The Routledge Handbook of Language and Professional Communication

Vijay Bhatia, Stephen Bremner, Vijay Bhatia, Stephen Bremner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138281783
• eBook ISBN: 9781317916420
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Professional Communication provides a broad coverage of the key areas where language and professional communication intersect and gives a comprehensive account of the field.

The four main sections of the Handbook cover:

• Approaches to Professional Communication
• Practice
• Acquisition of Professional Competence
• Views from the Professions

This invaluable reference book incorporates not only an historical view of the field, but also looks to possible future developments. Contributions from international scholars and practitioners, focusing on specific issues, explore the major approaches to professional communication and bring into focus recent research.

This is the first handbook of language and professional communication to account for both pedagogic and practitioner perspectives and as such is an essential reference for postgraduate students and those researching and working in the areas of applied linguistics and professional communication.

Section 1 Approaches to professional communication

A. General theoretical frameworks

1 Analysing discourse variation in professional contexts

Vijay Bhatia

DOI: 10.4324/9781315851686-3

Much of research in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), and to some extent in professional communication, has been inspired by descriptions of discourse variation in academic and professional contexts. Although professional communication represents the development that integrates ESP and Business Communication as two main areas of study (see Bhatia and Bhatia 2011), with ESP drawing its inspiration from applied linguistics, and Business Communication from communication theory, both of them have come to benefit from the outcomes of analysis of various forms of academic and disciplinary discourses within the various frameworks of discourse analysis, in particular from genre analysis. In more recent years critical discourse and genre analytical frameworks have also started influencing the current thinking in organisational communication, management communication, and corporate communication, all of which are often grouped under professional communication (see Chia 2000; Boje, Oswick and Ford 2004; Grant et al. 2004; Bhatia 2007). In the early sixties, only ESP relied heavily on descriptions of discourse variation, and none of the other areas of professional communication took studies in discourse and genre analysis seriously, relying on various communication theories instead. The focus in these individually somewhat diverse areas of professional communication was primarily on text-external factors, including context, whereas in ESP the focus was on text-internal aspects, such as lexico-grammar and rhetorical organisation. However, in more recent years, the focus in all areas of professional communication has been shifting towards disciplinary variations in professional and academic discourses and practices in addition to various theories of communication, thus integrating text-internal as well as text-external factors in professional communication. In this chapter I would like to introduce some of the key developments in the field of discourse and genre analysis and their applications to various forms of professional communication, which can be represented as shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Discourse and genre analysis in professional communication (adapted from Bhatia 2012)

Analysing functional variation as register

As mentioned earlier, ESP has always drawn its inspiration from applied linguistics, particularly from sociolinguistics, through the analyses of functional variation in language use in academic as well as professional contexts. The earliest forms of analysis of language variation can be traced back to the work of Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens (1964), who defined functional variationin language use as register, drawing evidence from statistical significance of lexico-grammatical features. As Swales (2000) pointed out, register analysis gave early ESP practitioners a mechanism to relate findings of linguistic analysis to pedagogic materials through what he called ‘thin’ descriptions of ESP discourses. However, he cautioned that this resource lacked ‘a perception of discourse itself’ and ‘the means for analyzing and exploiting it’ (2000: 60), which was rectified in later work on genre analysis.

In subsequent years numerous studies appeared identifying and describing typically characteristic features of various academic and professional registers, such as scientific English, business English, and legal English. However, it is a common perception that outsiders to a discourse or professional community are not able to follow what specialists write and talk about even if they are in a position to understand every word of what is written or said (Swales 1990), and even being a native speaker in such contexts is not necessarily helpful if one does not have sufficient awareness or understanding of the conventions of such specialised discourses and genres situated in specific professional practices. Thus in subsequent years, ESP inspired a new tradition for the analysis of academic and disciplinary discourses within the framework of genre analysis, which, as Widdowson (1998) points out, was a significant advance on register analysis. Referring to the work done by Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993), he claims that it ‘seeks to identify the particular conventions for language use in certain domains of professional and occupational activity’. He further points out that it is ‘a development from, and an improvement on, register analysis because it deals with discourse and not just text: that is to say, it seeks not simply to reveal what linguistic forms are manifested but how they realise, make real, the conceptual and rhetorical structures, modes of thought and action, which are established as conventional for certain discourse communities’ (1998: 9).

The rationale for such developments has been that communication is not simply a matter of putting words together in a grammatically correct and rhetorically coherent textual form, but more importantly, it is also a matter of having a desired impact on how a specifically relevant discourse or professional community views it, and how the members of that community negotiate meaning in professional contexts. It is a matter of understanding ‘why members of a specific disciplinary or professional community communicate the way they do’ (Bhatia 1993), which requires the discipline-specific knowledge of how professionals conceptualise issues and talk about them in order to achieve their disciplinary and professional objectives.

Analysing functional variation as genre

In its early conceptualisations, genre analysis sought thicker functional descriptions of discourse variation, often going beyond the immediate context of situation, attempting to offer a grounded description of language use in educational, academic, or professional settings. Genre analysis thus reflected more than mere linguistic descriptions of texts, invariably offering explanation for language use in conventionalised and institutionalised settings. Genre analysis, as pointed out in Bhatia (2004), is viewed as the study of situated linguistic behaviour in institutionalised academic or professional settings, whether defined in terms of typification of rhetorical action, as in Miller (1984), Bazerman (1994), and Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995); regularities of staged, goal oriented social processes, as in Martin, Christie and Rothery (1987), and Martin (1993); or consistency of communicative purposes, as in Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993). Genre theory, in spite of these seemingly different orientations, covers a lot of common ground. The most important feature of this view of language use is the emphasis on conventions that all three manifestations of genre theory consider very central to any form of generic description. Genre essentially refers to language use in a conventionalised communicative setting in order to give expression to a specific set of communicative goals of a disciplinary or social institution, which gives rise to stable structural forms by imposing constraints on the use of lexico-grammatical as well as discoursal resources (Bhatia 2004).

The second important aspect of genre theory is that although genres are typically associated with recurring rhetorical contexts, and are identified on the basis of a shared set of communicative purposes with constraints on allowable contributions in the use of lexico-grammatical and discoursal forms, they are not static. Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995: 6) aptly point it out when they say ‘genres are inherently dynamic rhetorical structures that can be manipulated according to conditions of use’.

These two features of genre theory — emphasis on conventions and propensity for innovation — may appear to be contradictory in character; one tends to view genre as a rhetorically situated and highly institutionalised textual activity, having its own generic integrity, whereas the other assigns genre a natural propensity for innovation and change, which is often exploited by the expert members of the specialist community to create new forms in order to respond to novel rhetorical contexts or to convey ‘private intentions within the socially recognised communicative purposes’ (Bhatia 1995: 1). How do we explain this seeming contradiction between ‘generic integrity’ on the one hand, and ‘propensity for innovation’ on the other?

Going back to Berkenkotter and Huckin, we find that although genres are associated with typical socio-rhetorical situations and in turn, they shape future responses to similar situations, they have always been ‘sites of contention between stability and change’ (1995: 6). Situations, and more importantly rhetorical contexts, may not always recur exactly in the same way, though they may still have a considerable overlap. It may be that a person is required to respond to a somewhat changing socio-pragmatic need, encouraging her or him to negotiate her or his response in the light of recognisable or established conventions. It may also be that she or he may decide to communicate ‘private intentions’ within the rhetorical context of a ‘socially recognized communicative purpose’ (Bhatia 1995). Bhatia (2004) discusses the example of a letter from a company chairman to the shareholders, in which he finds expert manipulation of generic resources to convey a positive image about a company's somewhat negative performance. In contexts such as these it is often possible for established members of a professional community to manipulate institutionalised generic resources, thus exploiting the ‘tactical freedom’ available to expert professionals to negotiate individual responses to recurring and novel rhetorical situations. It is true that there are regularities of various kinds, in the use of lexico-grammatical, discoursal, and generic resources; there are rhetorical situations, which often recur, though not exactly in the same form, or manner, but at the same time, there are expert and well-established users of language in specific disciplinary cultures who try to exploit, appropriate, and even bend generic conventions and thus expectations in order to be innovative and effective in their use of language. All these factors make the real world of discourse complex and yet interesting.

In the last two decades genre theory has become one of the most favoured tools for the analysis of professional discourse. The frameworks and methods of language description have also become increasingly sophisticated, focusing more on context, rather than just the text. It has also become increasingly multidimensional and multi-perspective (Bhatia 2004), in that it has integrated a number of different methodologies, such as textography (Swales 1998), interpretive ethnography (Smart 2006), corpus analysis (Hyland 2000; Cheng, this volume), participantperspectives on specialist discourses (Louhiala-Salminen 1996; Rogers 2000), cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives (Gimenez 2001; Vergaro 2004; Planken 2005; Vuorela 2005; Zhu, this volume), multimodal analysis (Brett 2000; O'Halloran 2006; Maier, this volume), and obser...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Section 1: Approaches to professional communication
• Section 2: Practice
• Section 3: Acquisition of professional competence
• Section 4: View from the professions
• Appendix: View from the professions – questions
• Index