Language for Specific (Professional) Purposes – A Critical Genre Analysis inspired view

Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), in its early incarnation, was developed to address the language needs of students from specific disciplines.Inspired by functional descriptions of language use in disciplinary contexts, LSP teachers were motivated by a variety of approaches to discourse analysis as register and genre with focus primarily on the discursive practices of specialists in academic contexts (Swales, 1990;Bhatia, 1993).In more recent years, the academic world has become increasingly multidisciplinary where law students, for instance, are being introduced to business courses, or technologists similarly are required to take courses in law and management.The LSP community across the world has readily responded to such requirements by designing and offering interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary LSP programmes.In addition to these developments, the professional world has also become increasingly multicultural as well as digitally inclined and motivated as a result of the invasion of web-mediated digital communication.The targeted world for LSP thus has become more complex, bringing in a diversity of interdisciplinary and intercultural input not only to discursive but also to professional practices.LSP researchers and practitioners now have to confront the increasing complexities of a changing academic and professional world (Bhatia, 2025a).In order to integrate discursive and professional practices in authentic contexts of professional engagement, LSP theory and practice needs to respond to such challenges, focusing particularly on interdiscursive performance of expert professionals in the multidisciplinary, multilingual, and multicultural contexts of the academic as well as professional world, which requires rethinking in terms of both the theory as well as practice of LSP in the broader context of Language for Specific (Professional)