English for Specific Purposes: New ways for Teaching

What is your background that brought you up to this point?

I think that, besides the encouragement and help from my professors –especially my tutor– during my degree, it is my family background which has brought me here: my parents have always transmitted me the passion for being curious, studying, and learning, and my aunt, who is a researcher too at the University of Salamanca, has shown me how fulfilling the profession can be, so that is why I am here and why I want to keep working on developing a researching career.
I graduated in English Studies and I am currently enrolled in master’s degree in Education.
Next year, I intend to study a master’s degree in Advanced English Studies: Languages and Cultures in Contact and start a PhD.
Although I don’t think my researching career has even started yet, I have carried out some research thanks to a scholarship granted by the University of Valladolid for my degree’s final dissertation: It dealt with a corpus analysis related to the specialized language of olive oil tasting notes, which was used to develop a semi-automatic writing tool for Spanish native experts to be able to compose such texts in English.
I have given an oral presentation at a National Scientific Workshop entitled “Legal English in Charterparties: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Rhetorical Structuration of the Genre”.
Besides this project and studying for my masters, I am working on an article which is under revision.
The field I have worked on and I am most attracted to is ‘English for Specific Purposes’, mainly related to tourism, gastronomy, and legal languages. 

Where does your interest in languages/lexicography come from and what keeps you motivated?

My interest in lexicography comes from a particular subject I chose at University, Linguistics III: The course focused on both lexicography and terminology, and I loved to learn about the different types of dictionaries, their structure and their components. We also conducted some terminology work and management, and I enjoyed creating a  terminological database for the subject’s final project.

Before that, I had never thought about the importance and all the work involved in the creation of dictionaries and other lexicographic resources, but it was then when I started to be more interested in lexicographic research. Because of the research I have conducted on ‘Languages for Specific Purposes’, I have progressively realized the relevance of lexis and its study. In this sense, I think both my motivation and my interest in lexicographic research come from the fact that I think lexicography is a field in which there is a lot of potential work to be done, and I am eager to see how the current and future technology could help us to manage and enhance the enrichment of this discipline and of linguistic teaching and communication.