Lexical Innovation in English Article Abstracts: Implication for the Teaching of Professional Genres in Islamic Studies

摘要

English language teaching of professional genres relates with issues of language and of professional or disciplinary knowledge. The paper discusses these issues by studying the lexical resources in article abstracts as exemplars of professional genre to better understand how professional community use English in their professional practices. Using content-analysis, the paper collected data from 208 English article abstracts of international journals of Islamic studies in four-year publication. The findings demonstrate that the English article abstracts in the discipline contain some lexical innovation mainly in form of resemiotization of Arabic as the thematic language of the discipline and English as the academic language, and word formation comprising elements of both languages. This indicates that lexical innovation in abstracts functions as a tool for proper communication of the professional community in both academic and professional contexts. These findings imply that the teaching of professional genres, in particular that of English article abstract, should take into account linguistic skills and disciplinary knowledge of the professional community in both academic and professional contexts. The paper, thus, proposes some ways to develop students' ability in doing lexical innovation to better prepare their professional practice using professional genres in the future.