Interdisciplinary Cooperation in the Analysis of Specialized Discourse: Challenges and Prospects

The purpose of this paper is to investigate some of the challenges and prospects connected with interdisciplinary cooperation in the analysis of specialized discourse. In the last few decades, the ESP literature has often underlined the importance of this type of collaboration, highlighting the usefulness of the integration of methodological diversity, the exploration of possible connections among procedures and knowledge in order to achieve more focused interpretation and purposeful action. This interdisciplinary process is considered fundamental to better understand how practitioners use language to achieve the objectives of their professions. However, this collaborative experience may also present serious challenges both to the applied linguist and the expert professional, which can only be faced by means of a careful alignment of the specialist’s perspective with the analyst’s approach, and a continuous process of feedback and triangulation that guarantees inter-analytic reliability of the research project. This negotiation of the findings also avoids the insurgence of the practitioners’ skepticism towards the research results and therefore their limited impact on pro¬fes¬sional practice.