Smiljana M. Igrutinović’s scientific contributions

The author of the paper studied the experience and attitudes of 30 scholars working at a faculty in Serbia. The results of the questionnaire comply with the findings of much larger linguistic and sociolinguistic studies conducted on the subject in other non-English academic communities. Namely, to achieve personal academic goals and receive international recognition, all respondents are obliged to publish their papers in English. The choice of the publishing language is simple and does not depend on respondent's age, gender, degree of education, scientific field, knowledge of other foreign languages, and English competence. The choice of publishing language is obvious and comes down to English as a lingua franca (ELF) because 93% of scholars questioned consider English the most significant language for their scientific career and research field. Although they all publish their papers in ELF, most of these non-native speakers of English face both linguistic and non-linguistic issues in terms of lack of material resources, access to the latest research and technical problems. However, the bright side of the questionnaire is the finding that as much as 77% of respondents teaching at one faculty in Serbia publish their articles in the national journals in their native language. Thus, it is conclusive that ELF does not represent a threat to the Serbian language which still remains an important channel of publishing. Certainly, it is necessary to conduct a more extensive study on attitudes of a larger number of Serbian scholars regarding publishing in their native language and English, but this sample confirms that ELF is not necessarily a threat to local languages provided that it is regarded as a means of communication between scientists who do not speak the same native language.

This paper gives a brief theoretical review of conceptual metaphors with special reference to the metaphors in scientific discourse because they are present in engineering and scientific texts. The author tried to use the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphors to detect and identify metaphors and mappings in the corpus consisting of engineering texts in English. The texts were selected according to the needs of students at the Academy of Professional Studies Šumadija, Department in Trstenik. A few bilingual and online dictionaries in the field of science and technology were also used. Although the corpus under consideration is rather small in comparison with other corpora containing millions of words, a considerable number of metaphorical expressions were discovered. All these expressions were grouped and analysed in order to establish conceptual mappings and metaphors. The results show that most of these conceptual metaphors have an anthropocentric quality in common (e.g. MACHINE PARTS ARE PARTS OF THE BODY, PARTS OF A MACHINE TOOL ARE PARTS OF THE BODY, A MATERIAL FEATURE IS A BODY FEATURE, A MACHINE FEATURE IS A HUMAN FEATURE). The paper also aims to apply these findings in the classroom activities. This can be achieved by raising metaphoric awareness of students learning engineering English. If students’ attention is explicitly drawn to the relations between the source and target domain, language learning can be facilitated. Thus, the study of metaphors can become a significant tool in the classroom in order to help students learn both technical and academic vocabulary and comprehend engineering texts written in English. Language acquisition may be higher if pedagogical potential of conceptual metaphors is used.