Ruth Breeze

Legitimation in corporate discourse: Oil corporations after Deepwater Horizon

Despite growing interest in corporate discourse practices, linguists have rarely focused specifically on the discursive legitimation of institutional or corporate actors after perceived episodes of wrongdoing. This may be due to the fact that under normal conditions, legitimation may scarcely be perceptible, only reaching a significant pitch when a major crisis threatens the existence of the agents involved. Should such an event occur, then institutions will summon up a range of justificatory discursive strategies embodying ideological elements that will resonate with socially accepted ideas, feelings or desires. One case in which legitimation could clearly be perceived was that of the oil industry after the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. In the wake of the disaster, as the oil spread and the crisis appeared to be uncontrollable, public opinion turned against the oil industry. It comes as no surprise that the messages to shareholders published in the annual reports of oil corporations during the following year all make reference to the incident and attempt to legitimate both the individual companies and the sector as a whole, in the eyes of the public in general and the shareholders for whom the reports are intended. This article examines the discourses of legitimation used in these texts, focusing specifically on the roles assumed by the writer as scientist and environmentalist, as well as financial expert, and on the story-telling techniques used to present the events as a survivor narrative. It discusses ways in which these writers endeavour to engage readers’ solidarity, while also appealing to their interests as stakeholders. These discourses operate on an ideological level to underpin the workings of large corporations within the complex panorama of contemporary capitalism.

Interpersonality in legal genres

Few concepts in Discourse Studies are so versatile and intricate and have been so frequently contested as 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. 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 interpersonality, since they are most often confined to modality and the Gricean cooperative principles. 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 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.

Moodle Glossary Tasks for Teaching Legal English

The educational potential of online collaborative tasks has recently been explored in various areas of higher education. This paper reports two cycles of practitioner research focusing on the use of the Moodle glossary tool as part of a university English for Specific Purposes course. The first cycle, completed in 2010, consisted of creating a class glossary of key legal terminology in English which could then be used for study purposes. The second cycle, finished in 2011, built on our experience with the first project. The aim of this second cycle was to construct a class encyclopaedia of common law countries, and to use the finished product to carry out a controlled information search activity in which the students had to read each others’ entries and complete a worksheet. The glossary creation process is analysed, taking into account both teacher and student perspectives, and using a taxonomy to study the editing process. Student feedback concerning both tasks was positive.

Perspectives on North and South: The 2012 financial crisis in Spain seen through two major British newspapers

The world financial crisis of 2008 reached a head in the Eurozone in 2012, when major problems became apparent affecting several countries in Southern Europe. During this time, the British press focused particularly on Spain, watching the potentially volatile political situation with interest, and documenting the negotiations between Spanish and European leaders. This article considers how this situation was reported in two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Independent, applying corpus linguistics techniques to identify salient aspects of the crisis and to detect patterns in language use that had an ideological dimension. The 2012 crisis emerges mainly as a political issue, and the reporting focuses on solutions rather than causes or effects. However, even though these two publications are not noted for Euroscepticism, they both show a strong tendency to group South European countries together within a negative frame, collectivizing them and establishing a dichotomy with Northern Europe.

Promoting Critical Cultural Awareness in the International University

Critical cultural awareness is an essential component of critical thinking, and is increasingly necessary in order to build effective relationships in today’s globalised world. This chapter reports on a project carried out with a group of international and local journalism students, involving rewriting and refocusing local news stories from the students’ home countries for an international readership. This task brought students face to face with the need to communicate about familiar subjects to readers who would share little background knowledge. They had to construct a working theory of what the “international reader” would be likely to understand, and develop strategies to achieve comprehension. This also involved refocusing the story, highlighting different aspects of it for a new readership. The project generated considerable interest among the students, and sparked discussion of cultural topics and topoi that provided material for further research and reflection.

Balancing neutrality and partiality in arbitration: discursive tensions in separate opinions

Abstract Although arbitration is increasingly being used to settle important disputes, particularly on an international level, little attention has focused on the language used by arbitrators. This article contains a qualitative analysis of the discursive moves and resources used in separate (dissenting and concurring) opinions published on the website of the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes from 1987 to 2013. Arbitrators’ discursive practices in this forum are analyzed, with a particular focus on the tensions that arise between the need to sustain the arbitral system and maintain professional relations, on the one hand, and the equally pressing need to display commitment to the losing party’s cause, on the other. These tensions have parallels in other areas of legal practice and professional life, and can be understood as part of the way power systems operate and replicate through discourse.

A Comparison of EFL Teachers' and Students' Attitudes to Oral Corrective Feedback.

ABSTRACT A relatively small number of studies on beliefs about oral corrective feedback (CF) have uncovered a mismatch between teachers’ and students’ attitudes which is potentially harmful to the language learning process, not only because students may become demotivated when their expectations are not met, but also because teachers appear to be reluctant to provide oral CF. One of the reasons why teachers may feel this way seems to be that they are worried about triggering negative emotions in their students. So far, however, hardly any research exists which takes students’ affective responses to CF into account. Previous studies have also neglected to investigate how students prefer to be corrected. Against this background, the present survey study asked 395 students and 46 teachers of English as a foreign language what their attitudes and feelings are with regard to oral CF. Previous findings that students want to be corrected much more than their teachers feel inclined to do were confirmed. Moreover, students were found to be much more positive about explicit types of CF than their teachers are, and to experience positive emotions when receiving CF.

Representing the People: Claiming the Heartland in Scottish Election Manifestos

Breeze examines the way in which populist discourses develop in the official self-presentations of the four main political parties in Scotland before and after the Scottish Independence Referendum. Her analysis focuses on categories related to place, identity and belonging, showing how layers of ideological difference are materialised in political discourse. The positioning of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) is consistently Scottish in terms of discursive stance and deictic centre, while other parties have difficulties negotiating the overlap of UK and Scottish identity. Populist traits in SNP discourses include the identification of an external antagonist, and the configuration of discursive dichotomies firmly placing ‘the people of Scotland’ in a ‘we’ versus ‘them’ relationship with a number of discursive ‘others.’

Emotion in politics: Affective-discursive practices in UKIP and Labour

Recent political trends in many countries have sparked renewed interest in populism. Despite general agreement that the affective/emotive aspects of political communication are particularly important in this, there is little recent analysis of how populists operationalise emotion or how they genuinely differ from mainstream parties in this sense. This article applies mixed methods to explore the ‘affective-discursive practices’ that characterise the discourses of two opposition parties in the United Kingdom: United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and Labour. Comparison of the frequency of semantic subcategories related to emotion in corpora of press releases published by these parties on their websites is complemented by qualitative analysis of how specific emotional areas such as fear, anger and anxiety are invoked by the two parties. Different ‘affective-discursive practices’ underpin their discourses, since Labour characteristically frames reactions to social phenomena in terms of worry and concern, while UKIP legitimates fear and anger, but also projects more positive emotions.

Introduction: Making Essential Competencies Visible in Higher Education

This introductory chapter states the motivation underlying the present volume, describes its goals and structure, and examines the challenges posed by the Bologna Process with regard to the encouragement of lifelong competencies in English-medium instruction within the European Higher Education Area. In addition, the editors justify their choice of critical thinking, creativity, learner autonomy and motivation as essential competencies, highlight their interconnection, and explain the educational premises that bind the collection together, which is intended to inform and inspire not only European lecturers, but also university teachers all over the world. Finally, the implications of fostering lifelong competencies in English as a second language or lingua franca are discussed. These include, along with linguistic proficiency, mastering the genres and discourses of the discipline and their associated stylistic conventions and rhetorical variants, as well as methodological changes for ensuring interactive learning and making language more salient that when teaching in the first language. Lastly, a closing reflection on pedagogical options and dilemmas is provided.