN) Universities Network, which comprises some thirty universities in the countries of ASEAN, is also seeking to encourage staff and student mobility across the universities of the network.

Malaysia was one the earliest Asian countries to encourage transnational private HE opportunities for its citizens and to develop the nation as a regional hub of education (Gill, 2004, p. 140). Malaysia provided HE opportunities in English as far back as the 1980s, when Malaysian educational entrepreneurs responded to a local need for cheaper international degrees by creating a system whereby students did two years at a Malaysian private college and then, through credit transfer, could enter the third year of US universities. Based on this model, they then went on to initiate “twinning programs” (“1 + 2” and “2 + 1”) with British and Australian universities in the late 1980s. As a consequence, Malaysia has come to have some hundred private colleges and private university colleges, which have partnership programs with universities in Australia, the UK, the USA, and other English‐speaking countries.

In addition, there are now a total of more than a dozen private universities established after 1997–8 when the economic crisis set in. These include engineering universities set up by the three public utility corporations in Malaysia, Telekom (the national telecommunications company), Tenaga Nasional (the national electricity board), and Petronas (the national petroleum company) to branch campuses of foreign universities, as mentioned below (Gill, 2004, p. 141). More recently, several UK universities have established campuses in Malaysia. EduCity, a development just outside the city of Johore Bahru, is home to three UK universities, namely Newcastle, Reading, and Southampton. Indeed, UK universities now have 39 campuses outside Britain, and many more have some form of twinning arrangement with local universities. Malaysia's role is particularly significant. As the Economist notes, “Malaysia now has more students studying for the British qualification than any country bar Britain itself” (Economist, 2018).

Many Asian countries and universities are now trying to establish themselves as education hubs and attract international students from the region. Not only does this bring the university income and prestige, it can also be attractive to regional students, as fees and living expenses are appreciably lower than those in countries such as the UK, the USA, and Australia, where many international students currently study.

China's University and College Admission Systems (CUCAS; www.cucas.edu.cn) lists English medium instruction (EMI) courses offered by Chinese universities and it is clear that Chinese universities are increasing the number of EMI courses which they offer. As long ago as 2001, the then premier, Zhu Rongji, said that he hoped all classes at his alma mater, Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management, would be taught in English, as China needed to be able to exchange ideas with the rest of the world (South China Morning Post, 2001).

Even Indonesia, the country that was a role model for Malaysia in its own language planning stages, is pragmatically relaxing its control over mother‐tongue medium of instruction in favor of English, in order to attract international students. This is reflected by an advertisement for a medical degree from Padjadjaran University as a program that is conducted fully in the English language.

Japan is also embracing international education and introduced the Global 30 Project, which was designed to attract international students to Japan to study in one of 30 universities. The results have been disappointing, with fewer than 22,000 international students enrolled in 2011. Indeed the low numbers of international students has led to the recent abandoning of the Global 30 Project, which also drew criticism as many of the EMI programs were exclusively for international students and excluded local Japanese students. (McKinley, 2015). This has now been replaced by the Super Global Universities Project, under which 13 of Japan's top universities have been given extra funding to help them compete internationally and a further 24 universities have been identified whose role is to show Japan in a more global light (Kirkpatrick, 2017)

Despite the increase in English‐medium programs, the national languages in respective Asian and European countries are not forgotten (although other languages often are). Apart from Singapore, which made the decision to use English as the main medium of instruction in the entire educational system, including universities, many other nations in Asia have adopted a bilingual system of education. Yet how precisely to introduce this limited notion of bilingual education (the national language + English) remains the subject of controversy and experimentation. One principle being tried is that of “parallel languages” (Preisler, 2009), but this has yet to be defined. At one extreme it means that all subjects should be taught in the national language and English. At the other, universities may simply offer courses in English as they so wish. Preisler suggests, however, that the notion of “complementary” languages needs to be introduced where “the two languages will be functionally distributed within the individual programme according to the nature of its components, that is, the national or international scope of their academic content and orientation of their students” (2009, p. 26).

At the Hong Kong University of Education students take degrees in Cantonese, Putonghua, or English, and many degrees have some modules taught in Cantonese and others in English. However, the situation at the other seven government universities in Hong Kong demonstrates how slow institutions have been to embrace the notion of complementarity, as all, with the exception of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, are English‐medium only universities. This is despite the government's policy of creating a citizenry that is trilingual in Cantonese, Putonghua, and English and biliterate in Chinese and English. Thus the overwhelming majority of HE degrees and programs in a Chinese city with a population of more than 7 million are taught (officially, in any event) only through English. In other words, complementarity is not the norm for HE in Hong Kong—English‐medium only is.

This rapid growth in English medium education has often been implemented, especially in universities in Asia, without adequate planning and preparation. In a worldwide study mapping the growth of EMI, which encompassed 54 countries (Dearden, 2015), key findings were:

1. Apart from a few local exceptions, EMI is expanding rapidly, especially in the HE sector, as a result of a perceived need to internationalize institutions.
2. The private HE sector is putting pressure on the state HE sector to convert their programs to EMI as the latter need to compete for students; in turn, the tertiary sector is putting pressure on the secondary sector to also teach subjects through the medium of English.
3. In many countries the introduction of EMI is not supported by preservice teacher training or teacher professional development.
4. Not all teachers are equipped linguistically to be able to effectively deliver subject content to students.
5. Where there are concerns about the introduction of EMI, these are to do with its potentially divisive nature: the likelihood that it will either create social elites based on English‐language proficiency or contribute to already existing social inequalities. Other concerns relate to the deleterious impact that EMI may have on the home language (Macaro, Hultgren, Kirkpatrick, & Lasagabaster, 2019).

In conclusion, there is a definite and continuing trend within both Europe and Asia to move toward English medium education in higher education. At the same time, there are concerns that, in many places, this is being introduced without adequate planning and preparation, and without adequate thought about the future role of other languages as languages of education.

SEE ALSO: Varieties of English in Asia; World Englishes and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

Introduction

English for business is referred to in the academic literature in a number of different ways, including English for business, business English (BE), English for specific business purposes (ESBP), international business English (IBE), and business English as a lingua franca (BELF). When English for business is taught in professional business settings, it overlaps with English for occupational purposes (EOP). When it is taught as part of a tertiary course, it also overlaps with English for academic purposes (EAP). One of the hallmarks of research into English for business is the fact that it has largely been data driven. As a result, it has been characterized by reference to a variety of different research approaches, including sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, discourse analysis, business communication, management studies, English as a lingua franca, and English for specific purposes.

English is used routinely for commerce and industry across national borders in all parts of the globe (e.g., Rogerson‐Revell, 2007, discusses multicultural meetings in the European context; Evans, 2013, focuses on Hong Kong; Lockwood and Forey, 2012, report on the call center industry worldwide, etc.). It is almost always chosen as at least one of the official corporate languages used within a multinational corporation, even if both the corporation and its head office are located in a non‐English‐speaking country. Such corporate language policies have had varying degrees of success. For example, Louhiala‐Salminen, Charles, and Kankaanranta (2005) look at the challenges posed by a Scandinavian corporate merger in their seminal study of English as a business lingua franca; Du‐Babcock and Tanaka (2017) investigate leadership construction and decision making in intra‐Asian English; Gimenez (2002) reports on the impact of using English within the Argentinian subsidiary of a European multinational. In addition, English is often used in business transactions within national borders in countries where it is one of the language choices available as a result of that country's colonial past, (e.g., in India, the Philippines, and Singapore), and it may also be chosen for pragmatic reasons because there is an extensive expatriate business community who are unfamiliar with the local language, (e.g., in the Gulf Region). Finally, large parts of the world, (e.g., the United States, Australia, Anglophone Canada, the United Kingdom etc.), do business primarily in English, as it is the first language of most of the population.

There are many millions of business people across the globe who speak or write English on a daily basis, and hundreds and thousands of business transactions are initiated, negotiated, and completed using English either on its own or in combination with one or more other languages. Exactly how many people are involved is difficult to establish because of the wide range of different methodologies that have been used to measure this. In terms of economic value, however, first language interactions alone could account for as much as 30% of the world's gross domestic product (Graddol, 2006). The real value is clearly much larger if second and foreign‐language users of English are also taken into account. Although there are some indications that the use of other languages, such as Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic, will increase in business contexts, most scholars agree that English will continue to dominate for at least the next 50 years.

Because of its dominance, English has been analyzed more than any other business language. In the past three decades, researchers interested in English for business have looked at a variety of different forms of workplace communication, including business meetings, negotiations, presentations, sales letters, application letters, e‐mail, annual reports, audit reports, advertising texts, various forms of computer‐mediated communication, and corporate home pages. They have also studied the consequences of using business English across the globe, particularly for those people who do not speak it as a first language. Some researchers have focused primarily on the forms of communication that are used in business (e.g., Handford, 2010, looks at business meetings; Gimenez, 2014, looks at computer‐mediated communication in the workplace; de Groot, Nickerson, Korzilius, & Gerritsen, 2015, look at annual general reports, etc.), while others have looked specifically at the challenges faced by speakers of other languages in business English encounters and the ways in which they, and others, deal with them (e.g., Rogerson‐Revell, 2010, identifies the accommodation strategies used in international business meetings in English; Kankaanranta & Louhiala‐Salminen, 2010, elaborate on the perceived neutrality of English for Finnish business people, etc.). A third group of researchers have investigated how English is used to facilitate a specific type of business activity, and also how it interfaces with the other languages in use within the same context (e.g., Hornikx, van Meurs, & de Boer, 2010, investigate the effectiveness of using English slogans in advertising in the Netherlands; Flowerdew & Wan, 2010, consider the combination of speaking tasks in Cantonese or Mandarin as well as writing tasks in English that auditors in Hong Kong need to complete in parallel to successfully carry out an audit, etc.). The findings of these different types of studies have all contributed to our understanding of business English used as discourse—that is, “how people communicate using talk or writing in commercial organizations in order to get their work done” (Bargiela‐Chiappini, Nickerson, & Planken, 2013, p. 3).

English for business is a multibillion dollar industry, and British and American varieties of English still tend to dominate in textbooks and commercially produced training materials, despite the fact that many business people will use English primarily in their own region and will never interact regularly with their counterparts from the United Kingdom or the United States. In addition, as several researchers have shown, there is a very large gap between what real business people say or write and the models of language use that most textbooks include (Chan, 2009; Evans, 2012; but see Handford, Lisboa, Koester, & Pitt, 2011, for a research‐based textbook).

Researching Written and Spoken Business English

For written business English, the type of analysis generally referred to as “genre analysis” has been extremely influential. Vijay Bhatia's 1993 publication Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings extended an existing English for specific purposes (ESP) approach that had been pioneered by John Swales for academic writing, and reapplied it to some of the most important forms of written business communication that were in use at the time, such as application letters and sales letters. Genre analysis focuses on the communicative purpose of a text as a whole and attempts to explain how the content and form of the text contribute to this purpose; in doing so, it identifies a set of moves that people include in a text in which content and form are combined in a specific way. In his later publications, Bhatia has continued to develop this work with particular reference to strategic language use on the part of individual genre users, and he has explored the complex relationship between a text and the surrounding context (Bhatia, 2008, 2010). Many applied linguists interested in the written forms of English for business have been influenced by Bhatia's ideas, and, more recently, several of them have also extended his approach to the spoken forms of English for business. They include Stephen Evans (business presentations and e‐mail correspondence), Almut Koester (sales letters and negotiations), Anne Kankaanranta (e‐mail correspondence), and Michael Handford (business meetings). All of these scholars are active as teaching practitioners, so their research work has also influenced the ways in which business English is taught. Within the broader field of LSP (language for specific purposes), Johns's study of cohesion in different types of discourse is historically important as one of the first published studies on English for business (Johns, 1980), and the contrastive studies of business correspondence by Jenkins and Hinds (1987) and by Yli‐Jokipii (1994) are landmark studies for the 1980s and 1990s, respectively.

For spoken forms of communication, conversational analysis (CA) and discourse analysis (DA) (especially the approach pioneered by John Sinclair and Malcolm Coulthard at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom from the late 1970s onward) have been influential on our understanding of the ways in which English is used for business purposes. An important study of spoken business English that uses a CA approach is Boden's account of meetings in the United States in three different sectors: health, academia, and business (Boden, 1994). CA allows Boden to deconstruct the interactions that take place within the meetings and to show the contrast between the three sectors. She also looks at the way in which the organizations involved are shaped by the language they use. Mirjaliisa Charles's work on British business negotiations using discourse analysis (e.g., Charles, 1996) has remained influential, as has the work by Bargiela‐Chiappini and Harris on meetings and other forms of spoken business communication, both in English and in other languages (e.g., Bargiela‐Chiappini & Harris, 1997).

For the last two decades, many researchers looking at spoken business English have taken a discourse approach, in which their focus has been on the specific types of strategies that people use in business transactions. The 2005 study of English as a business lingua franca in Finnish and Swedish corporate mergers by Louhiala‐Salminen et al. (2005), for instance, shows that different national cultures use different strategies, which may then be interpreted by the participants in a meeting in both positive and negative ways. Likewise, the series of studies by Rogerson‐Revell on multicultural meetings in Europe shows how speakers with different proficiency levels in English cooperate with each other to co‐construct shared meanings (Rogerson‐Revell, 2007, 2008, 2010). Finally, the Language in the Workplace Project (LWP), directed by Meredith Marra at Victoria University Wellington in New Zealand, uses a number of different methodological approaches in the study of communication in the workplace, with an emphasis on spoken interactions. The methodologies used, together with the project's findings, are accessible via the project Web site, alongside a set of publications and pedagogical materials (www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/lwp/).

The Effects of Using English for Business

An additional type of research looks primarily at the effects of using English in business and is less concerned with the nature of the written communication or spoken interaction. Scholars interested in this type of research talk to business people who speak English as a second or foreign language about what their experiences are if they need to use English, or they talk to the users of different kinds of written texts about their attitudes to those texts and the ways in which business English influences their behavior. These studies have shown, for instance, that business people may face a number of complex challenges when they are asked to use an additional language to complete their work‐related tasks, particularly those who work in multinational corporations. At the same time, however, English has been shown to be both empowering and disempowering if it is used as a corporate language, depending on the surrounding context (Marschan‐Piekkari, Welch, & Welch, 1999; Vaara, Tienari, Piekkari, & Säntti, 2005). The pioneering study by Charles and Marschan‐Piekkari (2002) reveals a number of problems directly related to the use of English, such as difficulties in comprehending accent, insufficient translation of English into the languages used at subsidiary companies, and feelings of isolation due to a perceived lack of proficiency in English. Other studies that have looked at the effects of opting for English in business meetings and other types of communication in multinational corporations include Gimenez's (2002) study of the use of English at an Argentinian subsidiary company and Takino's (2017) study of the use of English in corporations in Japan. All of these studies emphasize the fact that language choice is only one factor within the complex contemporary workplace environment.

In a second group of studies investigating the effects of using English, the emphasis has been on the response of readers to business texts in English, often in an experimental setting. In these studies, a group of people are presented with business texts that include English and they are asked how the use of that English influences them: for example, what is their attitude to a product when it is advertised in English? Some studies have also tested whether people are able to comprehend the English in the texts that are presented to them. The study by Planken, van Meurs, and Radlinska (2010) is an accessible example of this type of study conducted within the European context; it looks at the use of English in Polish product advertising and its impact on the relevant consumer population (Planken et al., 2010). The findings of studies like these suggest that the use of English for business may not always be appreciated if it is included in promotional texts targeted at a non‐English‐speaking audience. More importantly, they also suggest that people may not always understand the message that is being conveyed.

English for Business in the Future

English for business in the future will be shaped by (a) the need to know more about the processes underlying intercultural interactions and how these impact commerce and industry, (b) the need to know more about what real business people say and write in different contexts across the globe, and (c) the need to know more about the influence of new media and computer‐mediated communication on workplace practices. The flattening of the world and the increasing influence of emerging economies such as India and mainland China will lead to more multilingual workplaces and more multinational organizations. English for business will continue to play an important role as both an international and intranational business language, and at the same time it will become increasingly disassociated from its Anglo‐Saxon roots (Zhang, 2007, 2017). This means that in situations where English is used as a lingua franca it will increasingly function as a “neutral and a shared communication code” and the business people who use it will not consider themselves either as “non‐native speakers” or as “learners” (Louhiala‐Salminen et al., 2005, p. 404). Because of this, business people will need to develop cultural intelligence as well as proficiency in business English (as a lingua franca) in order to communicate effectively with those around them (Kankaanranta & Planken, 2010; Zander, Moikaitis, & Butler, 2012). Related fields such as intercultural communication and intercultural interaction will continue to be influential (see especially the work of Helen Spencer‐Oatey, e.g., 2000) and there will be an increasing need to produce textbooks that incorporate the findings of research into business language and business English (Chan, 2017). Finally, there will be an urgent need to understand more about the role played by multimodality (e.g., how text, visuals, and sound combine), as this will underpin the development of more complex and dynamic forms of computer‐mediated business English.

SEE ALSO: English for Academic Purposes; Genre and Discourse Analysis in Language for Specific Purposes; Genre‐Based Language Teaching; Language, Culture, and Context; Lingua Franca and Language of Wider Communication

Introduction

English for occupational purposes (EOP) refers to the specific ways English is used in different work and professional situations. It is often considered to be one of two main subdivisions of English for specific purposes (ESP), the other being English for academic purposes (EAP). Like English for specific purposes or languages for specific purposes (LSP), the history of English for occupational purposes is closely bound up with developments within English language teaching and the emergence of courses aimed at preparing students and trainees to use English in specific professional, academic, and occupational contexts. In fact, the term “English for occupational purposes” is often considered to be synonymous with the teaching of such courses. The growth of EOP as a major branch of ESP can be linked to the emergence of English as an international language, or lingua franca, of business and work.

Because of their practical aim to develop the language and skills needed for work, what is taught in EOP courses should be based on needs analysis—that is, on finding out what tasks will be performed in English in the target situation (Dudley‐Evans & St. John, 1998; Woodrow, 2018). Since the mid‐1990s, a considerable amount of research on how English is used in different workplace contexts, especially in business, has been conducted; however, there is not always a strong link between this research and what is taught in EOP courses (Bargiela‐Chiappini, Nickerson, & Planken, 2007). This entry will provide an overview of research into English used in different occupational and workplace contexts and will discuss the relevance of this research for teaching EOP.

Surveys in English for Occupational Purposes

An obvious way to discover what communicative tasks people carry out in their work is to ask them. For this information to be useful for teaching EOP, it is important to know which tasks are performed in English, rather than in the national language. Surveys have been carried out in a number of countries to find out such information; for example, Barbara, Celani, Collins, and Scott (1996) conducted a survey to discover how English was used in a variety of business organizations in Brazil; and a survey by Chew (2005) focused specifically on the tasks carried out by new graduate employees in the banking sector in Hong Kong. In the European context, a widely read magazine for English learners in Germany (McMaster, 2008) conducted a survey among approximately 1,000 readers who use English in their work. The tasks most frequently performed in English, according to the survey results, included reading and writing e‐mails, speaking on the telephone, and reading letters and job‐specific literature. Interestingly, the most frequent tasks were not necessarily the ones respondents felt they had difficulty performing in English; for example, small talk was not among the top five most frequent tasks, but was felt to be one of the most problematic. That is why, in designing EOP courses, it is important to carry out a needs analysis in order to find out what abilities and skills students lack (in addition to what tasks they will need to perform), as illustrated, for example, by Chan (2018) in reporting on a curriculum development project for a business English course in a Hong Kong university.

Such surveys and needs analyses are a good starting point for deciding what to include in an EOP syllabus; however, in order to discover what language is used in these workplace tasks, it is necessary to study workplace texts and interactions.

Analyzing Language and Interactions at Work

It is, in fact, quite difficult to specify the characteristics of English for occupational purposes, as this term covers a very wide range of occupations and professions. In order to discover what is distinctive about EOP, a useful question to ask is how it is different from everyday language. Drew and Heritage (1992, p. 22) have identified three dimensions of interaction that distinguish institutional talk (of which workplace talk is a subcategory) from everyday conversation:

1. Goal orientation: “an orientation by at least one of the participants to some core goal, task or identity . . . conventionally associated with the institution.”
2. “Special and particular constraints on what one or both of the participants will treat as allowable contributions to the business at hand”; that is, on what it is considered appropriate to say or how interactions are structured.
3. “Inferential frameworks and procedures that are particular to specific institutional contexts”; that is, what is said and done is interpreted against the background of the institutional context.

The impact of these three dimensions is that the language used in the workplace is more restricted in many ways than that used in social interactions. A further characteristic of workplace interactions (and institutional interactions in general) is that they are often asymmetrical (Heritage, 1997); that is, there is often a difference in the relative power or relevant knowledge between the participants—for example, between doctors and patients or bosses and employees.

Beyond such general insights into the distinguishing features of language used in the workplace, corpus analysis has provided useful quantitative findings on the characteristics of English for occupational purposes, in particular in business situations, since around 2000. A corpus is a computer‐based collection of written or spoken texts, which can be analyzed for recurring linguistic features using a number of analytical tools. Two corpora of spoken workplace interactions are:

• the Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus (CANBEC) consisting of 64 meetings (approximately a million words) from business sectors (mostly in the UK) such as the pharmaceutical industry, information technology, and manufacturing; and
• the business subcorpus of the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE) consisting of 30 hours (262,000 words) of workplace interactions in Hong Kong businesses.

The latter corpus includes a wide range of workplace situations, such as interviews, service encounters, and telephone conversations, while CANBEC consists mostly of meetings.

By comparing the language used in workplace corpora like this with corpora consisting of social interactions, it is possible to gain an insight into which words, expressions, and phrases are frequent in occupational settings. A comparison of CANBEC with a subcorpus consisting of social and family conversations from the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE) revealed some unexpected findings (Handford, 2010). Not only were words typically associated with the world of work, such as meeting, business, or order, more frequent in CANBEC; but so were some fairly general words, for example problem and issue, as well as grammatical words, such as the pronoun we. These findings point to the importance of problem solving as a key activity in the workplace and the emphasis on the group (the team, professional group, or organization) rather than the individual. Such quantitative findings based on the analysis of large amounts of text provide valuable information for coursebook writers and syllabus designers. Corpus findings are beginning to have an impact on the content of EOP course material, as shown in some recent publications, such as Koester, Pitt, Handford, and Lisboa (2012), a corpus‐informed business English textbook.

Besides corpus analysis, which is a fairly recent method for analyzing workplace interactions, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and genre analysis are frequently used to study the ways in which English is used in occupational settings. Discourse analysis is a qualitative approach to examining how language is used in written and spoken texts within particular social contexts. Conversation analysis is similar; however, it focuses exclusively on spoken interactions and involves a particular method of analyzing such interactions in great detail and attempting to make sense of them from the participants' point of view (see Drew & Heritage, 1992). Genre analysis can be described as a type of discourse analysis that aims to describe the characteristics of particular text and interaction types that recur in specific social and institutional situations and display regular patterning. As language is frequently used in the workplace in specialized types of text (e.g., correspondence and reports of various kinds) or spoken interactions (e.g., meetings, presentations, job interviews), genre analysis is a particularly useful method for describing workplace language. A genre can be described as having a particular communicative purpose (or set of purposes) and a particular structure and lexicogrammatical patterns (Bhatia, 1993).

Workplace genres can be identified at a fairly general level (e.g., Koester, 2010, pp. 18–44); for example, a genre such as the workplace meeting occurs across different occupational sectors and is characterized by distinctive, recurring features, such as the role of the chairperson, minutes, and an agenda (even if not all meetings have these features). Other genres are only used in a particular occupation or workplace, for example tax computation letters, which are, of course, a specialized genre used by tax accountants (Flowerdew & Wan, 2006), or the clinical handover, which involves a transfer of patient care and responsibility between clinicians (such as doctors and nurses) in hospital (Eggins & Slade, 2012). In terms of pedagogical applications in EOP teaching, identifying the characteristics of genres that are frequent across occupations provides useful insights for courses aimed at heterogeneous groups of EOP learners. On the other hand, for groups of homogeneous learners from the same occupational group or workplace—for example, in the case of on‐site teaching—surveying, and analyzing the specialized genres used in that particular occupation would be useful for identifying the specific needs of such groups.

English for Occupational Purposes in Different Workplace Settings

The kind of patterning identified in workplace genres is revealing not only of the language used, but also of the people who use the genres and of how they interact with one another. Genres are used and recognized by groups, not just by individuals, and therefore they tell us a great deal about the groups or “communities,” such as occupational groups or coworkers, who use them. The term “community of practice” is frequently used to describe the totality of shared “ways of doing things” of teams or groups of people who work together (a related term is “discourse community,” see Swales, 1990). According to Wenger (1998, pp. 72–3), communities of practice are defined by three criteria: mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire. These three dimensions of a community of practice result in a set of norms and practices, including interactional ones, which may vary from one workplace to another. Research on particular workplace settings has often sought to identify specific interactional practices of the professional community.

A great variety of workplace contexts and occupations have been investigated by researchers interested in language and interaction using some of the methods described above (e.g., corpus analysis, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and genre analysis). “White collar” office contexts have received much attention, including some large‐scale studies (Holmes & Stubbe, 2003; Handford, 2010), frequently with a specific focus on “business discourse” (e.g., Bargiela‐Chiappini et al., 2007). Compared to white‐collar contexts, workplace interactions in “blue collar” settings are less well researched; however, a number of studies have been carried out in factories (Holmes & Stubbe, 2003; Vine, 2004) and in the construction industry (e.g., Handford & Matous, 2015). Specific professional contexts in which communication has been studied include health communication (Hamilton & Chou, 2014), legal discourse (e.g., Coulthard & Johnson, 2010), and call centers (e.g., Forey & Lockwood, 2010). Bhatia and Bremner (2014) and Vine (2018) provide a comprehensive overview of the range of occupational settings that have been investigated by language researchers, as well as the topics and issues they have explored and the research methods used.

The Social Dimension of English for Occupational Purposes

Researchers investigating the workplace have become increasingly interested in the social and interpersonal dimension and the role played here by language. Examples of research in EOP with such a sociolinguistic orientation can be found in studies deriving from the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project, a database of workplace interactions from a variety of occupational settings in New Zealand, such as government departments, small businesses, and factories (see Holmes & Stubbe, 2003). Social aspects of workplace interactions investigated include power and politeness, humor, small talk, gender and identity (e.g., Holmes & Stubbe, 2003; Vine, 2004; Holmes, 2006; Schnurr, 2013).

This move toward a more social orientation of research in EOP is paralleled by a more holistic approach to teaching EOP. Whereas in its early days the focus in EOP/ESP teaching was primarily on vocabulary and grammar, it is now more on communicative skills, including social skills. Belcher (2004, p. 173) summarizes this trend as follows:

Perhaps because of their heightened awareness of the array of social, material and affective factors that can motivate and facilitate language learning, and of what language learning can accomplish beyond smoother workplace interactions, some number of on‐site EOP specialists now see their role as widening to include more than language teaching.

While there is still a gap between research and teaching in this area, a number of EOP textbooks have now been published, particularly for business English, that draw on research findings regarding the language used to perform social and interpersonal functions in workplace interactions (e.g., Koester et al., 2012; Darics & Koller, 2018).

Conclusion

In sum, English for occupational purposes refers both to the ways in which English is used in workplace settings and to the teaching of courses that aim to prepare learners to communicate in English in occupational settings. With needs analysis at the heart of this kind of teaching, research into EOP is of key relevance to the content of EOP syllabuses and teaching material. The aim of this entry has been to provide an overview of the different approaches to discovering how English is used in workplace settings and to show how the findings from such research can be applied to teaching EOP.

SEE ALSO: Corpus Analysis of Business English; English for Academic Purposes; English for Business; Genre and Discourse Analysis in Language for Specific Purposes; Genre‐Based Language Teaching; Lingua Franca and Language of Wider Communication; Needs Analysis and Syllabus Design for Language for Specific Purposes

English has long been the common and dominant language in the USA. Nevertheless, supporters of official English and restrictive English‐only policies maintain that the common language is under threat from the numerous minority languages in the country (Crawford, 2008). The relationship between the dominant language and minority languages is often depicted as a struggle between them. From a demographic perspective, however, it is important to understand that the vast majority—over 98%—of those residing in the USA speak English, and those who speak other languages are mostly bilinguals. Thus it is difficult to understand how English is under threat if most of those who speak other languages also speak English. One argument that can be advanced is that about one third of those who speak English do not speak it well, but there is evidence that those who do not speak it well desire to speak it better, as is evidenced by the demand for English as a second language programs (Wiley, 2005).

Historical Background

During the British colonial period, English achieved dominant status over other European languages in the colonies. Generally there was tolerance toward other European immigrant languages. Tolerance, however, did not extend to all languages and speakers. Enslaved Africans were not allowed to speak their native and ancestral languages, and, beginning in the late colonial period in the southern colonies, compulsory English illiteracy statutes were imposed, whereby it became illegal for the enslaved to learn to read and write English. American Indians were generally treated as members of separate and subordinate nations with whom treaties could be negotiated. There were many efforts by missionaries to promote literacy in indigenous languages, largely as a means of proselytizing Indians, as well as attempts to teach them English. During the American Revolution, one of the first acts of the Continental Congress was to pass an appropriation for Indian education for the purpose of pacification (Wiley, 2004, 2014).

The question has often been raised regarding why the USA did not designate English as an official language in the US Constitution of 1789. There are several reasons. First, the dominance and common utility of English was self‐evident—it functioned as if it were the official language; second, the founders were generally tolerant toward language diversity and minority rights, except toward the enslaved; third, they did not want to offend speakers of European languages other than English who had just supported the revolutionary cause against England. Thus its functional role and status precluded the need for its “official” designation (see Heath, 1976a, 1976b; Daniels, 1989; Baron, 1990).

In the early 19th century, there was a considerable effort to promote a standard American English, or “American language,” though this was through private commercial means, rather than official governmental means. Largely through the efforts of Noah Webster, the focus was on regularizing spelling and pronunciation of the language. Webster wanted to differentiate the standard American variety from the language of the English. He was generally more preoccupied with eradicating regional variations in American English, and in making the spoken form conform to the written, than with defending the language from threats from other languages (Simpson, 1986).

From the early years of the Republic through the mid‐19th century, the federal government pursued an aggressive agenda of territorial expansion. As a result of annexation, military conquest, and imposed treaties, numerous indigenous and nonimmigrant language minority peoples were incorporated from the former French Louisiana territory, former Spanish Florida, as well as Texas and other former Mexican territories. After English was briefly designated as the official language of the newly annexed Louisiana Territory, there was some initial resistance, so French regained standing with English in Louisiana. The federal government chose not to impose English on its newly acquired territories from Mexico in the southwest.

Up to the Civil War (1861–5), attitudes and policies toward language diversity in the USA were mixed. There was relative tolerance toward European immigrant languages in many states. In 1837, for example, Pennsylvania passed laws allowing for German bilingual education (National Education Association, 1987). There were, however, strong anti‐immigrant sentiments, particularly in eastern urban areas with large immigrant populations. These were particularly evident in the Know Nothing movement of the 1840s and 1850s. The compulsory illiteracy laws, which were imposed on enslaved African Americans during the colonial period, persisted in southern states until the end of the Civil War. In the aftermath of the forced relocation of Native Americans in the “Trail of Tears” (1831–8), some American Indian tribes, most notably the Cherokee, successfully ran their own schools and achieved impressive levels of native language literacy and biliteracy in English. In the latter decades of the 19th century, however, English‐only boarding schools became a tool for the deculturation of native cultures and “pacification” of Native Americans (Wiley, 2014).

From 1867 to the end of the Spanish American War (1898–1901), the USA added Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico to its growing international empire. English education was imposed in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and, in the case of Hawaii, the native language was restricted. On the US mainland, high levels of European immigration increased until World War I. During the war, there was a wave of anti‐German sentiment and widespread xenophobia which culminated in English being designated as the official language in a majority of states. In some states, such as Nebraska, it became illegal to teach German or foreign languages in lower grades. In 1923, the Supreme Court (Meyer v. Nebraska 262 US 390) ruled against the Nebraska English‐only statute. The ruling, however, was a partial victory for English advocates, because it affirmed right of states to require English as the medium of instruction. English‐only boarding school instruction for American Indian children persisted into the early 1930s (Wiley, 2004, 2014). Despite its impact on immigrant children, it is likely that the English‐only movement had less impact on their adult parents (Lleras‐Muney & Shertzer, 2015).

Following World War II, language minority issues increasingly came to be seen in the light of federal racial desegregation initiatives. The correlation between low educational achievement, racial segregation, and language minority status—particularly for students of Mexican origin—became a focus of civil rights advocates. By the mid‐1960s, bilingual education came to be seen as an appropriate accommodation for non‐English‐speaking minority children. In the wider sociopolitical context, bilingual accommodations were also allowed for voting and legal proceedings. Following the failure of the San Francisco school district to provide any accommodation for non‐English‐speaking immigrant children of Chinese origin, the Supreme Court ruled in Lau v. Nichols (414 US 563, 1974) that schools had to provide some proactive means of teaching English and making the curriculum comprehensible. These victories of language minority advocates were short‐lived, however, because by the later 1970s bilingual education had come under attack by those who questioned any attempts to accommodate speakers of languages other than English (Wiley, Lee, & Rumberger, 2009).

The Rise of the Contemporary English‐Only Movement

The contemporary English‐only movement grew out of organized efforts in the 1980s to promote the official status of English while restricting bilingual accommodations. In 1981, Senator S. I. Hayakawa (1906–92), a Canadian immigrant of Japanese ancestry, semanticist and former president of San Francisco State University, introduced a constitutional amendment to make English the official language of the USA. That effort failed, and since the 1980s subsequent versions of the proposed amendment likewise have been unsuccessful.

To further his cause, in 1983, Hayakawa joined with Dr. John Tanton, an ophthalmologist and proponent of population control and environmentalism, to found U.S. English (www.usenglish.org). U.S. English was affiliated with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which lobbies for restrictive immigration policies. Initially, U.S. English was well funded, with endorsements from well‐known celebrities, including Walter Cronkite. Following the public release of a controversial internal memo by Tanton, which was seen as anti‐Latino, Tanton resigned and some celebrities such as Cronkite disassociated themselves from the organization. Although efforts to promote a federal constitutional amendment to make English the official language have thus far been unsuccessful, U.S. English has pursued a more successful strategy in promoting English as the official language among the states, where, according to a recent count some 31 have now passed some form of official English policy (see National Education Association, 1987; Crawford, 1992; Wiley, 2004).

U.S. English continues to be one of the leading groups advocating for English‐only legislation. Although it has been unsuccessful thus far in seeing the passage of an official English law, it continues to support such legislation. In the 115th Congress (2017–18), for example, it supported H.R. 997, “The English Language Act of 2017,” and similar legislation, S. 678, in the US Senate. The organization currently opposes statehood for Puerto Rico, based on the dominance of Spanish in the island. It also advocates for revoking Executive Order 13166, which President Clinton signed into law on August 11, 2000. The executive order is designed to provide translation services for those with limited English ability, thereby guaranteeing equal access for critical social and medical services.

Another highly visible organization, English First (http://englishfirst.org), was established in 1986 with three goals: to (a) make English the official language of the USA, (b) allow children the opportunity to learn English, and (c) eliminate what the organization considers to be ineffective and expensive multilingual policies. The organization's first president, Larry Pratt, was also executive director of the Gun Owners of America as well as Secretary of the Council on Inter‐American Security. The latter organization published a report in 1985 that depicted Hispanic people as a national security threat and bilingual education as fostering cultural apartheid (National Education Association, 1987; Crawford, 1998; Wiley, 2004).

There has been organized opposition to the English‐only movement, largely from academic organizations involved in language teaching and civil rights advocacy. In 1987, for example, English Plus was founded by opponents of English‐only policies, who supported a cultural rights amendment which sought to promote linguistic and cultural diversity. A number of educational organizations have passed resolutions opposing English‐only policies. These include Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), the Linguistics Society of America (LSA), the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), and the National Education Association (NEA). The major concerns posed by critics of the official English movement are that it threatens the civil rights of language minorities and the government's ability to accommodate their educational, economic, and political access. Beyond that, critics see the movement's priorities as working against the need to promote languages other than English which are needed to make US businesses more competitive in international markets (Crawford, 1998; Wiley, 2004).

One major criticism of the English‐only movement is its association with anti‐immigrant agendas which have particular impact on Latinos. These policies received widespread endorsement by a majority of those voting. In Arizona, for example, voters have supported official English policies while also endorsing policies that make it illegal to teach English to undocumented adults. Given such widespread support, some scholars, such as Tatalovich (1995) have attempted to assess how deeply held the popular endorsement of English‐only policies is and which elements of the population most supportive. Tatalovich concluded that the first phase of the movement was dominated by debates between elite politicians, who aligned with the issues largely along racial lines with pro‐Latino politicians opposing English‐only policies. The second stage involved mass activism along social class lines with the middle class largely endorsing English‐only policies. The more recent phase at the national level has seen a strong linkage between English‐only and anti‐immigration policies. According to Tatalovich (1995), this third phase shifted emphasis from the states back to the federal level and is potentially more politically inflammatory than it was during the Americanization movement (1914–25).

Other political scholars, such as Donahue (1995), have argued that the public debate over English‐only policies has been made more controversial because of political opportunism:

What matters is that . . . to achieve leadership, one must first become widely known. In what seems to be an utterly cynical value, problems of truth and falsity can be dealt with not at the outset, but later . . . indeed, truth may simply be a matter of what one can get the public to believe. (Donahue, 1995, p. 117)

Propositions 227 and 203

In California, beginning in the late 1990s, Ron Unz, a private businessman, sponsored and succeeded in passing a controversial proposition (227) called “English for the Children,” which resulted in restricting bilingual education. The arguments for Proposition 227 advanced by Unz were based on the following premises: (a) English is the language of opportunity and social mobility; (b) immigrant minority parents are eager to have their children learn the language; (c) schools have a moral obligation to teach English; (d) California schools have performed poorly in educating immigrant children, as indicated by their high dropout rates; and (e) young immigrant children acquire second languages easily (Wiley, 1999).

Advocates of bilingual education generally had little argument with the first three assumptions regarding the importance of English and the necessity to teach it. The fourth assumption, however, that bilingual education causes high dropout rates among language minority children, was questionable at the time because only about 30% of California's then 1.4 million language minority students had received any bilingual education support, prior to passage of Proposition 227, even though they were eligible. The fifth assumption, that young immigrant children rapidly acquire second languages was—and continues to be—the most controversial claim because it is not supported by research evidence (Wiley et al., 2009; Gandara & Hopkins, 2010). It is also contradicted by the fact that many English‐speaking monolingual children have difficulties mastering English literacy skills in school (Wiley, 1999).

In 2000, Unz followed with another successful antibilingual education proposition (203), in Arizona. Again, since the passage of Proposition 227 in California and 203 in Arizona, there is little evidence that English‐only education has improved educational performance and growing evidence that it has not (Wiley et al., 2009; Gandara & Hopkins, 2010; Moore, 2014). Since the implementation of Proposition 203 in Arizona, a controversial structured English immersion (SEI) model has been implemented requiring immigrant children to be separated from those in mainstream instruction for four hours per day. Researchers (Gandara & Hopkins, 2010; Lillie et al., 2010; Moore, 2014) have raised concerns that many children are falling behind their native English‐speaking peers.

Proposition 58 and the Future

In a major reversal of the restrictive policies enacted in California in 1998 under Proposition 227, Californians voted to overturn Proposition 227 by nearly a 74% margin by affirming Proposition 58 in the fall of 2016. Preposition 58 maintains the requirement that students must learn English, but also allows schools to establish dual language programs for all students, both for those who are native speakers of English and for those who are learning English but speak another language. The new provision also requires school districts to consult parents, including those who speak languages other than English, regarding whether they want their children to be taught in an English‐only environment or bilingually. The broad support for Proposition 58 appeared to reflect a shift away from a strict English‐only ideology toward broader support for all students to learn an addition language, although much of the supportive campaign advertising for learning additional languages tended to be within a neoliberal discursive frame of reference (Wiley, in press).

Whether future generations will be as favorable to English‐only policies in the USA as those of the recent past remains to be seen. As long as the “either or” logic of the English‐only ideology prevails, in which a struggle between English and other languages for dominance is presumed, there can be little progress in expanding the linguistic capacity of the country. Fear of language conflict and bilingual education limits the opportunity to develop the linguistic resources of multilingual minority populations. Thus we may well wonder what the long‐term consequences to US society will be, given the significant intergenerational loss of heritage languages (Rumbaut, 2009), which results from English‐only educational policies. It is likewise apparent that foreign‐language teaching is on the decline (Rhodes & Pufahl, 2010), which has implications for the USA's ability to function in the multilingual global society and be competitive in the global economy. With the vast majority of Americans speaking only English, surely the more serious issue facing the USA is how to retain languages being lost while expanding the teaching of the world's languages more broadly.

SEE ALSO: Heritage Languages and Language Policy

Introduction

Since the 19th century, concepts related to knowledge have been analyzed using a small group of primary categories; the core three are metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. Within these, epistemology and a subcategory within metaphysics, namely ontology, are sometimes paired as terms of analysis to indicate positions within the domain of research methodology and also as the basis for understanding positions in politics and pedagogy, not to mention one's philosophy of second language (SL) teaching (Crookes, 2009, pp. 76–8, 113–33). The two terms are often used in discussions of research positions (e.g., Guba and Lincoln, 1994). This entry defines the terms “ontology” and “epistemology” as they occur within philosophy, then takes up points concerning their use in SL research as a practice intended to result in SL‐related knowledge. Many of the issues involved have been in existence as long as humans have philosophized, theorized, and researched. Some of the same issues play out repeatedly in our field. The social nature of knowledge, the roles of observation and interpretation in research, the degree to which knowledge is well founded, knowledge of language itself, and SL professionals' knowledge all turn on epistemological and ontological matters.

Ontology Within Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the study of abstract concepts including those transcending sense data. Philosophical systematizers conventionally break it into three parts: cosmology, theology, and ontology—the nature of what is. This study has not always been valued. Of metaphysics, Hume (1748/2004, p. 107) wrote, “Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing save sophistry and illusion,” a position endorsed later by the logical positivists. Nevertheless, ontology is relevant to an understanding of research procedures and products in general, because all scientific theories, and all research methodologies, have a metaphysics (Harré, 1985). They all (explicitly or implicitly) take a position on the nature of the things to which they are referring, or the entities they are trying to identify or theorize, and the meanings of the basic concepts they are working with.

The use of the term or concept of ontology in research contexts is often related to whether researchers are trying to arrive at knowledge of an objective, real world, or to obtain knowledge of entities that are conceived of as not given—not independent of human action or of embeddedness in human culture. Attempts to deal with these matters have not been helped by the tendency to do so simplistically, with dichotomies being particularly pernicious. Thus, if we say that there is a “real” world, the one apparently given to us by our senses, then the supposedly singular alternative position, once the first position has taken hold of the label “realist,” is presumably “antirealist.” At this point, those opposed to the first position are immediately backed into a corner by the “commonsense” question, “Surely you are not saying that this world does not exist?” The response is to say, indeed, that is not what we are saying. But what is the position, then? It is that the ontological nature of the objects of the research inquiry are much less well grounded than might otherwise be thought; that they have an existence, yes, but it is one made relative by their ineluctable implicatedness in human existence. Discussions of this topic in an SL context, and even in education contexts, have usually not been informed by a full awareness of the historical extent and diversity (beyond binaries) of the philosophical contexts involved.

Ontologies are often associated with one of three main schools of philosophical thought: idealism, realism, and pragmatism. Thus one can talk about an idealist ontology, a realist ontology, or a pragmatist ontology (and many variants or intermediate positions). Similarly, ontological positions are referenced or specified in terms of other (grand) theories. In the past, some spoke of a materialist (or dialectical materialist) ontology (Lenin, 1908, p. 57); at the present time, one can refer to a “leftist ontology” (Strathausen, 2009). Thus in ontological explorations in SL research contexts we are concerned with what we mean when we say that a theoretical concept in our area exists and when we are obliged to specify or investigate its nature (e.g., Al‐Amoudi, 2010). This applies to rules, to the nature of the SL learner, to language, to the entities “acquired” in second language acquisition (SLA) processes, to learner identities, to cognitive structures, and so on.

Perhaps the most important ontological question or area facing SL researchers is to what degree the objects of their investigation, most obviously language, are socially constituted. This question is tackled by Zuengler and Miller (2006), whose entire discussion of the difference between cognitive and sociocultural views of language in SLA is specified in terms of ontological perspectives. Furthermore, if one accepts that some concepts (or objects) under investigation are socially constructed, one can then subject the term “society” itself to inspection. If a conflict theory of society is entertained, that means our basic understandings of language, or of the person, are themselves socially constructed in a contested manner. If a critical theory of society is to be engaged with, a critical ontology follows, in which the ontological status of a language, for example, might be seen as having, say, an inherently patriarchal or class character. Or for example, concerning discourse, it would be found to have a strong tendency to obscure (to the benefit of a ruling class) as opposed to being transparent, or to manifesting viewpoints of Indigenous peoples or other oppressed groups (Kincheloe, 2006). Finally here, note that though most ontologies refer to “substances,” it has also become possible to refer to “process ontologies” (Thorne, 2005).

Epistemology

Epistemology is the domain of philosophy that concerns the sources and nature of knowledge. This entry is concerned with research as a source of knowledge, though other sources are recognized in epistemological discussions. Where religion (especially charismatic or fundamentalist) holds power, revelation and authority are two such sources. Intuition is a source of knowledge that has been identified by some mainstream philosophers, such as Kant. However, in secular societies, two sources are given general lip service: reason—that is, the exercise of rational judgment—and empirical research.

Scheffler's (1978) education‐oriented review identifies some subdomains within epistemology. He specified the question “what is knowledge?” as the primary focus of epistemology, but provided four other related questions:

[Second,] the evaluative question: “What knowledge is most reliable or important? . . . [which] asks for a classification of sorts of knowing. . . . [Third,] the genetic question: “How does knowledge arise?” To answer this question is to give an account of the processes or mechanisms by which knowledge develops; it is, typically, to provide some model of the mind that may render learning processes intelligible. Fourthly, there is the methodological question: “How ought the search for knowledge be conducted?” . . . Fifthly . . . the pedagogical question: “How is knowledge best taught?” (p. 5)

Besides the matter of knowledge itself, SL specialists must concern themselves with sorts of knowing, an important area for us, reflecting our ontologies of language. Scheffler's “genetic” question is equally important. Considering the genesis of knowledge, one epistemological position allows for innate knowledge of language; others dispute this or emphasize that knowledge comes about through learning. And as a consequence, arguments among those concerned with universal grammar‐based theories of SLA are often framed using the term “epistemology.” Thus theories of learning in general or SL learning in particular, inherently important for the teacher and potentially important for the researcher (as a person engaged in learning about a phenomenon), come in here. As White (1998, pp. 3–4) wrote,

That area of philosophy known as epistemology has been concerned with questions of how knowledge is acquired and the distinction between knowledge and belief. . . . Questions about how we learn are closely related to these epistemological preoccupations and rest on them to a large extent. The scientific enterprise of learning theory rests on a variety of related epistemological positions and cannot be understood except in terms of them.

The fourth of Scheffler's questions raises the matter of the search for knowledge. This requires addressing both (a) the philosophy of scientific research methods and (b) the status of professional knowledge (understood as SL teacher thinking) vis‐à‐vis scientific knowledge. Applied linguistics continues to concern itself with the first area, and increasingly is developing a literature in the second area (see Crookes, 2015; Kubaniyova & Feryok, 2015).

As Kasper and Wagner commented recently (2018, p. 82) with our field in mind, “As academic disciplines mature, they develop an increasing range of ontological and epistemological perspectives.” This is indicated by the increased acceptance and promotion of “multiple methods” in our area (e.g., Brown, 2014). Nevertheless, substantial differences concerning epistemologies of inquiry persist. The most obvious one concerns the matter of interpretation. At one end of a spectrum of positions, interpretation is to be minimized through investigative practices which support objectivity (or intersubjective agreement). Alternatively, interpretation can be seen as inherent to human perception, and a process without which there is no understanding in the first place; as crucial to the study of, in particular, social matters, so that informed and possibly guided subjectivity is actually the desired target.

Although the position favoring interpretation may seem more challenging (because of the persistent dominance of “scientism” in popular culture), it has coexisted with the opposite position within philosophies since the earliest times (in ancient Greek, Chinese, and Indian philosophical systems) and also appeared in the European development of the social sciences (in the Methodenstreit, “methods debate,” of the late 19th century). Since SL research is an interdisciplinary project, we may see these different positions as reflecting allegiances to other SL‐related disciplines, with some SL researchers orienting to cognitive science conceived of as objectivist and others orienting, say, to anthropology, with its long‐standing interpretivist stance.

Modern analytic philosophy has mostly presented epistemology as individualistic in nature, but in the last few decades a social epistemology has been developed. This is part of the coming together of philosophical and sociohistorical empirical studies of knowledge, following Bachelard (e.g., 1936/1984; Tiles, 2005) and Kuhn (1962). Social epistemology (as its name suggests) emphasizes studying the way knowledge arises from and is supported by social forces and practices. A critical spin on this was visible in sociological analyses of the history of science (e.g., Barnes, 1974) which brought out the role of power, or of socially located perspective, or the influence of other theories (such as racist, eugenicist, or imperialist theories of humanity) in the development of ideas that were given (for a while) the backing of science. The European tradition in the history of ideas (e.g., Canguilhem, 1988; directly following Bachelard) flowered in the work of Canguilhem's student, Foucault, whose well‐known theorizing of the interrelationship of knowledge and power leads to a position summarized by philosopher of education Noddings:

Many today suggest we abandon traditional questions of epistemology, and describe truth locally, as a function of power or as an artifact of language and question the extent to which true statements can point to things outside language, while still being able to be truth‐telling (or lying) within specific contexts. (Noddings, 1995, p. 105)

Recent years have also seen the development of “standpoint epistemologies,” of which feminist epistemology is the best known. This position asserts that the inner view is more authentic, above objectivity; bias (reconceptualized as a standpoint) is unavoidable, and the only way to avoid it is to include the views of all interested parties in accounts and arguments, rather than attempt to screen them out. Finally, it may be noted that epistemology, historically, has tended to be descriptive, but it is possible to develop a prescriptive or normative epistemology by bringing in aspects of axiology (i.e., ethics). A normative social epistemology of research leads to the position that research knowledge must be useful, otherwise its conduct is in some sense unethical (Ortega, 2005).

Theories of Knowledge in Mainstream and Second Language Research

Epistemology also encompasses the development of theories of knowledge, important (obviously) because knowledge is the product of research. These theories can be placed on a spectrum between foundationalist and antifoundationalist poles; the latter pole has more recently come into a primary position. Foundationalism advances the position that truth claims can be based in some indubitable or self‐justified beliefs. Logical positivism was a foundationalist enterprise, aimed at arriving at statements about reality that could be verified; its core position in this area was known as verificationism. Quine (1969) and Popper (1959) subjected this position to sustained critique, maintaining (successfully) that while normal methods of science can plausibly establish the falsity of general statements, they cannot establish the truth of such statements. In the absence of a verificationalist position (that of the logical positivists), a historical, or temporal, account of how knowledge has been arrived at is to be used to justify knowledge. That is, we are persuaded of the plausibility of a statement, arrived at through whatever investigative procedures, through its support, which comes from the social processes of scientific reporting and judgment exercised through a public process of peer review and follow‐up work.

It is valuable to trace this mainstream scientific position, of Popper, back a few steps. Mainstream here turns out to be more or less pragmatist, consistent with the views of Peirce and Dewey (Hutcheon, 1995). Dewey's epistemology, like most of his work, reflects his interest in unifying dichotomies opened up by the two major philosophical schools of his time: idealism and empiricism. The first assumes that knowledge is of ideal forms; the latter that it is of the real world, to which we are assumed to have more or less direct access. Dewey based his position on our status as human beings in the real world, and indeed as beings subject to evolution. Thus, for him, knowledge was only obtained through our action on the world, and in some sense subject to survival constraints (see Boyles, 2006). “Emphasis on the reciprocity of theory and praxis, knowledge and action, facts and values, follows from post‐Darwinian understanding of human experience, including cognition, as a developmental, historically contingent process” (Siegfried, 1995, p. 730). Dewey's position also suggests a way to cut through the common theory/practice division: theoretical knowledge is that which is arrived at through practical inquiry (usually by teachers) when reflected upon and tested in practice.

Just as language can be seen as having structure, but also as socially created and manifested, as individual but also social in nature, so can knowledge. Knowledge can be seen as knowing, and as itself a social practice rather than something individual. This is equivalent, in epistemology, to moving from an individualist, foundationalist epistemology toward one which is more social and antifoundationalist. Besides Dewey, the influential work of Kuhn on the social dimensions of scientific theory test and lend further support to the social, antifoundationalist position on knowledge, as did the philosophical work of Gadamer (e.g., 1960/2004):

Gadamer's view was that it is a mistake to think of knowledge (knowing‐that, but also knowing‐how) as something that occurs outside the traditions in which we are brought up and through which we are taught to see the world. Instead, we should see knowledge as something that occurs in our interaction with the world by means of these traditions. What Gadamer struggled against—and what Descartes and Hegel were struggling for—was the idea that there could be a pure standpoint, untainted by our traditions and our prejudices, from which any knowings‐that could be had. . . . Gadamer denied that there was any such kind of pure knowledge. He argued forcefully that in order for there to be knowledge there had to be language, and that language always occurs in the context of traditions in which viewpoints develop, social relations form, and individual lives unfold. (May, 2001, p. 79)

This position emphasizes the importance of our own locally situated, locally developed knowledge, even in the generation of research‐based knowledge. It also suggests the possibility that knowledge tends to be “interested,” that is, again, reflects the views, traditions, and standpoints of those who create it.

In due course, the understanding of knowledge as a social practice has joined with lines of influence deriving from sociocultural theory and activity theory and has become more prominent in mainstream social science and in studies of language learning and teaching. Given the organizational locations of SL research and teaching, an interpretation made of this perspective by organizational theorists and knowledge utilization researchers ought to be useful. Orlikowski (2002) refers to this position as

a perspective on knowing in practice which highlights the essential role of human action in knowing how to get things done in complex organizational work. The perspective suggests that knowing is not a static, embedded capability or stable disposition of actors, but rather an ongoing social accomplishment, constituted and reconstituted as actors engage the world in practice. (p. 249)

Thus researchers' knowledge is not necessarily the knowledge of an individual scientist or researcher, but rather the knowing practices manifested by groups of scholars (and teacher‐researchers) in social organizations under better or worse (emancipatory or oppressive) conditions.

Constructivist Epistemology and Second Language Research Knowledge

Constructivist epistemologies derive substantially from Kant (1998), who rejected both the innate ideas view of rationalism and the position of the early empiricists. Kant's opinion was that we can never know the world in itself, only the world as it is mentally constructed. Piaget (e.g., 1937/1954) developed Kant's position by saying that Kant was wrong in thinking of structures as static and given. Like rationalists, Piaget assumed mechanisms of mind that make knowledge possible, but, like empiricists, he theorized that organisms test their knowledge against the world of sensory experience (thus to some extent his is a nonfoundational epistemology).

The position that knowledge is constructed by learners and is not the result of passive reception has now produced several varieties of “constructivism.” Thus, we can talk about weak as well as strong constructivism. Then, much learning takes place in social interaction rather than just working with the environment, or “facts” alone, and this takes us to the Vygotskyan variant: social constructivism. If we say “all knowledge is mediated by our cognitive structures and theories,” we can go on to say (following Hegel: Westphal, 2003) that those structures are social and historical in nature; if we add the possibility that these are almost always accompanied by real‐world cultural artifacts which play a crucial role in learning, we are then in the realm of “activity theory” (a.k.a. sociocultural historical theory, with its own epistemological positions; see, e.g., Thorne, 2005). Finally, radical constructivism emphasizes the way that a person's experienced world is what is arrived at through the process of knowing rather than the discovery of a preexisting world. Most of these varieties of constructivism have had influence on SL and foreign‐language teachers' understandings of how students learn (Reagan, 2002). They also apply to the researcher's discovery processes, a form of learning, within the social processes of science.

Knowledge of Second or Foreign Languages and Language Teachers' Knowledge

SL researchers are familiar with the always‐continuing debate concerning what knowledge of language really is; that is, answers to the question “What does it mean to know a language, or a second language (L2)?” In particular, in contradistinction to the early concern of epistemology with propositional knowledge, many SL researchers would accept that knowledge of a language includes “knowing how” (Ryle, 1949, pp. 29, 38). In addition, this “know‐how” pertains not just to the construction of grammatically correct sentences. It also involves knowledge that enables those sentences to function effectively when communicating within another culture; in which case, knowledge of language has to be encased within knowledge of a (second) culture (see Gadamer, 1960) and its practices. This is knowledge also accessed and utilized by SL professionals in general, most obviously SL teachers, though this is only a part of SL teachers' knowledge. We have teachers' knowledge of SL research (e.g., Bartels, 2005), and (for example) language assessment knowledge (Inbar‐Lourie, 2008) or language assessment literacy (Ismael, 2017), and we have that part of the area that is becoming formalized because of institutional pressures, namely the international Teachers' Knowledge of Teaching test (which perhaps favors a nonlocal understanding of language teachers' knowledge: González Moncada, 2007).

We can assume that some of the knowledge identified (formal knowledge of language and of SLA, and professional knowledge within applied linguistics) that derives from SL research is of a more or less propositional nature. Contrasting, we have work in mainstream education. Munby, Russell, and Martin (e.g., 2001) summarized characterizations of teachers' knowledge, noting its sometimes tacit, knowledge‐in‐use character, and suggested that it may be embodied in scripts, rules of practice, metaphors, narratives, and cases, and have thus pointed out its situated, particularistic, and nonpropositional nature (see Crookes, 2009). The understanding of narrative as a form of knowledge, signaled by the term “narrative epistemology,” has been increasingly developed for our field by Barkhuizen (e.g., 2015, p. 170; after an initial appearance as “narrative knowledging”: Barkhuizen, 2011). How we arrive at that knowledge (or why we sometimes do not) remains a particularly important matter for the field. The idea that knowledge of practice begins as declarative knowledge and when automatized becomes procedural knowledge, mentally encoded in a nonpropositional form, provides another partially useful metaphor for understanding the difficulties implied by the theory/practice divide (though it suggests a fairly high level of ontological complexity). It has been suggested that the term “praxis” (theoretically grounded knowledge, reflected on) overcomes this problem (see Pennycook, 2004), though language teachers' working conditions may not necessarily support this. It is thus not possible to bring this discussion of extremely long‐standing matters to a simple conclusion. The complexity of SL research‐based knowledge (and the SL professional) is such as to justify further investigation and analysis of SL ontologies and epistemologies.

SEE ALSO: Positivism and Postpositivism; Vygotsky and Second Language Acquisition

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This entry provides an introduction to the “ethnography of communication” for qualitative researchers interested in possibly adopting the methodology to study the complex interrelationship between language and the sociocultural context of its use within a particular social group. The entry begins with some background on the origins of the ethnography of communication and the tradition of inquiry that subsequently developed, next describes the theoretical model underlying the approach, and then offers prospective researchers a series of questions to explore as a starting point for their inquiry.

The “ethnography of communication,” a qualitative research methodology introduced by anthropologist, sociolinguist, and folklore scholar Dell Hymes in his seminal 1962 paper, enables a researcher to study the distinctive configuration of discursive conventions, options, and constraints—that is, the “ways of speaking”—that structure the communicative activities of any given social group. An approach combining ethnography, the description and analysis of culture, with linguistics, the description and analysis of language, the ethnography of communication centers on the concept of the “speech community” (Bloomfield, 1933)—a group of people sharing a linguistic code as well as norms of discursive interaction, expression, and interpretation. In the decades since Hymes first conceived the ethnography of communication, researchers following in the same tradition have used the methodology to describe and explain the ways of speaking of many different speech communities in a wide range of geographical regions, while at the same time contributing concepts and theories to a larger meta‐understanding of patterns of communication across human cultures.

Hymes occupies a place in a line of researchers that includes Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Whorf, all of whom explored the relationship between language and culture through fieldwork among North American indigenous peoples. At the same time, Hymes also shares a lineage with Bronislaw Malinowski, J. R. Firth, and Firth's student Michael Halliday in arguing that much of the meaning of language derives from the particular social context in which it occurs and that therefore the analysis of socially situated utterances and their contextually construed meanings must be central to the study of language. This latter stance can be seen as a reaction against the formal abstraction of Ferdinand Saussure's structural linguistics, and then later, for Hymes, as a counter to the primacy of Noam Chomsky's focus on a universal context‐free grammar and ideal speaker‐listeners.

While Hymes originally called his innovative methodology the “ethnography of speaking,” implying a focus on spoken language, he and linguist John Gumperz soon reconceived the approach along broader lines as the “ethnography of communication” (Gumperz & Hymes, 1964), with the possible objects of study expanded to include

the various available channels, and their modes of use, speaking, writing, printing, drumming, blowing, whistling, singing, face and body motion as visually perceived, smelling, tasting, and tactile sensation [along with] the various codes shared by various participants, linguistic, paralinguistic, kinesic, musical, and other. (p. 13)

Hymes (1981) would also later adapt the approach in a specialized form that he termed “ethnopoetics” to identify patterned poetic elements in transcriptions of oral narratives and folk tales conveying the myths of North American aboriginal peoples.

Most of the other researchers who have applied the ethnography of communication and contributed to its development over the decades since its inception, however, have focused their work on spoken language, including, among the more prominent, Gumperz, Joel Sherzer, Gerry Philipsen, Richard Bauman, Susan Irvin‐Tripp, and Muriel Saville‐Troike. Saville‐Troike's The Ethnography of Communication: An Introduction, originally published in 1982 and now in its third edition (2008), has played a significant role in elaborating Hymes's approach and in popularizing it among researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics and cultural anthropology. Saville‐Troike's volume provides a comprehensive account of the goals, theoretical underpinnings, research methods, and eventual products of the ethnography of communication. What is perhaps most valuable in the book for a researcher new to the ethnography of communication, however, is its highly detailed description of data types, procedures for eliciting information from informants, and methods of analyzing data—with much of this description illustrated through concrete examples.

The diversity of the speech communities studied by researchers using the ethnography of communication as a primary methodology can be inferred from this list of six book‐length studies: Kuna Ways of Speaking: An Ethnographic Perspective (Sherzer, 1983); Linguistic Convergence: An Ethnography of Speaking at Fort Chipewyan (Scollon & Scollon, 1979); Puerto‐Rican Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Study of a New York Suburb (Torres, 1997); Literacy Practices in a Rural Community in Pakistan (Farah, 1992); Functions of Language in the Classroom (Cazden, John, & Hymes, 1972); and Changing Times, Changing Minds: Language Socialization in Hungarian English Schools (Duff, 1993). For readers seeking further examples of the use of ethnography of communication as a research methodology, Philipsen and Carbaugh (1986) have published a bibliography of over two hundred studies employing the approach. Saville‐Troike also notes additional studies in her 2008 volume, as does Carbaugh (2008, 2012) in more recent work.

Hymes's Theoretical Model

On a conceptual level, the ethnography of communication, as originally conceived by Hymes, proceeds from the assumption that conventionalized norms of language use within a speech community are inseparable from patterns of social action and social organization. Accordingly, in Hymes's theoretical model, social life within a speech community is characterized by a distinctive pattern of “speech situations,” “speech events,” and “speech acts” that together comprise the communicative activities of the community. (As an example, consider the following: a retirement party with colleagues and friends—a speech situation; a conversation between the newly retired individual and a long‐time work colleague—a speech event; and a compliment from the colleague regarding the retiree's career accomplishments—a speech act.)

In its focus on the communicative functions performed by language, Hymes's theoretical model resonates with the work of Roman Jakobson, John Austin, and John Searle. Hymes's model is also clearly reminiscent of literary critic and rhetorician Kenneth Burke's “dramatistic pentad”—comprising act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose—proposed by Burke as an analytical tool for examining discursive events. Hymes studied under Burke at Indiana University, and the two scholars subsequently maintained a decades‐long correspondence and had a mutual influence on one another's work. Hymes (2003) readily acknowledged his debt to Burke as an inspiration for his model of speech situations, speech events, and speech acts: “My sense of what I do probably owes more to Kenneth Burke than to anyone else” (p. x).

In an extension of his theoretical model of the speech community and its constituent elements, Hymes (1966, 1985) introduced the concept of “communicative competence”— playing off the distinction that Chomsky (1965) had earlier made between “linguistic competence” and “linguistic performance”—to describe what an individual needs to know and be capable of doing, both linguistically and in social relations, in order to communicate effectively within a particular speech community according to its local “ways of speaking.” Looking at language acquisition, Hymes (1972) describes what such communicative competence involves, using the experience of a child as an example:

We have to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences not only as grammatical but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where and in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others. This competence, moreover, is integral with attitudes, values, and motivations concerning language, its features and uses, and integral with competence for, and attitudes towards, the interrelation of language with the other code of communicative conduct [viz. social interaction]. (pp. 277–8)

In communicative competence, Hymes originated a concept that would be widely appropriated by researchers in language education from the late 1970s onward, particularly in the fields of second language and foreign‐language teaching, reflecting the extensive use of the ethnography of communication in educational research (Duff, 2002; Kaplan‐Weinger & Ullman, 2014). In what came to be known as the “communicative approach,” language learners are introduced very early in their course of instruction to the use of authentic language in the particular situations and social interactions in which they are ultimately aiming to participate, whether these situations and interactions occur in academic, workplace, or community settings—so that the end goal of language learning plays a central part in its means of achievement (Canale & Swain, 1980).

“Doing Ethnography”

For Hymes (2003), any credible general theory claiming to describe and explain the interaction of language and social life across speech communities must be derived from empirical field research within single communities: “Underlying the diversity of speech within communities . . . are systematic relations, relations that, just as grammatical and social structure, can be the object of empirical inquiry” (p. 30). According to Hymes (1977), a researcher undertaking such inquiry should focus on

the local form of general properties of social life—patterns of role and status, rights and duties, differential command of resources, transmitted values, environmental constraints. [An ethnography] locates the local situation in space, time, and kind, and discovers its particular forms and center of gravity, as it were, for the maintenance of social order and the satisfaction of expressive impulse. (p. 25)

Muriel Saville‐Troike (2008) provides a researcher intent on “doing ethnography” (p. 4) within a speech community with a broad initial question to consider: “What does a speaker need to know in order to communicate appropriately within [this] speech community, and how does he or she learn?” (p. 2). Proceeding from this starting point, the aspiring researcher can look to Hymes himself (1967) for a more detailed set of questions regarding the “ways of speaking” that organize communicative activities within the community:

What [forms of language] are used, where and when, among whom, and for what purpose and with what result, to say what, in what way; subject to what norms of interaction and of interpretation; as instances of what speech acts and genres of speaking? How do community and personal beliefs, values and practices impinge upon the use of language, and upon the acquisition of such language by children? (p. 8)

Narrowing the focus to specific communicative events occurring within a speech community, Hymes (1967) provides four additional questions for the researcher to investigate: “1. What are the communicative events, and their components, within a community? 2. What are the relationships among them? 3. What capabilities and states do they have, in general, and in particular events? 4. How do they work?” (p. 25).

In order to pursue these various questions within any given speech community, the researcher would need to conduct two kinds of inquiry—emic and etic. A significant part of the culture‐specific knowledge needed to answer the questions mentioned above requires that the researcher gain an emic, or insider‐like, perspective that can be achieved only through prolonged experience as a participant‐observer within the speech community under study, with a year spent working in the community sometimes cited as a minimum duration (Saville‐Troike, 2008). Depending on the researcher's status within the speech community and his or her access to a cross‐section of reliable informants, the data to be gathered might include observational field notes, interviews with individuals in a range of different roles and social contexts, a collection of artistic and other material artifacts, as well as secondary published sources containing insider‐supplied information on the history, demographics, and social organization of the group.

For the second kind of inquiry—conducted from an etic, or outsider, position—Hymes's (1972) model includes a set of 16 factors that can be used to analyze a speech event: message form, message content, setting, scene, speaker, addressor, audience, addressee, purposes (goals), purposes (outcomes), key, channel, forms of speech, norms of interaction, norms of interpretation, and genres. To facilitate the researcher's work, Hymes offers an acronym for use as a mnemonic for identifying the various facets of a speech event: SPEAKING. Hymes lists eight such facets—setting, participants, ends, act sequences, key, instrumentalities, norms, and genre. Farah (1998) describes this heuristic in some detail:

(S) Setting including the time and place, physical aspects of the situation such as arrangement of furniture in the classroom; (P) participant identity including personal characteristics such as age and sex, social status, relationship with each other; (E) ends including the purpose of the event itself as well as the individual goals of the participants; (A) act, sequence or how speech acts are organized within a speech event and what topic/s are addressed; (K) key or the tone and manner in which something is said or written; (I) instrumentalities or the linguistic code i.e. language, dialect, variety and channel i.e. speech or writing; (N) norms or the standard socio‐cultural rules of interaction and interpretation; and (G) genre or type of event such as lecture, poem, letter. (p. 26)

Conclusion

For language researchers, a key aspect of the theoretical model underlying Hymes's ethnography of communication is its detailed description of the different elements comprising the sociocultural context of language use. While other theoretical representations of context have appeared over the years to rival Hymes's model as a conceptual tool for researchers wishing to explore the complex interrelationship between language and sociocultural context within a particular social group—such as the discourse community (Bizzell, 1982), the community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and the activity system (Cole & Engeström, 1993)—Hymes's notion of the speech community and its constituent features remains an important concept for qualitative language research. At the same time, the recognition of similarities across ethnographic accounts from geographically and culturally diverse field studies in individual speech communities by researchers using the ethnography of communication to study local patterns of relationship among language, social knowledge, and communal behavior continues to strengthen our general theoretical understanding of language‐in‐use and linguistic competence across cultures.

SEE ALSO: Analysis of Dialogue; Anthropological Linguistics; Systemic Functional Linguistics

What Is Explicit Knowledge?

Explicit knowledge is knowledge that a learner has about a language and that he or she is conscious of and able to report in some way (Ellis, 2008). For example, many learners know and can explain that in English you need an “s” on verbs when you use them with a subject such as he, she, or John to talk about something in the present. Another term, sometimes equated with explicit knowledge, is metalinguistic knowledge, although metalinguistic knowledge usually refers to the ability to use the type of technical language that is common in grammar rules (Loewen & Reinders, 2011). However, explicit knowledge of a language does not necessarily require knowledge of this type of technical language. Learners can be given explanations in simple, nontechnical language, and, indeed, this is how they may best remember them (Elder, Erlam, & Philp, 2007).

Theoretical support for including a focus on explicit knowledge in the language classroom comes from Schmidt's (1995, 2001) noticing hypothesis. Schmidt claims that learning will be more effective when learners pay attention to what they learn. Giving grammar explanations and building learners' explicit knowledge will assist noticing. Paying attention is important for all types of learning and has been referred to as the “universal solvent of the mind” (Baars, 1997, p. 304). A large body of evidence in second language acquisition research suggests that instruction that encourages the development of explicit knowledge makes a significant difference to language learning outcomes (Norris & Ortega, 2000; Leow, 2015; Nassaji, 2016). In particular, explicit instruction may help speed up the rate of learning (De Graaff & Housen, 2009). In a paper written for teachers, Toth and Moranski (2018) list, as one of four key principles, the importance of giving learners explicit information about how the language works. However, the effects of the explicit teaching of language forms may be evident over time, rather than leading to direct and immediate results in terms of students learning to use these new forms correctly.

Isolated or Integrated Grammar Instruction?

In traditional classrooms, lessons started with a focus on preselected language forms, presented in activities separate from the communicative use of language, in what is termed an “isolated” approach (Spada & Lightbown, 2008). However, a number of researchers (e.g., Ellis, 2012) suggest that it is more effective for students to pay attention to language forms in lessons where they are using language as a tool to communicate. In this type of “integrated approach,” where the attention to form arises out of learners' attempts to use language, learners are more likely to make a form‐meaning mapping (VanPatten, 2004), or a connection between the language form and the meaning it encodes (e.g., understanding that in English “ed” on the end of a verb refers to past time). Research suggests that opportunities to make form‐meaning mappings promote language acquisition (VanPatten & Oikennon, 1996; Shintani & Ellis, 2014). We will explore below some of the ways of drawing learners' attention to language forms, many of which can be used in either an integrated or isolated approach.

Grammar Explanation

Grammar explanation, which aims to help students develop understanding of specific grammatical features, needs to be distinguished from grammar practice, which aims to help them produce these features correctly. There is evidence that explicit instruction plus practice leads to learning but there is less evidence for the effectiveness of practice alone.

For many, the idea of grammar explanation will evoke the notion of grammar rules. There are two main approaches to helping learners become familiar with the rules of a language: a deductive or inductive approach. In a deductive approach, students receive explicit information about a particular target structure, usually prior to language practice activities. In an inductive approach students are given examples of the target structure in context and encouraged to form hypotheses and conclusions about it themselves. An explanation or a rule given by the teacher may follow, but this aspect is not always included. Inductive approaches may encourage greater depth of processing on the part of the learner (Oded & Walters, 2001) although a potential problem is that a student might not be able to arrive at an understanding independently, or may even “induce” incorrectly the grammatical rule or concepts.

A very common deductive approach is the PPP model (i.e., present, practice, produce) which has been widely promoted in teacher handbooks (Ur, 1996; Hedge, 2000). Another example is processing instruction, where the language structure targeted is one that has been demonstrated to present input processing difficulties for students (VanPatten, 2004). Students receive information about the structure and about why it is difficult for them to process it; they then work at structured input activities, which help them process the structure correctly. In an integrated approach, the teacher may give a grammar explanation in the form of corrective feedback in response to an error a learner makes as they are using the language to communicate. For example, the teacher might say: “kiss—you need past tense” (Ellis, Loewen, & Erlam, 2006).

An example of an inductive approach to grammar explanation is “consciousness‐raising” (Ellis, 2002). A consciousness‐raising activity isolates a specific linguistic feature for learners to attend to, provides them with data which illustrate this feature, and encourages them to use intellectual effort to understand it. PACE (presentation, attention, co‐construction, extension) uses the principle of “guided induction” to support learners to better understand a particular language structure (Adair‐Hauck, Donato, & Cumo‐Johanssen, 2010). In a PACE lesson learners' attention is drawn to specific grammatical forms in a L2 text and they co‐construct with their teacher an understanding of these forms before completing extension activities requiring them to use the forms in communicative tasks (Donato & Adair‐Hauck, 2016). Haight, Herron, and Cole (2007) claim that this approach draws on a sociocultural and constructivist theory of learning (Lantolf, 2000).

Another approach is “concept‐based instruction” (Lantolf, 2007; Lantolf & Zhang, 2017). Lantolf complains that the grammar explanations learners receive are often piecemeal, rather than coherent and theoretically informed. In his concept‐based approach learners are given grammatical explanations and helped to understand these through charts and diagrams. They then verbalize their understanding so that their learning becomes visible, and incomplete learning is modified through feedback until the learner demonstrates that she or he has formed a deep understanding of the relevant grammatical concepts.

While a focus on grammar rules may be valuable, it is likely that it is the ability to understand and apply them, rather than to verbalize them, that is important (Elder & Manwaring, 2004). In one study, German learners of L2 English did not know grammar rules they had been taught, but not knowing rules did not mean that they were unable to recognize and correct mistakes in English (Green & Hecht, 1992). The researchers concluded that learners seem to outgrow a dependence on rules.

Other Ways of Explaining Grammar

Presenting grammar rules is not the only way of explaining grammar. Other ways of helping students understand how language structures “work,” include, but are not limited to (Simard & Jean, 2011)

• sentence analysis—using arrows or color, for example, to show the relationship between different components of a sentence;
• contrastive analysis—comparing language features in the L1 and a L2;
• translation;
• presenting other language features paradigmatically (e.g., declensions or conjugations in a chart or table);
• syntactic manipulation—for example, turning a declarative sentence into an interrogative;
• labeling or classifying components of a sentence.

Other options present choices in terms of preparation, timing, and motivation. First, grammar explanation can be planned or unplanned. In the former there has been some advance preparation for the grammar focus, while in the latter the teacher may decide, without prior forethought, to briefly focus on an error that she or he has noted during the lesson. Second, grammar explanation can vary in terms of its timing in relation to classroom activity, that is, it can be preemptive or reactive. In the former, the teacher may anticipate knowledge that students will need to complete a particular task/activity and incorporate a focus on this before the task is undertaken. A reactive explanation may follow a particular task, perhaps in response to errors that the teacher has observed. Third, grammar explanation can be either student initiated or teacher initiated. In the former, it is most likely that a student asks a question that leads to a subsequent explanation while, in the latter, it is the teacher who decides that the explanation is necessary.

It is important to recognize that these options are not mutually exclusive but may overlap with each other. For example, grammar explanation may be unplanned, reactive, and student initiated.

What to Explain

Teachers not only have choices in how to explain grammar, but also in what aspects of grammar to focus on. Ellis (2012) claims that instruction should focus on language features which cause learners problems, rather than on features which are acquired incidentally. He also suggests that it might be best to focus on structures already partially acquired by learners because learners may be more developmentally ready to learn these. Another issue to consider is the complexity of the language feature. Some complex aspects of language may be best learned incidentally rather than “explained.”

Taking the Learner Into Account

There is some evidence to suggest that grammar explanation (in particular the more explicit forms of explanation) may be more effective for adolescents and older learners who are more academically and cognitively mature than for younger children who have not yet developed analytic skills. Younger children may learn more implicitly and be less able to benefit from an explicit focus on language structure. Another factor to consider is learner aptitude. Some learners have high language analytic ability and are better able to infer grammar rules or make linguistic generalizations than others. There is tentative research evidence to suggest that learners who have high language analytic ability may be more able to benefit from an inductive approach to grammar explanation because they are more skilled at hypothesis testing. Other learners may do better with a more deductive approach (Erlam, 2005).

Conclusion

In conclusion, when it comes to helping learners develop explicit knowledge through grammar explanation, it is important to remember that one size does not fit all. A differentiated approach to grammar instruction may well be the one that works best. It may sometimes be appropriate to use a deductive approach, at other times an inductive approach. At times it may be appropriate to give a rule, at other times some other form of grammar explanation may be more suitable. It is also important to remember that the beneficial effects of grammar explanation may be seen over time rather than immediately.

SEE ALSO: Aptitude in Second Language Acquisition; Attention, Noticing, and Awareness in Second Language Acquisition; Form‐Focused Instruction; Instructed Second Language Acquisition; Languaging: Collaborative Dialogue as a Source of Second Language Learning; Roles for Corrective Feedback in Second Language Instruction