Research articles are clearly influenced by the discipline of the research being reported. Just as disciplinary conventions place constraints on, for example, the moves and language use of abstracts and introductions, they also provide a set of options for title design. This study attempts to identify the title conventions of eight disciplines by focusing on various features that play a part in title design: the use of multiple-unit titles (those with subtitles); the use of noun phrases to form the title; and 'a' or 'the' in initial position. The length of titles is investigated, as is the proportion of substantive words. Data is based on a 3,200-title corpus of titles from research articles published in prestigious journals in four disciplines in the hard sciences (botany, fluid engineering, geology, and medicine) and four in the soft sciences (economics, education, history, and sociology). The data is presented in a visual form that compares title features by discipline, to demonstrate title conventions and to help novice writers understand the features and options available.

This paper gives an overview and an evaluation of Web pages of Asian languages on the Web, in particular of those languages that have not been focused on so far. The authors have collected over 100 million Asian Web pages downloaded from 42 Asian country domains, identified the languages based on Ngram statistics and analyzed their language properties. Primarily the number of pages written in each language measures the presence of a language. The survey reveals that the digital language divide exists at a serious level in the region. The state of multilingualism and the dominating presence of cross-border languages, English in particular, are analyzed. The paper sheds light on script and encoding issues of Asian language texts on the Web. In order to promote language resource collection and sharing, authors have a vision of creating an observation-collection instrument for Asian language resources on the Web. The results of the survey show the feasibility of this vision, and provide us with a better idea of the steps needed to realize that vision.

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The general aim of the study is to present the challenges of writing for academic publication as perceived by doctoral students of a particular Hungarian university. The respondents of an on-line questionnaire survey (N=70) were asked to consider their practices for meeting publication requirements and express their opinions on differences between writing for publication in their first and second languages, the (lack) of support in publication-related processes, and the most common language-related problems they face when publishing their research. The findings show considerable differences between the answers and perceptions of doctoral students of humanities and social sciences ("soft sciences") and those in engineering ("hard science"). Furthermore, the results provide directions for further investigation in order to explore practices and differences in more detail. Finally, some pedagogical implications for language teachers and supervisors are introduced and possible approaches are discussed for offering more comprehensive support in writing for research publication.

This paper introduces an idea for expanding student exposure to reading longer texts on ESP topics. It consists of sets of ESP materials (primarily for engineering) centering around a single topic, containing several authentic texts (and even videos) intended for different audiences (e.g. general, informed about science, academic). Since texts deal with the same topic (for instance, announcing a new material or technological advance) many words are repeated, but information is presented or highighted differently, and comparing texts can help learners become aware of various language and text features. Because learners do not have to comprehend a new topic in each text they read, they can work with longer texts. In addition, reading abstracts or extracts oforiginal journal articles can serve as a useful introduction to the academic level. Tips are given to help teachers assemble sets of multipletexts around topics matching the needs of their students.