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

Submissions are accepted in English, Italian, and Spanish
https://e-journall.org/index.php/ejall/announcement