Call for Papers - Special Issue - 2025

 

Call for Papers

E-JournALL is now accepting submissions for the Special Issue to be published in 2025.

Special Issue Title: Multimodality and the digital turn in teaching business discourse

Guest Editors:

Judith Ainsworth, McGill University (Canada)

Virginia Pulcini, University of Torino (Italy)

A growing number of university students, both native and non-native speakers of English, expect to acquire high-level digital communication skills and competences to successfully handle business communication in their future careers. These students belong to the so-called ‘generation Z’ (born between 1997 to 2012), an age group born with innate digital fluency, active use of social media and expert consumption of visual and aural communication. Thus, lecturers and trainers in higher education are faced with new pedagogical challenges to answer the needs and expectations of these new cohorts of highly digitalized learners.

The manifold facets of business communication and the great variety of genres, both written and oral (Garzone & Gotti, 2011) have been strongly impacted by the overwhelming power of the visual component and by the use of digital technologies. Remediation of traditional channels of communication (from brochures to web based genres) and resemiotization (from verbal texts to a range of semiotic resources) have modified the way communication takes place today. Lecturers and trainers are more than ever challenged by the rapidly evolving media and the new forms of digital communication and are called upon to reshape their materials and methods. Students must be trained to identify and analyze the grammar of visual discourse (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) and how business communication takes shape through new media.

Previous research into teaching business communication has focused on business discourse (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2009; Bargiela-Chiappini et al., 2013; Mautner & Reiner, 2017; Pfeffermann & Gould, 2017), genre approaches and models to teach business communication (Daly & Davy, 2016; Jonsson & Blåsjö, 2020; Roshid et al., 2018; Szanajda & Ou, 2017), language for business (Zanola, 2012) and assessing professional communication skills (Douglas, 2000; Williams et al., 2019).  Less attention has been given to teaching strategies that take into consideration the multimodal dimension of business communication (Hartle et al., 2022) and the digital turn in teaching and learning business discourse (Darics, 2015).

Consequently, this special issue aims to address the topic of new teaching modes and practices in business discourse mirroring the evolving social and economic environment in this digital age.

We therefore invite contributions to this special issue from scholars, teachers and practitioners from the fields of business discourse and business communication training. Due to the lack of available published materials based on business discourse research (Bargiela-Chiappini et al., 2013), all submissions should be related to research-based pedagogical approaches outlining methodology and providing data and analysis.

Suggested areas for papers:

• Digital/multimodal approaches to teach business discourse
• Multimodal/digital materials, methods and teaching strategies

E-JournALL publishes original papers in three different languages: English, Italian, and Spanish. Furthermore, to increase the distribution of all its papers and contribute to cross-language referencing, E-JournALL publishes the abstracts of the articles accepted for publication into English, Italian, and Spanish.

E-JournALL is a diamond open-access journal and operates under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license, which grants authors the right to republish their work, provided that its original publication in E-JournALL is acknowledged.

Please, make sure to format your article according to  the manuscript template  and E-JournALL Style Guide 

Important Dates

The special issue is scheduled to be published in February 2025.

The deadline for submitting titles and abstracts (150 words) is April 15, 2024. (For the abstract proposal, click on “Make a Submission”, then select Special Issue - Abstract proposal

(Please note that an invitation to submit a full-length manuscript does not guarantee publication in the special issue).

The deadline for submitting articles is July 20, 2024.

Authors interested in submitting a paper to this special issue should do so by using the submission form on the journal website: www.e-journall.org

Submissions must be made by creating an account and by clicking on the MAKE A SUBMISSION button.

• For the abstract proposal, please select Special Issue - Abstract proposal
• For the full article, please select Research Articles - Special Issue

All the papers will go through double blind peer review.

For any questions pertaining to this special issue, please contact judith.ainsworth2@mcgill.ca and virginia.pulcini@unito.it.

For any other questions, please contact ourjournall@gmail.com and laura.diferrante@unimi.it

 

References

Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca (Ed.). (2009). The handbook of business discourse. Edinburgh University Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09zrh

Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca, Nickerson, Catherine, & Planken, Brigitte (2013). Business discourse (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137024930

Daly, Peter, & Davy, Dennis (2016). Crafting the investor pitch using insights from rhetoric and linguistics. In Glen Michael Alessi & Geert Jacobs (Eds.), The ins and outs of business and professional discourse research (pp. 182-203). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137507686

Darics, Erika (Ed.). (2015). Digital Business Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan.

Douglas, Dan (2000). Assessing Languages for Specific Purposes. Cambridge University Press.

Garzone, Giuliana E., & Gotti, Maurizio (Eds.). (2011). Discourse, communication and the enterprise. genres and trends. Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0351-0185-0.

Hartle, Sharon, Facchinetti, Roberta, & Franceschi, Valeria (2022). Teaching communication strategies for the workplace: a multimodal framework. Multimodal Communication, 11(1), 5-15. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1515/mc-2021-0005

Jonsson, Carla, & Blåsjö, Mona. (2020). Translanguaging and multimodality in workplace texts and writing. International Journal of Multilingualism, 17(3), 361-381. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2020.1766051

Kress, Gunther, & van Leeuwen, Theo (2001). Multimodal discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication. Arnold.

Mautner, Gerlinde, & Reiner, Franz (Eds.). (2017). Handbook of business communication: linguistic approaches. De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614514862

Pfeffermann, Nicole, & Gould, Julie (Eds.). (2017). Strategy and communication for innovation: integrative perspectives on innovation in the digital economy (3rd ed.). Springer.

Roshid, Mohammod Moninoor, Webb, Susan, & Chowdhury, Raquib. (2018). English as a business lingua franca: a discursive analysis of business e-mails. International Journal of Business Communication. https://doi.org/10.1177/2329488418808040

Szanajda, Andrew, & Ou, Fang-Chun (2017). A simulation-based model for teaching business writing: exploration and applications. International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research, 16(2), 35-47.

Williams, Julie Ann Stuart, Schutts, Joshua, Gallamore, Kristine, & Amaral, Nicholas. (2019). Assessment of memorandum writing in a quantitative business context. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 82(1), 38-52. https://doi.org/10.1177/2329490618798606

Zanola, Annalisa (2012). Global English in international business. Bright Pen.

 

Guest Editors

Judith Ainsworth (PhD) is a Course Lecturer of Professional Communication at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and Visiting Faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at Ashesi University, Ghana.

Virginia Pulcini is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Turin (Italy).