Talking Shop: An Overview of Language and Work.

This section provides an overview of papers about language and work. This collection covers four separate areas. These are language for work, language about work, language as work, and language in reaction to work. Language for work is the language which workers use when they are performing their work. Five papers in this collection are concerned with language for work. Philips discusses the ways in which judges and lawyers describe crimes in two different contexts. Coleman analyzes how members of two ethnic groups working together perceive the way they communicate with each other at work. Bonamy and Waters illustrate the communicative strategies employed by native speakers of English and Indonesian with minimal knowledge of each other's language when they are trying to discuss a work problem. In the fourth discussion of language for work, Torbe looks at the ways in which young people in Britain must use language to do jobs in the engineering industry and in clerical and retail work. Finally, van Naerssen describes one variety of the language of the hospital doctors which does not involve communication with the patient, that is, the creation of medical records. Records are not used by the patient but by professional colleagues.