Ruth Breeze – författare

This book examines creative new ways in which legal and administrative information are communicated to diverse audiences. Using a range of theoretical frameworks, it explores these transformations within broader societal issues such as legal activism, access to justice, and citizen participation.Increasingly, there has been widespread recognition that non-specialists need to be able to understand legal information. Although plain language campaigns have made considerable progress in ensuring that legal texts are now less dense and more readable, such measures are often shown to be insufficient. For this reason, many institutions such as parliaments and courts have made considerable efforts to present this information in more attractive digital formats, and to disseminate the core messages via other media including video and virtual reality. In addition to addressing the social and political trends underlying these changes, the volume provides evidence of various cognitive and multimodal strategies used in different languages and cultures, investigating discourse practices in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America.The collection will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and professionals working in the areas of law, public administration, communication, and applied linguistics.

This book provides practical help and guidance for non-native English-speaking higher education lecturers faced with the need to deliver lectures and seminars in English. It builds on the authors' years of experience as researchers and teacher trainers in the area of English Medium Instruction (EMI), combining practical advice and research findings with useful case studies from different global settings, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, Slovakia, Spain, the UK and the USA, and a range of subject areas, such as philosophy, mathematics and genetics. The authors present an overview of what generally happens when university teachers make the transition to teaching in English. After dispelling some common myths and setting out priorities, Ruth Breeze and Carmen Sancho Guinda move on to explain how practitioners can prepare to give lectures and interact with both local and international students effectively in English, tackling difficult issues, such as encouraging participation, promoting creativity and critical thinking, and evaluating written student work. The final chapters address good practices in EMI, proposing ways to achieve excellence in global settings.

This book provides practical help and guidance for non-native English-speaking higher education lecturers faced with the need to deliver lectures and seminars in English. It builds on the authors' years of experience as researchers and teacher trainers in the area of English Medium Instruction (EMI), combining practical advice and research findings with useful case studies from different global settings, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, Slovakia, Spain, the UK and the USA, and a range of subject areas, such as philosophy, mathematics and genetics. The authors present an overview of what generally happens when university teachers make the transition to teaching in English. After dispelling some common myths and setting out priorities, Ruth Breeze and Carmen Sancho Guinda move on to explain how practitioners can prepare to give lectures and interact with both local and international students effectively in English, tackling difficult issues, such as encouraging participation, promoting creativity and critical thinking, and evaluating written student work. The final chapters address good practices in EMI, proposing ways to achieve excellence in global settings.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a host of critical reflections about discourse practises dealing with public health issues. Situating crisis communication at the centre of societal and political debates about responses to the pandemic, this volume analyses the discursive strategies used in a variety of settings. Exploring how crisis discourse has become a part of managing the public health crisis itself, this book focuses on the communicative tasks and challenges for both speakers and their public audiences in seven areas:- establishment of discursive and political authority - official governmental and expert communication to the public - public understanding of government communication- legitimation of public health management as a ‘war’ - judging and blaming a collective other- cross-national comparison and rivalry - empathy and encouragementCovering global discourses from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and New Zealand, chapters use corpus-based data to cast light on these issues from a variety of languages. With crisis discourse already the object of fierce national and international debates about the appropriateness of specific communicative styles, information management and ‘verbal hygiene', Pandemic and Crisis Discourse offers an authoritative intervention from language experts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a host of critical reflections about discourse practises dealing with public health issues. Situating crisis communication at the centre of societal and political debates about responses to the pandemic, this volume analyses the discursive strategies used in a variety of settings. Exploring how crisis discourse has become a part of managing the public health crisis itself, this book focuses on the communicative tasks and challenges for both speakers and their public audiences in seven areas:- establishment of discursive and political authority - official governmental and expert communication to the public - public understanding of government communication- legitimation of public health management as a ‘war’ - judging and blaming a collective other- cross-national comparison and rivalry - empathy and encouragementCovering global discourses from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and New Zealand, chapters use corpus-based data to cast light on these issues from a variety of languages. With crisis discourse already the object of fierce national and international debates about the appropriateness of specific communicative styles, information management and ‘verbal hygiene', Pandemic and Crisis Discourse offers an authoritative intervention from language experts.

Exploring narratives produced by different groups of MENA and SSA migrants or refugees, this book focuses on the spatial and temporal aspects of their experiences. In doing so, the authors examine a wide range of accounts of journeys to host countries and memories (or recreations) of “home”. The spaces that migrants occupy (or not) in their new country; the spaces and times they share with local populations; and different conceptions of space and time across generations are also investigated, as are how feelings surrounding space and time are manifested within these different narratives and their affective-discursive practices.Taking both a traditional, linear view of migration as well as a multilinear, multimodal approach, the book presents an in-depth investigation into the ways in which people inhabit multiple real and digital spaces.

Exploring narratives produced by different groups of MENA and SSA migrants or refugees, this book focuses on the spatial and temporal aspects of their experiences. In doing so, the authors examine a wide range of accounts of journeys to host countries and memories (or recreations) of “home”. The spaces that migrants occupy (or not) in their new country; the spaces and times they share with local populations; and different conceptions of space and time across generations are also investigated, as are how feelings surrounding space and time are manifested within these different narratives and their affective-discursive practices.Taking both a traditional, linear view of migration as well as a multilinear, multimodal approach, the book presents an in-depth investigation into the ways in which people inhabit multiple real and digital spaces.

Corporate discourse examines business communication practices from a discourse perspective, looking in detail at the ways in which corporations around the world communicate with individuals, with other collective entities and with the world at large. It is concerned with understanding how language works in business contexts and how corporate identity and personal and professional relationships are configured through discourse. Using a range of analytical techniques to examine different forms of textual evidence from companies operating in many sectors, this book maps out current developments in corporate discourse against the complex background of globalization.

Corporate discourse examines business communication practices from a discourse perspective, looking in detail at the ways in which corporations around the world communicate with individuals, with other collective entities and with the world at large. It is concerned with understanding how language works in business contexts and how corporate identity and personal and professional relationships are configured through discourse. Using a range of analytical techniques to examine different forms of textual evidence from companies operating in many sectors, this book maps out current developments in corporate discourse against the complex background of globalization.

For centuries the people of Africa have been on the move, seeking new opportunities, fleeing from dangers, or tragically uprooted through human greed and cruelty. In the twenty-first century, with over 40 million people migrating from and within Africa each year, it is clear that migration still has a significant impact on every aspect of African life. For this reason, Sarali Gintsburg and Ruth Breeze in their new book, African Migrations: Traversing Hybrid Landscapes, explore the hybrid landscapes of African migration and provide new insights into the complexity of migratory movements and migrant experiences associated with the African continent. Taking the view that the only ecologically valid way to understand migration is by looking at it through the eyes of the migrants themselves, the authors draw on a wide spectrum of first-hand evidence from a multitude of sources, including testimonies, media artefacts, workplace experiences, interviews, and ethnographic observations. The contributors reflect on a wide array of themes linked to the African context, such as diasporic mapping of landscapes, hybridity, heterotopia, métissage, cultural mixing, and complementation. This book presents the African continent not only in its cultural diversity but also to cover the complex and wide trajectories of migrations to, from and within Africa.

Few concepts in Discourse Studies are so versatile and intricate and have been so frequently contested as interpersonality. This construct offers ample terrain for new research, since it can be viewed using a range of diverse theoretical frameworks, employing a variety of analytical tools and social perspectives.Studies on the relationship between writer/reader and speaker/audience in the legal field are still scarce, dispersed, and limited to a narrow range of genres and a restricted notion of interpersonality, since they are most often confined to modality and the Gricean cooperative principles. This volume is meant to help bridge this gap. Its chapters show the realisation and distribution of interpersonal features in specific legal genres. The aim is to achieve an expansion of the concept of interpersonality, which besides modality, Grices maxims and other traditionally interpersonal features, might comprise or relate to ideational and textual issues like narrative disclosure, typography, rhetorical variation, or Plain English, among others.

Despite the apparent novelty and fluidity of the media today, there is strong evidence that patterns are emerging which both reflect and extend the evaluative paradigms previously observed in the print and broadcast media. In this complex scenario, discourse analysis offers a rich and varied methodology for understanding the different types of evaluation conveyed through media texts and the way these project, reflect and develop their relationships with their audience. The chapters in this volume draw on a variety of analytical tools, including appraisal analysis, argumentation theory, multimodal approaches and corpus linguistics, to address the issue of evaluation in media discourse. The theoretical underpinning for these chapters ranges from corpus-informed discourse studies, through critical discourse analysis and semio-communicative approaches, to Bakhtinian perspectives. Although the chapters are all in English, the scope of the volume is broadly European, covering aspects of the British, Spanish, Dutch and German media in their traditional and online manifestations, as well as contrastive studies.

This volume focuses on the study of linguistic manipulation, persuasion and power in the written texts of professional communication, to go further into the understanding of how they are constructed, interpreted, used and exploited in the achievement of specific goals. Such texts are here contemplated from the stance of genre theory, which starts from the premise that specialised communities have a high level of rhetorical sophistication, the keys to which are offered solely to their members. In particular, the book investigates the communicative devices that serve the need of such professions to exert power and manipulation, and to use persuasion. The perspective adopted in this work does not envisage power simply as a distant, alienated and alienating supremacy from above, but as an everyday, socialized and embodied phenomenon. To attain its goal, the volume brings forth studies on the language of several professions belonging to various specialised fields such as law and arbitration, engineering, economics, advertising, business, politics, medicine, social work, education and the media.

The relationship between politics and digital media is currently a focus of intense interest: the symbiosis between the two spheres is such that political activity is now almost inseparable from media communication. However, the implications of this development are not fully understood. Digital media are a powerful tool in the hands of mainstream parties, but also make it easier than ever before for the public to express their reactions, or for new actors to enter the political arena. This volume explores the intersection between politics and new media, which involves crucial ideals, values and aspirations, such as informed democracy, citizens’ empowerment and social debate, but also negative aspects like manipulation and polarization.

Specialized communication in science, technology or institutions is one of the most important and exciting fields of applied linguistics. The handbook captures the current and relevant knowledge of specialized languages and professional communication. It promotes international communication on central issues, where dialogue is urgently needed concerning both their intellectual underpinning and the day-to-day practices associated with them.

As English gains prominence as the language of higher education across the world, many institutions and lecturers are becoming increasingly concerned with the implications of this trend for the quality of university teaching and learning. With an innovative approach in both theme and scope, this book addresses four major competencies that are essential to ensure the effectiveness of English-medium higher education: creativity, critical thinking, autonomy and motivation. It offers an integrated perspective, both theoretical and practical, which defines these competences from different angles within ELT and Applied Linguistics, while also exploring their points of contact and applications to classroom routines. This approach is intended to provide practical guidance and inspiration, in the form of pedagogical proposals, examples of teaching practice and cutting-edge research by scholars and university teachers from all over the world. To that end, a leading specialist in the field introduces each of the four competencies, explaining concepts accessibly and synthetically, exposing false myths, presenting an updated state of the art, and opening windows for future studies. These introductions are followed by practitioner chapters written by teachers and scholars from different cultures and university contexts, who reflect on their experience and/or research and share effective procedures and suggestions for the university class with English as a vehicle for instruction.

As English gains prominence as the language of higher education across the world, many institutions and lecturers are becoming increasingly concerned with the implications of this trend for the quality of university teaching and learning.