The first research area brings together studies on various types of specialized English-language discourse (such as legal English, architectural English, mathematics, or climate science, for example) and aims to describe what distinguishes and characterizes these specialized varieties of English.
To analyze these discourses, the team uses
- llinguistic analysis, corpus linguistics (creation of specialized corpora, exploration of corpora using concordancers and textometric tools)
- ethnography (field studies, questionnaires, interviews, expert consultations)
- to civilization and the history of ideas, in order to characterize these discourses qualitatively and quantitatively and to explore the texts and their context.
In particular, we study specialized discourses and their potential plain-language versions (the plain language movement in law), popularized or semi-specialized discourse (such as popular science), as well as discourse emerging in new fields (such as “climate English”).
Specialized discourse genres are the products of constantly evolving socio-professional contexts. The team focuses on discourse genres from a diachronic perspective to examine what changes over time in their terminology, phraseology, structure, and multimodal nature, as well as the reasons behind these changes.
In particular, the team examines how the advent of the Internet influences genres that have migrated to the web or genres that originated on the web. For example, the team examines how research teams in the humanities, engineering, and life sciences promote their work through tweets and videos.
Designing LANSAD English courses that meet students’ future professional needs requires conducting needs assessments and cross-validating data from various sources—including methods (surveys, interviews, analyses of student work or expert opinions) and the respondents (learners, experts, etc.).
These methods make it possible to identify teachable and certifiable skills in English for other disciplines and to improve training and assessments in scientific English (such as English for mathematics) at ENS Paris-Saclay.
The team also plans to conduct classroom observations and experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of LANSAD teaching approaches in English and to optimize student motivation and the acquisition of terminology, phraseology, and specialized written and oral genres at various stages of their education.