Abstract
This chapter opens with an intriguing question asked by one of the Business English undergraduate students whose experience invokes several key issues in ESP education, including transferability of classroom learning to workplace settings, professional identity, indexicality and genre knowledge, and participatory learning in ESP. By relating these issues to current scholarship of language learning and identity, in particular in relation to ESP learning, the chapter identities several gaps in the literature such as defining professional identity, ESP learning process, and research methodology, and proposes four research questions along with a discussion of the significance of addressing them for ESP education.
Dong (sounding frustrated): 一涉及自己专业方面的东西的时候, 自己就会感觉很怵, 就是听不懂, 看不懂! … 感觉就是也学了三年了, 学啥了? [when it came to the technicalities in my area, I would feel really uneasy, I couldn’t understand what I heard, I couldn’t read. … I feel like it’s been three years, but what have I learned?]. (Interview with Dong #6, 6 July 2010)
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Zhang, Z. (2017). Introduction. In: Learning Business English in China. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59291-6_1
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