Bruce Maylath, professor of English and director of NDSU’s program in Upper Division Writing, recently received the seventh annual Enrique Alcaraz Research Award for a publication he co-edited. “Multilingual Writing and Pedagogical Cooperation in Virtual Learning Environments” was recognized by the European Association of Languages for Specific Purposes.
The association promotes research and instruction in the field of language for specific purposes, which is a widely used approach to second language teaching to address immediate needs of learners who must know that language for their education or job training.
The book, published by IGI Global, was released in April 2018. It contains 15 chapters from the perspectives of international contributors from 12 different countries, and examines experiences with virtual networks and the advantages for universities and students.
“Winning the Enrique Alcaraz Award is an indication of the value of the research that we’ve been conducting for a couple decades now on what we call ‘cross-cultural virtual teams,’ which we assemble internationally to bring together students of writing and translation and sometimes usability testing to produce written documents in multiple languages,” Maylath said. “All of book’s co-editors and about half of its contributors have done multilingual collaborative projects of this sort through the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project, a network with NDSU as its hub, of university teachers that has now operated for 20 years and which has involved 40 universities in 17 countries on four continents.”
According to the editors, the book offers perspectives on the use of telecollaborations and lessons learned from teaching writing, translation and usability testing across languages and cultures. “They cover a variety of key issues in LSP, such as the pros and cons of synchronous and asynchronous communication programs, exemplified by email and Google Docs, respectively; audience awareness in online collaborative writing; different team roles in specialized writing projects; collaborative and intercultural dimensions of online writing and translation; training professional translators; strategy use and competence development; multilingual and intercultural communication; as well as usability testing in professional communication, among others,” the editors wrote in a description of the book.
The award is named for Enrique Alcaraz Varó, who focused his research on language for special purposes and led English studies in Spain. He lectured at universities worldwide and published works on applied linguistics and specialized translation.
Other co-editors of the award-winning book include Birthe Mousten, from Aarhus Universitet, Denmark; Sonia Vandepitte, from Universiteit Gent, Belgium; and Elisabet Arnó, from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
Maylath joined the NDSU faculty in 2007. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English at Kalamazoo College, Michigan; master’s degree in English from Michigan State University, East Lansing; and doctorate in English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He also had undergraduate and graduate study experiences at the University of Oslo, Norway.
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