Introduction to language awareness in professional communication contexts

The four papers in this special issue focus on four professional communication contexts, one forensic (Aldridge’s police interviews with child witnesses), two in health (Wray’s paper on the care of dementia patients on the one hand, and Spilioti et al.’s nursing shift handover meetings on the other), and one in the field of business (Handford and Koester’s conflict exchanges in business meetings).

Language awareness (LA) has long been closely associated with language teaching and learning, and, reflecting this, van Essen (2008, p.3) has considered this to be the ‘core business of LA’. To the extent that LA has developed in large part from the seminal work of Hawkins (e.g. 1984), and in the debates around explicit knowledge about language and the use of consciousness-raising activities in second language acquisition, this association is no great surprise. But in its various definitions, LA has always also been concerned with ‘language use’ (see for example, the Association of Language Awareness definition – ALA n.d.). And this extends its potential scope across all spheres of our social lives, including political, workplace and professional communication. Indeed, the very first issue of this journal appealed for LA work to extend to “the world of work and issues in language-sensitive professions” (Donmall, 1992, p.2).

Much has changed for LA since Donmall’s appeal in 1992 (see Cots and Garrett, 2018). The increasingly globalized new economy has led to profound transformations in work practices and regimes (Heller 2010, see also Spilioti et al., this issue), leading amongst other things to ‘new conditions for the production of language practices and forms and new challenges to current ways of thinking about language’ (Heller 2010, p.350, see also Codó 2018). Such radical changes are occurring within a lifetime, and, as Cots (2013, p.3) maintains, ‘as long as both native and non-native speakers never stop learning new aspects of a language, there will always be communicative situations in which language users may benefit from increased language awareness to allow them to better control, organise and evaluate verbal behaviour’. In fact, in this respect, as Spilioti et al. (this issue) point out, making a distinction between language learning and language use may anyway be untenable.

Yet in the published literature on LA, to our knowledge, forays into social and professional contexts outside language teaching have been relatively few (although Critical Language Awareness has arguably had more engagement with sociocultural contexts, and given more prominence to, for example, issues of power, democracy and citizenship - e.g. Fairclough 1999). Given this, our own view is that for a stronger symbiotic relationship to develop between LA research and social and professional communication research, more proaction may be needed to bring them together, and there is a need to explore what forms such initiatives might take.

Looking for more opportunities to engage in collaborative research is undoubtedly one avenue. But others include the seeking out and gathering together of collections of relevant work to publish in respective journals or edited volumes, or to present in symposia or panels at respective conferences. And this is the motivation behind this special issue. There can be difficulties with such initiatives to bring together two fields that have hitherto been working largely independently. For example, researchers and scholars generally choose to present their papers at conferences where they anticipate that they will be able to attend plenty of other papers closely enough related to their own research activity and interests, and it may sometimes be the case that beyond the small panels or symposia, they find the majority of other conference papers too far removed from their central interests and areas of activity. But this need not hold if there are, for example, interdisciplinary conferences that offer plenty of interest to both sides. In preparing this special issue, some authors followed this route. Three of the four papers were presented at the 8^th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice (ALAPP 2018), forming part of a panel on Language Awareness and Professional Communication.

Our hope is that, modest though this collection is in terms of the number of papers, it will nevertheless provide a persuasive indication of how engagement with language and communication can make significant contributions to our critical understandings of the conduct of and outcomes from professional and social contexts. We greatly appreciate the courage of our contributors to go into what is for them the uncharted territory of LA, and also to explore the extent to which an LA framework (such as that of van Lier 1998) can be useful to illuminate their analyses. It is perhaps an implicit call for those of us working in LA to take the initiative in looking for opportunities for collaboration with applied linguists and communication scholars working in other professional communication-mediated domains. In addition, we hope that growth in LA work in such areas will bring new insights – theoretical and methodological – into the LA field. In this collection, we have inevitably been able to do no more than scratch the surface when it comes to the range of contexts and issues included. There is certainly a great deal more for us all to explore and pursue.