Bringing together recent international research in the field of hospital communication and interaction, the contributors to this book contextualize clinical professional work by focussing on the rising intensity of information and communication practices in organizations generally, and in health care in particular.

This textbook aims to bring together many of the various linguistic strands in health communication, while maintaining an interdisciplinary focus on method and theory.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication consists of forty chapters that provide a broad, comprehensive, and systematic overview of the role that linguistics plays within health communication research and its applications. The Handbook is divided into three sections: Individuals’ everyday health communication Health professionals’ communicative practices Patient-provider communication in interaction Special attention is given to cross-cutting themes, including the role of technology in health communication, narrative, and observations of authentic, naturally-occurring contexts. The chapters are written by international authorities representing a wide range of perspectives and approaches. Building on established work with cutting-edge studies on the changing health communication landscape, this volume will be an essential reference for all those involved in health communication and applied linguistics research and practice.

Based on detailed multi-disciplinary analyses of more than 800 recorded handover interactions, audits of written handover documentation, interviews and survey responses, the contributing authors identify features of effective and ineffective clinical handovers in diverse hospital contexts. The authors then translate their descriptive findings into practical protocols, communication strategies and checklists that clinicians, managers and policy makers can apply to improve the safety and quality of clinical handovers. All the contributors are affiliated with the International Research Centre for Communication in Healthcare (IRCCH), an international multidisciplinary organisation of over 90 healthcare professionals from more than 17 countries committed to improving improving communication in healthcare systems around the world. 'The authors have created a new and tightly woven systems safety net that will, if implemented, significantly reduce the occurrence of errors resulting from cumulative communication failures.' -H. Esterbrook Longmaid III, MD, FACR, President of Medical Staff, Beth Israel Deaconess-Milton Hospital, Milton, MA USA 'Uncommonly valuable for the rigorous, original communication research it reports and for the careful translation of the research findings into practical strategies that actually improve clinical handovers in the real world of practice.' -Professor Suzanne Kurtz, Washington State University 'This clear, plain English book is an outstanding resource for the training of all involved in healthcare.' -Elizabeth Trickett, (Former) Director of Safety and Quality, ACT Health, Australia

This volume presents mayor contributions of Applied Linguistics to the understanding of communications in the professions. The first two parts of this book deal with the theoretical and methodological orientations of professional communication studies, the history and development of professional communication studies, highlighting the discursive turn of Applied Linguistic research that goes far beyond the established paradigm of Language for Specific Purposes. The third part - the core of this book - presents research into professional practices from various domains (e.g. law, healthcare, business and management, organizations), sites of engagement (as e.g. lawyer-client-conference, doctor-patient interaction) and with respect to different themes that are generalizable across domains and sites (as e.g. communicative aspects of action and practice, of assessment and appraisal). In the final part, professionals from various domains evaluate the contribution to their work so far made by Applied Linguistics.

Health and Risk Communication provides a critical and comprehensive overview of the core issues surrounding health and risk communication from the perspective of applied linguistics. It outlines the ways applied linguistics differs from other methods of understanding health and risk communication, assesses the benefits and limitations of the approaches used by different scholars in the field, and offers an innovative framework for consolidating past research and charting new directions. Utilizing data from clinical interactions and everyday life, this book addresses a number of crucial questions including: How are the everyday actions we take around health constructed and constrained through discourse? What is the role of texts in influencing health behaviour, and how are these texts put together and interpreted by readers? How are actions and identities around health and risk negotiated in situated social interactions, and what are the factors that influence these negotiations? How will new technologies like genetic screening influence the way we communicate about health? How does communication about health and risk help create communities and institutions and reflect and reproduce broader ideologies and patterns of power and inequality within societies? Health and Risk Communication: An Applied Linguistic Perspective is essential reading for advanced students and researchers studying and working in this area.

An examination of how the commercialization of professional practice is implicated in its organizational discourses. Drawing on a study of ELT colleges, the book explores how teaching practices are permeated and challenged by a 'discourse of commercialization' through which market priorities become normative in teachers' professional lives.

This book combines an authoritative examination of the field of discourse-based research with practical guidance on research design and development. The book is not prescriptive but instead invites expansive, innovative thinking about what discourse is, why it matters to people at particular sites and how it can be investigated. The authors identify a set of questions that, they argue, are crucial for understanding discourse. Part I of the book explores the implications of these questions, providing a comprehensive survey of relevant scholars, theories, concepts and methodologies. Part II addresses these implications, setting out a multi-perspectival approach to resourcing and integrating micro and macro perspectives in the description, interpretation and explanation of data. Part III offers wide-ranging resources to support further reflection and future research. Ultimately, this book offers a new research approach for students, researchers and practitioners in Applied Linguistics to encourage and support research that can be truly impactful through its relevance to social and professional practice.

Key practitioners and researchers explore how people routinely and at particular sites are discursively constructed as deficient in ways that may affect their life chances. The book offers examples of how adopting multiple perspectives on research can provide a rich explanatory analysis of the construct of 'deficit' in a range of domains.

We live in world increasingly shaped by risk, a fact underscored by recent events in the financial markets, science and technology, environmental policy and biosecurity, law enforcement and criminal justice. Risk assessment has become a central concern of governments, organisations and the professions, and the communication of risk is a crucial part of professional work. Exploring how risk is discursively constructed across these domains is therefore central to our understanding of how professional practice affects people's lives. Communicating Risk takes up this challenge, with contributions from leading researchers and practitioners that examine key issues of risk communication across diverse professional domains.