ALSPTHEI 2023: PILAR MUR-DUEÑAS DELIVERS A PLENARY TALK ON DIGITALLY-MEDIATED DISCURSIVE PRACTICES

Pilar Mur-Dueñas was a keynote speaker at the “Association of LSP teachers 6th International Conference: Contemporary Challenges in LSP Teaching”. This conference was hosted by the University of Osijek (Croatia) from the 23rd to the 25th of February 2023. In her plenary talk, titled “Emerging and evolving digitally-mediated discursive practices: A challenge for LSP training”, Pilar Mur argued that LSP teachers today are faced with the challenge of bringing new digital discursive practices into the classroom. She talked about these practices for the dissemination of specialized knowledge commonly employed by professionals in an online environment and how and why LSP teachers need to introduce them into their lessons to help develop students’ communication skills and disciplinary literacies together with their multiliteracies.

The full abstract of Pilar Mur-Dueñas’ talk can be consulted as follows:

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Emerging and evolving digitally-mediated discursive practices: A challenge for LSP training

Broad dissemination of specialized knowledge, especially through digital media, has radically changed professionals’ discursive practices, who consume and frequently produce emerging and evolving genres. Specialized knowledge is nowadays commonly shared and accessed through websites, blogs and social media. This Web 2.0 online environment in which professionals work, has important implications on how they receive, recontextualize and communicate information and knowledge. It embraces diverse semiotic modes (visual, aural, spatial, beside the verbal one) and affordances such as hypertextuality, hypermediality, or interactivity, which can be maximized to promote dialogicity with and collaboration between multiple audiences, to redress knowledge asymmetries and to build professional networks. This scenario of evolving, complex digitally-mediated professional practices is indeed a challenge for LSP teachers. Such practices need to permeate the LSP classroom and bring in digital genres to train future professionals to be effective in their discursive endeavours.

In this context it is the aim of my talk to (i) focus on research which has unveiled digital practices and genres commonly employed by professionals, (ii) identify and discuss digital medium affordances and aspects which have a bearing on how specialized knowledge and information is communicated and recontextualized, and which can be of special significance for professional practices, (iii) argue why and how not only students’ communication skills and disciplinary literacies, but also their multiliteracies (e.g. linguistic, digital, visual, multimodal, academic literacies) need to be developed in the LSP classroom.

It will be contended that LSP training needs to be research-based. It is a further challenge for LSP instructors to establish bridges between LSP literature and research and their trainees. Departing from research findings on the analysis of LSP digital genres and practices is fundamental for LSP teachers to create designs for learning which promote successful communication among and by future professionals in different contexts and media.