Maurizio Gotti

Ruth Breeze

Carmen Sancho Guinda

Few concepts in Discourse Studies are so versatile and intricate and have been so frequently contested as &ltI>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.&ltBR> 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 &ltI>interpersonality, since they are most often confined to modality and the Gricean cooperative principles. &ltBR> 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 &ltI>interpersonality, which besides modality, Grice's 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.

Interpersonality in Legal Genres

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.

Essential Competencies for English-medium University Teaching

Through Narrative Theory, the book offers an engaging panorama of the construction of specialised discourses and practices within academia and diverse professional communities. Its chapters investigate genres from various fields, such as aircraft accident reports, clinical cases and other scientific observations, academic conferences, academic blogs, climate-change reports, university decision-making in public meetings, patients' oral and written accounts of illness, corporate annual reports, journalistic obituaries, university websites, narratives of facts in legal cases, narrative processes in arbitration hearings, briefs, and witness examination accounts. In addition to exploring narration in this wide range of contexts, the volume uses narrative as a powerful tool to gain a methodological insight into professional and academic accounts, and thus it contributes to research into theoretical issues. Under the lens of Narratology, Discourse and Genre Analysis, fresh research windows are opened on the study of academic and professional interactions.

Carmen Sancho Guinda

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