Christoph A. Hafner

Creativity and Digital Literacies in English for Specific Purposes

The affordances of networked digital media to easily create, publish and share content have provided an environment within which creative practices have flourished. A “participatory culture” has emerged, empowering individuals to be involved in the amateur creation and sharing of culture. In addition, the resources available for text creation have expanded to include new, multimodal and hypertextual forms of representation, frequently combined in creative, hybrid ways. As a result of these changes, some language and literacy scholars have called for the development of pedagogies taking “digital literacies” into account. This chapter examines how digital practices might be leveraged in order to promote creativity in the context of higher education. It refers to a creativity enhancing learning environment, an English for science course at a university in Hong Kong. On this course, second and foreign language learners were engaged in an “English for science” project and created a digital video, shared through YouTube, as well as a more traditional text type, a written scientific report. The chapter examines students’ perceptions of these two tasks as they relate to creativity and suggests that, in order to promote creativity, both a “context for creativity” and “resources for creativity” are required.

Language, culture and the law: the formulation of legal concepts across systems and cultures

This collection, volume 64 in Peter Lang’s Linguistic Insights series, is inspired by two complementary research projects, which examine issues of intercultural communication firstly in specialist discourse, and secondly in the discourse of international commercial arbitration. The volume focuses on two important developments of relevance to practitioners and scholars in the domain of language, culture, and the law. The first is the emergence of a unified Europe, and the consequent political and legal restructuring that this unification entails. The second is the trend toward increasing globalization with attendant increases in international commercial relations, contracting, and dispute resolution (for example, through the practice of international commercial arbitration). Both the process of political unification in Europe and the practice of international trade and commercial arbitration involve the conflict of a variety of cultures and legal systems. Against this backdrop, Bhatia, Candlin, and Evangelisti-Allori have commissioned a range of discourse studies into the role of culture in the formulation of legal concepts across borders and legal traditions. The contributions to this volume provide a variety of perspectives on the communicative problems that must be resolved in multilingual and multicultural legal contexts. The editors identify three key questions: ‘How does the socio-political and cultural context affect the use of language in the formulation of legal discourse? How are the meanings of language choices made within the framework of one juridical tradition modified when the same language is put to use in a different context and tradition? How does the resulting, hybrid ‘‘Eurolanguage’’ reflect the amount of negotiation and compromise needed to reach agreement on fundamental political issues?’ (p. 12). The studies provide interesting insight into the development of written legal language in contexts where different national and legal cultures come into contact. As such the collection makes a welcome contribution to a field of study which has been largely under-researched. The book is divided into three different sections, and I sketch a brief outline of these in the following paragraphs. Unfortunately, because of the constraints of space it is not possible to describe all of the contributions here. Part 1 focuses on language and culture in international trade and international commercial arbitration, with particular attention paid to the expression of normative texts across languages and across cultures in this context. The chapters in this section are grouped according to their focus on international commercial arbitration, sports arbitration, and the practice and regulation of international trade. Journal of Multicultural Discourses Vol. 4, No. 3, November 2009, 351 354