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Lenassi / Scripta Manent XVI/2 (2021), 1–2
EDITORIAL
This issue of Scripta Manent features three articles in three different languages: English, Ger-
man, and Italian. The idea behind the issue had its origins in the Second International Con-
ference of the Slovene Association of LSP Teachers, held online on October 15th and 16th, 
2020, which put forward a myriad of different topics on teaching approaches and research 
activities within LSPs.
What is common to the contributions collected in this issue—and which at first glance may 
seem so different from the linguistic and content point of view—is the relevance of the ac-
quisition of receptive and productive skills and knowledge within different communicative 
aspects of LSP. In the specific case at hand, these refer to writing, dialects, and terminology. 
The articles all aim to make both teachers and students aware of such LSP topics, presenting 
various ways of flexibly acquiring receptive and productive communication skills in the areas 
addressed.
The issue opens with Ken Hyland’s article “Understanding Writing: Exploring Texts, Writers 
and Readers,” based on his keynote speech presented at the conference. Considering the 
importance of written language, which is used extensively in social and educational activities, 
and the interest of applied linguistics in its intricate nature, the author presents the main 
frameworks and approaches to teaching and studying writing, which is probably the most 
demanding skill for students to acquire and the most demanding for teachers to teach. The 
author identifies and discusses three major orientations, which, however, do not imply in-
flexible categorizations. First, he focuses on approaches that concentrate on the products of 
writing by examining texts, then on ones that emphasize the writer and the text production 
process, and finally on ones that draw attention to the role played by prospective readers 
during text creation, delineating how writers think about an audience when composing texts. 
Showing what is offered and what is neglected by each approach and what each means for 
the pedagogic practices they encourage, the author points out that writing teachers need 
to become researchers of the texts needed by their students and the contexts in which the 
students will probably need them. As a final step, the features of these texts should be made 
as explicit as possible by means of various classroom activities.
Johann Lughofer’s contribution “Dialekt im Fachsprachenunterricht. Überlegungen zu 
‘Deutsch für Wirtschaft und Beruf’ in Slowenien” (Dialect in LSP Teaching. Reflections on “Ger-
man for Business and Career” in Slovenia) stems from the pluricentricity of German, applied 
not only to the various national standards of German, but also to their dialects, which play an 
increasingly important role in (professional) life, especially in the border regions with neigh-
boring countries, and the fact that dialects are neglected in teaching German as a foreign 
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language and even more in German as an LSP. Based on multifaceted approaches to dialects 
in the literature, the presence of these nonstandard features in German online newspapers 
and bachelor’s students’ statements after they became acquainted with some regional lin-
guistic features, the author advocates that dialects also be included in German LSP courses, 
but always flexibly adapted to course participants and their future professional environment, 
course communicative goals, place of learning, and linguistic similarity. The objective is not 
the mastery of a dialect, but to sensitize students to these varieties through the increased 
use of flexible listening comprehension, decreasing the fear of not understanding. Given the 
spreading presence of these non-standard linguistic items, the author emphasizes that noth-
ing should hinder an examination of the authentic linguistic reality of German, including its 
dialects.
The issue concludes with the article “Le sfide terminologiche italiano-serbe nella formazione 
dei futuri insegnanti di italiano” (Italian–Serbian Terminological Challenges in Training Fu-
ture Italian Teachers) by Jelena Drljević, Katarina Zavišin, and Julijana Vučo, which deals with 
developing theoretical notions in Serbian, students’ native language, and students’ foreign 
language: Italian. The authors present the case of the introductory applied linguistics course 
offered in the third year of the program for future Italian teachers at the University of Bel-
grade’s Faculty of Philology. The research was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of 
teaching techniques with the objective of improving the acquisition of basic terminology and 
concepts in applied linguistics. Specifically, it examines the results of a terminology test and a 
questionnaire to evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching choices made during the course. 
The authors highlight the strengths of their action research and improvements that should 
be made to bilingual instruction in language-teaching concepts and related terminology as 
part of a university-level foreign language course. In light of the study carried out, the authors 
specify that the teaching model adopted could also serve as a teaching structure for other 
university-level disciplines beyond linguistics.
Nives Lenassi
Guest Editor