The assessment of engineering products and services is central to the work of engineering, but the evaluation of human communication and its development in engineering and other technical professions has not yet received enough attention in IEEE research and publications. This special section begins to remedy this situation by calling for more research in the assessment of professional communication skills and training programs as well as in the development of better assessment tools and procedures. It features four new articles on the topic in the hope that these will inspire even more research related to the assessment of human communication in scientific and technical professions.

This brief editorial describes the field of professional communication, comments on its evolution, and then explains how research and findings in corpus linguistics can aid in enriching the field of professional communication even further. Four articles and two tutorials, representative of studies and applications in corpus linguistics, are then presented in a brief preview.

The largest professional engineering organizations use English as their primary language; most of the world's engineering publications are written in English; and nearly all cooperative ventures with multinational participation choose English for their common language of communication. Unfortunately, most of the world's engineers are not native speakers of English. There are almost no reliable instruments for measuring competence in engineering English. Applying Douglas's Language for Specific Purposes test (2000) to engineering, gives not only a clearer overview of what kind of English and related content might be covered in an engineering English program, but also a clearer view of the knowledge that helps define what it means to be "professional" and this suggests what ought to be tested when evaluating an engineer's ability to use the English of his or her profession successfully.

One newcomer to English language education, with research beginning in the 1960s, is English for Specific Purposes (ESP), a discipline that has experienced remarkable growth in the last 20 years in numbers of specialists, programs, and publications as well as in quality of research and education. ESP is English language instruction designed to meet the specific learning needs of a specific learner or group of learners within a specific time frame for which instruction in general English will not suffice, Most often, this instruction involves orientation to specific spoken and written English, usually unfamiliar to the average speaker, which is required to carry out specific academic or workplace tasks. The paper discusses learner needs analysis and course design.

Based on a study of nearly 200 international faculty in the field of computer science and computer engineering, roughly 90 written genres in the computing discipline are identified and organized according to five central aims in the profession: generation, procuration, dissemination, evaluation, and regulation. The importance of writing in the field is discussed, and recommendations for further research follow to encourage greater breadth and depth in the identification and study of generic corpora characteristic of specific professional communities. Benefits of such research assist students preparing to enter a profession, working professionals wishing to improve their writing in a profession, and writing specialists who offer training or editorial services for a profession.