Specialised English: New Directions in ESP and EAP Research and Practice, edited by Ken Hyland and Lilian Wong, presents state-of-the-art studies on specific, purposeful uses of English across diverse settings. Using a range of theoretical approaches, the volume illustrates how specific contexts shape the forms and meanings of specialized texts and how this knowledge can be applied to pedagogical practice. This commitment to language specificity here and elsewhere has forged English for Specific Purposes (ESP) as well as its offspring, English for Academic Purposes (EAP), into an important part of English language teaching and a well established academic discipline.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I (Chapters 1 to 5) examines key concepts, covering lingua franca, workplace English, interdiscursivity, power, and practitioner identity. Part II (Chapters 6 to 11) explores various texts, such as research articles and workplace meetings. Part III (Chapters 12 to 17) discusses classroom practice.

In Chapter 1, Anna Mauranen interprets ‘English as a lingua franca’ (ELF) as a complex system that changes continually, and as a complex contact language that influences and is influenced by other languages. Drawing on spoken and written corpora of academic ELF, she finds that variability (e.g. different expressions for the same meaning) and regularity (e.g. regularization of verb inflections) in ELF add both complexity and simplicity to current English. Mauranen's findings encourage readers to conceptualize language as a fluid, dynamic, and open system as opposed to a static, fixed, and closed one.

English has also become a lingua franca in business. In Chapter 2, Jane Lockwood defines ‘workplace English’ as the English used by speakers of different first languages in educational or business sites. She develops a multi-layered analytical model to illustrate the process of workplace English curriculum design. This model includes particular situational and sociopolitical settings, which helps to identify the specific needs of learners, thus ensuring the focus of language training is appropriate.

In Chapter 3, Vijay K. Bhatia employs critical genre analysis to investigate a set of interrelated legal genres. His analysis uncovers the crucial role of interdiscursivity (i.e., interactions between and across genres, disciplines, writers, readers, and cultures) in the construction and reception of specialized genres. The concept of interdiscursivity opens up new perspectives to research and teach professional communication.

In Chapter 4, John Flowerdew looks at a range of power types in EAP. Through the lens of power, EAP practitioners can better understand the global trend of higher education, their marginalized positions in the university hierarchy, and the potential strategies they can use to empower themselves as well as their students. Only when they see the power relations, can they strive for a higher status in academia.

Chapter 5, by Alex Ding, continues to discuss the disadvantageous conditions of EAP practitioners. Ding demonstrates how the market-driven style of university management and institutional constraints erode the teachers’ sense of self-worth. His in-depth analysis encourages EAP teachers to seriously consider their professional development and the identity they want to forge.

Part II shifts to texts. Chapters 6 to 8 focus on written texts. In Chapter 6, Lynne Flowerdew brings together two research fields: ELF and learner English. Through reviewing corpus studies of disciplinary writing in these two fields, she suggests a three-way comparison to investigate textual features of disciplinary writing included in learner corpora, ELF corpora and expert corpora. This method helps to unveil student trajectories from novice writing towards expert writing, which is illuminating for the teaching of disciplinary writing.

In Chapter 7, Ken Hyland examines interaction changes in research articles from four disciplines over the past 50 years, using his model of stance and engagement (i.e. how writers convey their attitudes and bring readers into the discourse). The corpus data indicate a substantial decrease in the use of interactive devices in the soft disciplines but a moderate increase in the hard sciences, indicating that researchers in the soft fields are moving away from authorial visibility while scientists are doing the opposite. This shift in disciplinary practices, however, needs to be explained from the perspectives of insiders.

In Chapter 8, Ian Bruce deploys his multi-variable genre model to analyze the textual expression of critical thinking in university essays and fund manager commentaries. He finds that academic and professional genres use different discourse devices to convey authorial attitudes and expertise. This chapter provides an effective approach to examining knowledge construction in written texts.

Chapters 9 to 10 move to spoken texts. In chapter 9, Averil Coxhead and Thi Ngoc Yen Dang examine the extent to which the five existing academic word lists can help students learn the vocabulary used in university tutorials and laboratories. Their analysis reveals particular patterns of high-frequency words. Their work contributes to a better understanding of language specificity. In Chapter 10, Janet Holmes analyzes New Zealand workplace discourse to demonstrate how cultural values and norms affect interacting patterns in meetings. This discourse analysis has been applied to developing teaching materials and to fostering learners’ critical engagement with the target community. The study indicates that critical literacy could be incorporated into sociopragmatics instruction.

In Chapter 11, Jean Parkinson explores multimodal texts – specifically, builders’ diaries. She finds that an image can serve more than one function and that it is challenging to create coherence between written and visual meanings in a text. This chapter provides strong evidence for including visual modes in ESP classrooms.

To begin Part III, Ann M. Johns depicts how three secondary-school Latino students in the United States struggle with the writing of a self-promotional genre, the personal statement. The students cannot project themselves as highly appropriate candidates to meet the expectations of their audiences, who are mainly well-to-do white people. One reason is that their worldviews and cultural backgrounds differ from those of their audiences. The study encourages teachers to help students recognize the socially situated nature of writing (Paltridge, Starfield & Tardy, Reference Paltridge, Starfield and Tardy2016).

Data-Driven Learning (DDL) is a powerful approach for learners to engage in self-directed learning. In Chapter 13, Laurence Anthony introduces innovative corpus analysis tools and in-class learning management practices to address common challenges associated with Data-Driven Learning in EAP settings. His introduction offers an update about recent developments and future directions in the area of DDL. In Chapter 14, Lilian Wong presents a practical application of DDL. She illustrates the use of an online corpus query platform to support disciplinary writing at the postgraduate level in a university in Hong Kong. Although the platform is intended to be user-friendly, both students and teachers using it will require technical training.

As with DDL, effective feedback is also important. In Chapter 15, Jill Northcott studies the written feedback given by EAP teachers and subject specialists from social and political sciences as well as from medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine in a graduate writing course. Northcott finds that while EAP teachers are better commentators on language, subject teachers are better commentators on content. This chapter encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration in classroom applications for disciplinary writing.

In Chapter 16, Ursula Wingate and Eva Ogiermann address oral feedback. By examining the directives provided in academic writing tutorials, they find that it is not the frequency but the position of directives in the tutor-student dialogue that determines whether the instruction is monologic or dialogic. Drawing on their research findings, they make recommendations to improve tutor training.

In Chapter 17, Yongyan Li and Margaret Cargill take up the issue of language teacher-supervisor collaboration in the Chinese context. They describe an unsuccessful attempt by an EAP teacher to collaborate with postgraduate supervisors from the life sciences in a research article writing course. The main challenges, they argue, relate to the separation between disciplines and the prevalence of general English education. They call for English teachers to engage in teaching discipline-specific English. Their study inspires thinking about the training of English teachers in China and elsewhere.

This book is extremely useful for ESP/EAP practitioners. It covers many self-developed analytical frameworks, such as the social genre/cognitive genre model developed by Ian Bruce and the model of stance and engagement by Ken Hyland. These frameworks serve as an excellent starting point for those who want to continue these lines of research. The book is also practice-oriented, describing what is going on in EAP classrooms (e.g. Chapter 2) and offering well articulated pedagogical applications (e.g. Chapter 10). Most importantly, the book pays particular attention to ESP/EAP practitioners, an under-researched population. If related chapters, for example, Chapter 1 and Chapter 6, could be cross-referenced, the overall coherence of the book would be improved. This small defect, however, does not detract from the invaluable contribution of this book. We strongly recommend it to language teachers and researchers alike.