InterGedi in CLAVIER 2019

28th-29th November 2019.

At the end of November, InterGedi participated at the Clavier Conference, hosted this time in Pisa, Italy. The motto of the forum was this year ‘Knowledge Dissemination and Multimodal Literacy: Research Perspectives on ESP in a Digital Age’. 

We contributed the second day with a presentation carried out by Isabel Herrando-Rodrigo and Rosa Lorés-Sanz. They displayed a proposal, based on previous ethnographically informed studies, to use a range of digital resources in seminars aimed at professional training. Below, you can read the full abstract.

The conference was a good opportunity to see colleagues and catch up with the research that is standing out these days in our field! We can’t wait to attend the next Clavier edition.

Abstract:

Emerging trends in teaching professional communication practices: Using online resources for the design and implementation of seminars for trainee doctors

In the last few years, the web has become a privileged access platform for knowledge for an increasingly globalized society who uses English as a vehicle of international communication. The spread of digital platforms has brought with it the emergence of new modes of communication, some of them based on already existing ones, some others, totally new (Herring, 2012). It has also involved a substantial evolution in professional and discursive practices in all walks of life, and the scientific has not been an exception. Among other affordances, digital platforms offer resourceful repositories that could be exploited by linguistic trainers as a source of innovative multimodal ESP materials for the teaching of professional and occupational communicative practices. This presentation focuses on the design and implementation of a set of seminars addressed to urology practitioners and interns who are urged to present their clinical research in the 2020 European and World conference of Urology by means of digital posters. Following previous linguistic and rhetorical research on how audiovisual compositions, such as visual abstracts (Mur, 2018), are integrated by different modes that interact and contribute to create meaning as multimodal ensembles (Jewitt, 2016), we will here argue that the design and use of multimodal ESP materials and methodologies effectively contribute to enhance the linguistic and communicative competence of training professionals. Thus, in line with previous research (Crawford & Bonsignori, 2015; Fortanet-Gómez & Querol-Julián, 2010), our ethnographically-informed results convey that using multimodal ESP materials as learning tools (YouTube poster presentations, MOOCs on how to deliver feedback and manage questions, clips from medical TV series or audioslides) should be considered today an indispensable element in the significant acquisition of effective professional communicative competences