Editorial: Digital Genres and Multimodality

Abstract

Today's online science production and dissemination practices are far from being monolingual, monomodal or scarce in available genres (cf., e.g., Luzón & Pérez-Llantada, 2022, or the review in this issue). Quite on the contrary, the digitalization (or digitization) of science communication (Bucher, 2020;Könneker & Lugger, 2013) has brought about unprecedented access to a profusion of diverse semiotic resources which researchers need to harness for the effective diffusion and promotion of their investigative activities (Luzón, 2019;Xia & Hafner, 2021). Facing this complex panorama, the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) plays a crucial role in its endeavour to analyse and systematize the pedagogy of specialized discourse use in relation to the communicative practices of professional communities.At this juncture, this Special Issue of ESP Today puts together a collection of state-of-the-art research touching on web-mediated emerging genres from the perspective of ESP genre studies, complemented by two instances of research into digital instructional genres (for a justification of this decision see e.g., Bondi, 2016). More specifically, the issue intends to combine aspects of rhetorical and contextual analysis together with studies investigating the discourse features of these genres as expressed in their use of digital multimodal semiotic resources.