Written production around ethical questions in language for specific purposes

In the wider context of the study of the role of ethics in language learning for specific purposes, we focus on the use of ethical questions in language practice, from the point of view of language risk-taking. We follow the hypothesis that using ethically acute questions for language production activities can contribute to this risk-taking, itself a sign of engagement in the task. We undertake a qualitative study of a corpus of written productions from classes with students working towards a Master either in Humanitarian communication or in Educational sciences. Language risk-taking appears through enunciative traces of engagement in the task, such as humour and modality, and through complex reasoning on behalf of the students in spite of their limited linguistic means.