Researching Helping Professions for (Applied) Linguistic and Practica...

Helping professionals (i.e., professionals in formats such as doctor-patient interactions, therapy, coaching, supervision, mediation, counselling, etc.) make use of communication as primary means and method to support clients in achieving psychological, physical, intellectual and/or emotional change (Pick & Scarvaglieri 2019). Applied linguistic research has been exploring both the common core of what constitutes such ‘professional helping’, i.e., the shared practices realizing the helping profession-defining elements such as knowledge asymmetries/transfer, co-construction of the helping relationship, and change-oriented communication, as well as the endemic linguistic practices used in specific helping interactions (i.e., interaction-type specificities; Graf et al. 2014:1).

This panel invited applied linguistic contributions on all kinds of helping professions. It aimed to further the discussion by addressing intra-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research approaches, as well as the affordances and challenges in researching helping professions and in transferring knowledge from science to practice, and by including other promising research foci.