TITLE:
Multilingual Approaches to Specialized Language Pedagogy and Research: A Journal’s Perspective
AUTHORS:
Alejandro Curado Fuentes
KEYWORDS:
LSP, Multilingualism, Keywords, Thematic Analysis, ELF, LOTE
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.15 No.6,
June
17,
2024
ABSTRACT: The exploration of LOTE (Languages Other Than English) as a multilingual scope in LSP (Languages for Specific Purposes) constitutes both a major goal and challenge in LSP pedagogy and research, since English is mostly the target language used and analyzed in specialized communication. This study set out to explore multilingualism-oriented articles in a representative LSP journal in Spain, Ibérica (Q1 in language and linguistics). The years from 2012 to 2022 were selected for comparison, as other studies had examined previous time frames. A thematic exploration of these articles was enabled by keyword-based analysis, comparing the Ibérica collection with a larger academic corpus of writing in order to retrieve highly distinctive linguistic occurrences. It was found that keyword-derived collocations point to pivotal thematic references throughout the corpus, as these linguistic elements were frequent and dispersed. By manually annotating the co-texts of these collocations referring to multilingual issues and ideas, a classification was achieved according to thematic elements, leading to four major categories related to multilingualism in the journal: Methodologies, ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), groups of learners/participants, and collaborative projects. In general, it was confirmed that ELF dominates specialized language pedagogy and research in multilingual studies. However, it was also observed, among other developments, that three areas, lexicology, translation, and teaching methods, concentrate more studies dealing with LOTE and multilingualism in the journal.