Collaborating across organizational lines in Language for Specific Purposes

Abstract

Since its inception in the 1970s, the field of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) in the United States has continually adapted to ever-changing real-world needs. Its evolution has contributed to its increasing relevance, though the field faces ongoing challenges presented by the gap between its interdisciplinary nature and a lack of instructor expertise in the LSP content area, and thus calls for collaborations among institutions and communities. Reviewing successful collaborations in LSP, this chapter proposes an interdisciplinary collaboration taxonomy that aims to describe, compare, and evaluate such collaborations. The taxonomy categorizes LSP interdisciplinary collaborations at resource, project, course, and program levels, through intra-institutional and extra-institutional partnership. Furthermore, this chapter showcases examples of such collaborations at two institutions in courses of business Chinese, business French, medical Spanish, and a minor in Latin American studies for technical applications. These successful experiences demonstrate how LSP instructors can conduct intra- and extra-institutional collaboration with varying degrees of interactivity and on various scales to align the course with discipline standards. Each example also reflects on challenges and share tips related to logistics for replication and future development.