Dr Ana Rita Faustino

1. Your work brings together linguistics, language teaching and second language acquisition. Looking back at your academic and teaching journey, what first drew you towards the relationship between language research and classroom practice?
What has always interested me is the possibility of connecting what we learn from language research with what actually happens in the classroom. My work in second language acquisition, particularly my doctoral research on corrective feedback, initially led me to look closely at how teachers respond to learners’ language and how those interactions may affect learning. Teaching, in turn, continually raises new questions that research can help us explore. I see research and teaching as mutually enriching: classroom practice provides important questions for research, while research can encourage us to look at familiar classroom practices in new ways.

2. Your LERC2026 presentation makes the intriguing choice of bringing literature — and specifically Kafka's Poseidon — into the Business English classroom. What inspired you to challenge the more conventional boundaries of ESP in this way?
Business English is often associated with highly functional language, such as meetings, presentations, negotiations and professional correspondence. While these are clearly important, I became interested in what might happen if we created space for a different kind of engagement with the language. Kafka’s Poseidon was particularly appealing because it transforms a familiar mythological figure into an overworked and dissatisfied administrator. This unexpected representation creates an opportunity to discuss leadership, authority, productivity and organisational life. I wanted to explore whether a literary text could make students think critically about these concepts while communicating in English.

3. Your study suggests that literary texts can encourage intercultural awareness, critical reflection and engagement with organisational practices. What did your students' responses reveal that you found particularly interesting or perhaps unexpected?
What I found particularly interesting was how quickly students moved from discussing Poseidon as a mythological figure to interpreting him through the language of organisations and management. Before reading, they described Poseidon using terms such as “powerful”, “dominant”, “authoritative” and “unpredictable”. Afterwards, they described him as a “bored employee”, a “tired and overworked administrator” or a manager who could not delegate. I was also interested in their questioning of whether productivity, authority and leadership have universal meanings. The text therefore prompted students to reconsider assumptions they might otherwise take for granted.

4. Do you think ESP has sometimes become too narrowly associated with specialised vocabulary and professional communication? What might be gained by giving literature, culture and interpretation a more prominent place in ESP pedagogy?
I think there is a risk of reducing ESP to the acquisition of specialised vocabulary and formulaic professional communication. These aspects are important, but professional communication also involves interpreting people, perspectives, values and situations that may not be predictable. Literature can introduce ambiguity, alternative perspectives and unfamiliar ways of seeing the world, encouraging learners to negotiate meaning rather than simply identify the “correct” interpretation. Bringing literature and culture into ESP can therefore complement, rather than replace, more conventional approaches and help learners develop the critical and intercultural dimensions of communication.

5. What would you most like LERC2026 attendees — particularly teachers who may never have considered using literature in an ESP classroom — to take away from your presentation?
I would like teachers to leave with the idea that literature does not necessarily have to be separate from the professional world of ESP. A short literary text can provide a starting point for discussing very concrete issues that are relevant to students’ future professional lives, while also creating space for interpretation and critical reflection. I also hope teachers feel that they do not need to be literature specialists to experiment with this approach. Sometimes a relatively short, ambiguous text can generate surprisingly rich discussion when students are given the opportunity to interpret it together.