Martin Solly – författare

Why are doctors’ prescriptions illegible and why is the language of the law considered impenetrable to outsiders? Need they be so? Is it more difficult for non-native speakers of English than native speakers to access the discourse of professions such as law and medicine? These are some of the questions covered by this book which uses the lens of stylistics to shed light on how the discourse of professional communities is used not just to convey meanings, but also to construct identity and demark membership. The volume focuses on the three domains of healthcare, law and education, as well as on the language of the new technologies, with the aim of showing how a knowledge of stylistics can provide the key for appropriate and acceptable language use, enabling successful communication and potential membership of professional communities.

In many parts of the world the language education scenario is increasingly dynamic, as demographic, economic and social changes powerfully influence socio-political agendas in the sphere of language education. These in turn impact on complex issues such as linguistic pluralism, multiculturalism, and marginalization. This is especially so in the sphere of second language education where local, national and regional concerns often dominate the objectives underpinning policy choice and prioritisation.This volume brings together scholars and researchers from a wide range of different educational contexts and turns a sociolinguistic lens on some of the key areas of concern for researchers in language education: critical awareness of power and identity issues; competence in dealing with new sociolinguistic repertoires, modalities and literacies; ethical concerns for all who are involved. The ‘case study’ approach enables the reader to reflect on and critically engage with these issues in a rich variety of contextual situations, and the volume as a whole provides a useful overview of (second) language education in the world today.

The title of this volume intentionally echoes that of a landmark issue of Textus on Languaging in and across Human Groups, edited by Giuseppina Cortese and Dell Hymes in 2001, since the notion of languaging seems to capture most effectively the essence and the continuity in the life and work of Giuseppina Cortese, to whom the book is dedicated. It brings together contributions by a number of distinguished scholars that shed new light on current developments in this dynamic area of discourse analysis, especially taking into account recent research and emerging insights on speech communities and communities of practice. The sections in the volume are designed as main threads of a new investigation into languaging. The first, entitled Languaging Awareness, deals with recent findings in applied linguistics, exploring key topics in language acquisition, language learning and teaching and the changing role of the media. The second section, Languaging Identity, prioritizes the theme of the construction of identity in text and talk within a linguistic and languaging framework. The third section, Languaging Community, explores the notion of community, of the lifeworld and the textworld emanating from a variety of domains, closely inspecting contemporary events and showing, on a continuum with Corteses approach, how memory of the past gives depth of meaning to a discourse analysis that is geared to linguistic and textual awareness.

The present is a time of major change in the world of higher education. Conceptions of knowledge and learning as well as course provision are being powerfully altered by current socio-political agendas, constantly evolving technology, demographic developments. The question of identity and its construction in narrative are central to reflection on these issues. Indeed the construction of multimodal/hybridized narratives involves discoursal processes where perceptions of culture and identity, attitudinal and evaluative stances are represented, negotiated, marginalized, transformed. This volume presents a rich variety of perspectives on verbal/visual narrative texts in higher education coming from Europe, North America, South Africa, China and Australia. It includes case studies and original research from a wide spectrum of disciplinary domains (political science, law, medicine, biology, ICT, teacher education) set in a range of different education contexts (online communities and classrooms; native-speaker/nonnative-speaker, intercultural and multilingual/multiethnic milieus).