The Editors: Ken Hyland is Professor of Education and director of the Centre for Academic and Professional Literacies at the Institute of Education, University of London. He has published widely in EAP and academic writing and is the co-editor of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes.Marina Bondi is Professor of English at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and current President of the Italian Association of English studies. Her main research interests are in language variation and academic discourse.

• Contents: Ken Hyland/Marina Bondi: Introduction – Ken Hyland: Disciplinary Differences: Language Variation in Academic Discourses – Marina Bondi: ‘A case in point’: Signals of Narrative Development in Business and Economics – Marc Silver: Introducing Abstract Reasoning: World of Reference and Writer Argument across Disciplines – Philip Shaw: Relations between Text and Mathematics across Disciplines – Hilkka Stotesbury: Gaps and False Conclusions: Criticism in Research Article Abstracts across the Disciplines – Davide Simone Giannoni: Book Acknowledgements across Disciplines and Texts – Polly Tse/Ken Hyland: Gender and Discipline: Exploring Metadiscourse Variation in Academic Book Reviews – Kjersti Fløttum/Torodd Kinn/Trine Dahl: «We now report on ...» Versus «Let us now see how ...»: Author Roles and Interaction with Readers in Research Articles – Eva Thue Vold: The Choice and Use of Epistemic Modality Markers in Linguistics and Medical Research Articles – Paul Thompson: A Corpus Perspective on the Lexis of Lectures, with a Focus on Economics Lectures – Anna Mauranen: Speaking the Discipline: Discourse and Socialisation in ELF and L1 English – Rita C. Simpson-Vlach: Academic Speech across Disciplines: Lexical and Phraseological Distinctions.