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As researchers from different nationalities and disciplines collaborate in research projects with joint grants, science becomes more and more global. For conducting the research, project members from several different professional and national backgrounds work together on a daily basis using English as lingua franca (ELF). This results in a very heterogenic linguistic setting, influenced by several mother tongues and languages for specific purposes (LSPs). Systematic approaches have been neglected during the last years while LSP research moved more and more towards applied approaches working on concrete case studies. The present study follows an alternative approach. Applied linguistics and further development of systematic approaches shall here be seen as a circular flow. For instance, communication optimisation during a case study benefits from system-thinking and vice versa. How could the project language of a case study be structured and which long established classifications need to be revised based on these data? Is there a need for a new understanding of applied LSP research?

Email flooding, deleting emails without reading them – both common parts of our daily workflows. Emails need to motivate their recipients to read them and of course, the number of emails we receive every day play a crucial role. The present paper shall not only describe how the email communication between the members of a research project could be enhanced, but also show how helpful emails are for implementing strategic communication optimisation. By involving the project members as probands in a study based on AMASA (Research project “Accessing Medicines in Africa and South Asia”) emails for developing a restructuring of the internal communication, the process of communication optimisation was accepted by the project members and the strategic superiour aims could be met.