Message from the Guest Editors
Welcome to the JALT CUE and BizCom ESP Symposium, 2019 OnCUE
Journal Special Issue. The conference, held September 21, 2019 at Uchida Yoko
Osaka Branch, brought together a large number of researchers and conference
participants. We are pleased to present the opening address, two plenary articles,
and a collection of seven short research articles and two short pedagogy-basedpapers.
In the opening address, Kevin Knight introduced the ESP Project Leader
Profiles, which features ESP project leaders in a newsletter format based oninterviews by Knight. In the plenary, Winnie Cheng shared insights of corpusdriven and corpus-based ESP research in Hong Kong. Then, in the second
plenary, Judy Noguchi illuminated her expertise on the historical aspects of ESP,and how to move forward to transcend ESP to support native English speakers
with professional communication.
The first of the seven short research papers was by Jeff Broderick whoinvestigated the effects of a smartphone learning application on language testscores. This is followed by a paper by Sandra Healy, Olivia Kennedy, andYasushi Tsubota who introduced different virtual learning ESP environments.
The third paper, by Daniel Parsons, examined lexical bundle differences whencomparing research papers and textbooks, to assist master’s degree students
in writing their theses. The next paper, by Alexander Sheffrin and Eugene
Vakhnenko, investigated language learners’ beliefs, perceptions, and attitudesof students enrolled in individual tutorials. Alan Simpson gathered feedback
from learners on a virtual learning ESP environment that he had developed,and identified various challenges related to the project. Sean Toland, FernSakamoto, and Tony Cripps examined the integration of critical thinking
skills in an EAP course. Finally, Fangzhou Zhu completed a corpus-based
investigation of mainland Chinese EFL learners' use of restrictive relative clauses
in English writing.
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From the Editors

Following this, there are two practice-oriented pedagogy-based papers.
Wendy Gough described learning methods for general reading and writingclasses, and finally, Leigh McDowell provided advice on vocabulary learning forJapanese chemists.

Acknowledgements

In September 2019, we could all travel freely and meet people at conferences.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic made life quite different from before, and while
the conference was dusted and done, the editorial team’s mission to bring thisvolume to publication continued. From early 2020, the authors had to deal withemergency remote teaching and learning with software many had never used
before, such as Zoom, Google Meets, and Microsoft Teams, all in the efforts tosocially distance and prevent the spread of the virus. Despite this unexpected
turn to attend to online teaching, the authors were extremely patient andcontinued to respond to the editors in a timely manner. We would like to takethis opportunity to thank the authors for their efforts, and congratulate themfor their contributions to the academic community. We would also like to thankGlen Hill, the chief editor, and Gavin Brooks, in charge of layouts, for theircontinued dedication in bringing the journal to publication.

Suwako Uehara
Jean-Pierre J. Richard
Michael Phillips
Guest Editors, Special Issue OnCUE Journal

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