Decision-Making and Limited Resources

What happens when advanced students of English for general purposes suddenly find themselves as beginning students of English for special purposes? What happens in interlanguage when such students are faced with the obligation of constructing a viable currency for the market? What happens when the learner-actor attempts to understand for meaning in texts for the professions? What happens at the point where interlanguage and reality meet? Such encounters constitute genuine moments of opportunity. They are essentially the moments of truth that will determine the actual potential of the learner-interlocutor as interactor with the text - and with reality itself. Literacy is at stake - and professional competence.

Actor performance cannot be seen as a simple function of resources alone, but is to be seen as a function of a complexity of factors such as "mother-tongue and linguistic distance, bilingualism and market competition, acquisition and learning, language used in the operations," and "lexical currency status." The book is an empirical study against the background of the new competition of today's service economy and the requirements of the interaction imperative in the business world of today. And it is set in a dual linguistic environment.