Review of Beyond the Universe of Languages for Specific Purposes : The 21 st Century Perspective

This manual contains worthy material in relation to the field of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP). It comprises 29 papers dealing with relevant topics in LSP. The papers are divided into three different categories, namely, (1) teaching, (2) linguistics, and (3) translation. A “Foreword” by the editors precedes these papers. All the studies included in this volume focus on the analysis of specialized discourse in English and Spanish, and most of them include corpus methodology in which the use of technology is integrated. The section devoted the teaching of LSPs contains varied topics comprising the implementation of teaching models and approaches by offering new perspectives, some of which derive from the authors’ actual observation of practice and teaching experiments. The paper by Manuela Crespo describes the Eurocrea project, which was run in different Spanish and Belgian universities, and it focuses on the use of teleconferences to practice oral skills using a task-based approach in a synchronous computer-mediated communication environment. The empirical side of this contribution reports on a survey taken by participating students to reveal Eurocrea approach’s motivational value and its benefits when it comes to learning languages in context, as learners from different countries may improve their oral linguistic skills through virtual interaction. Obviously, the number of informants, all of them from the University of Antwerp, is quite limited, and so the conclusions drawn from their answers should be taken as provisional, as the author herself