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The use of metadiscourse for knowledge construction in Chinese and English research articles
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to compare the usage of metadiscourse in English and in Chinese research articles (RAs) published in applied linguistics journals and to investigate how metadiscourse may contribute to knowledge construction in RAs. A small corpus in each language was built consisting of 20 journal articles in English and another 20 in Chinese. In order to highlight metadiscourse features, an established model of metadiscourse was adopted to annotate both Chinese and English articles. It was found that there are generally more metadiscourse features in the English sub-corpus than in the Chinese sub-corpus. While both English sub-corpus and Chinese sub-corpus were found to use statistically significantly more interactive metadiscourse resources (organising discourse) than interactional metadiscourse resources (indicating writers' attitude and stance to themselves, text and audience), the English sub-corpus employed statistically significantly more interactional metadiscourse features than the Chinese sub-corpus. Implications of this study are discussed for both English and Chinese academic writing, including the teaching of English writing as a second language (L2).
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September 2015
... El discurso y el metadiscurso se distinguen, sintáctico-semiótico y pragmáticamente, entre disciplinas y lenguajes. Se entiende metadiscurso como el uso deliberado de palabras, frases, expresiones, puntuación y marcas tipográficas (Mu et al. 2015;Abdollahzadeh, 2011). Esto tiene precisiones dentro de la misma disciplina definidas por el contexto linguo-cultural específico (Flowerdew, 2015), y cubren pág. ...
... Esto tiene precisiones dentro de la misma disciplina definidas por el contexto linguo-cultural específico (Flowerdew, 2015), y cubren pág. 14151 las tres funciones lingüísticas: ideacional, interpersonal y textual (Mu et al, 2015). La ideacional sería la pragmática, la interpersonal implica la semántica y textual la sintaxis, denominaremos planos lingüísticos de interacción semiótico-epistemológica, como lo hemos venido señalando y lo ampliamos en el apartado de metodología. ...
... En ese sentido, la interacción L1-L2 (L1, inglés como idioma nativo, L2, inglés como segunda lengua) demanda compartir territorios en el discurso-metadiscurso, la disciplina, y los planos interpersonal, textual e ideacional. Dicho de otra manera, la interacción L1-L2 no se limita al conocimiento del inglés como lengua nativa o su conocimiento enciclopédico, sino que entran en juego la construcción semiótico-epistemológico-cultural personalmente asumidas, las acciones intelectuales en la adquisición de la L1 y la L2 Mu et al (2015) no establecen relación entre los planos, es presumible que la robustez de la construcción discursiva avanza del plano textual, pasando por el interpersonal, para arribar al ideacional que subsume a los anteriores. Asumiendo la interacción L1-L2 durante la entrevista entre integrantes de la misma disciplina, se facilitará el abordaje textual, desde el punto de vista semántico, pero los otros dos planos, el ideacional y el interpersonal, encontrarán barreras semióticas, e incluso literales las cuales deben ser conquistadas (ver fig. ...
se analizó la interacción docente-aspirante en entrevistas de admisión a un posgrado en sustentabilidad en México, generalizable a cualquier posgrado de países latinos hispanohablantes nativos. La interacción se refiere inglés-español como lenguas nativas y segundas lenguas: docentes hispanohablantes con inglés como segundas lengua, relacionados, en la entrevista, con aspirantes anglófonos nativos y anglófonos como segunda lengua oficial, en los que el español es su segunda lengua. Tenemos así aspirantes anglófonos nativos (L1); anglófono con inglés como lengua oficial (L2), hispanohablantes nativos (L1’) y docentes hispanoparlantes (L1’) y con inglés como segunda lengua (L2’). Con esta categorización, construimos tres escenarios de interacción semiótico-epistemológica. Aportamos a llenar el vacío investigativo respecto al inglés y el español más allá de su dominio instrumental en cuanto a segundas lenguas. Se alerta sobre el peligro de la admisión inequitativa y utilitaria
... This is because members of each academic discipline tend to follow specific problem-solving, substitution methods and persuasive strategies in their academic communications (Dafouz-Milne 2008). Thus, in recent years, some researchers seek to explore the preferred metadiscourse strategies used by members of specific disciplines such as applied linguistics (Abdollahzadeh 2011;Faghih and Rahimpour 2009;Mu et al. 2015), English for Specific Purposes (ESP) (Attaran 2014;Bogdanovič 2014), business management (Mur-Dueñas ...
... A number of inter-cultural studies (Connor 2004(Connor , 2011 have found that English academic texts contain more metadiscourse markers than their counterparts written in other languages, such as Chinese (Hu and Cao 2011;Yang 2013), Spanish (Mur-Dueñas 2011), Bulgarian (Vassileva 1997(Vassileva , 2001, German (Clyne 1987), Japanese (Hinds 1987), and Persian (Jalilifar 2011;Pishghadam and Attaran 2012). Some scholars have argued that using more metadiscourse markers in English articles might be ascribed to the varied readership of English articles published in international journals in contrast to rather homogenous readership of articles which are written in other languages and published in national journals (Abdollahzadeh 2011; Mu et al. 2015;Mur-Dueñas 2011;Salar and Ghonsooly 2016). Differences in the employment of metadiscourse strategies across languages have also been partially attributed to the influence of the rhetorical conventions and discursive preferences infused in cultural practices (Abdollahzadeh 2011;Jiang and Tao 2007). ...
... The comparative investigations within each metadiscourse category demonstrated that while English-language writers used 69.9% of the total number of hedges and 58.6% of the total number of boosters in the whole corpus, Persianlanguage writers only used 30.1% of the former and 41.4% of the latter. Using considerably more hedges and boosters in the English architecture articles might be attributed to the inclination of English writers who publish in international journals to convince the heterogeneous community of international readers through adopting a tentative language and recognizing alternative voices while at the same time emphasizing their certainty in their findings and arguments (Abdollahzadeh 2011; Mu et al. 2015;Mur-Dueñas 2011, Salar andGhonsooly 2016). ...
The present article reports a comparative study of interactional metadiscourse markers in English and Persian research articles. Drawing on Hyland's (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, this study investigates the employment of "hedges", "boosters", and "attitude markers" in a corpus composed of the post-method sections of 100 research articles (50 English and 50 Persian) in the field of architecture. Overall, it was found that there are statistically significant differences between the frequencies of hedges, boosters, and attitude markers used in English and Persian sub-corpora. Yet, the linguistic and functional analyses unveiled some basic similarities between the two languages in their epistemic metadiscourse strategies. The findings provide deep insights into the rhetorical conventions and norms in architectural articles and offer a broader perspective towards discoursing patterns and persuasion strategies of English and Iranian academic writers in this field.
... El discurso y el metadiscurso se distinguen, sintáctico-semiótico y pragmáticamente, entre disciplinas y lenguajes. Se entiende metadiscurso como el uso deliberado de palabras, frases, expresiones, puntuación y marcas tipográficas (Mu et al. 2015;Abdollahzadeh, 2011). Esto tiene precisiones dentro de la misma disciplina definidas por el contexto linguo-cultural específico (Flowerdew, 2015), y cubren pág. ...
... Esto tiene precisiones dentro de la misma disciplina definidas por el contexto linguo-cultural específico (Flowerdew, 2015), y cubren pág. 14151 las tres funciones lingüísticas: ideacional, interpersonal y textual (Mu et al, 2015). La ideacional sería la pragmática, la interpersonal implica la semántica y textual la sintaxis, denominaremos planos lingüísticos de interacción semiótico-epistemológica, como lo hemos venido señalando y lo ampliamos en el apartado de metodología. ...
... En ese sentido, la interacción L1-L2 (L1, inglés como idioma nativo, L2, inglés como segunda lengua) demanda compartir territorios en el discurso-metadiscurso, la disciplina, y los planos interpersonal, textual e ideacional. Dicho de otra manera, la interacción L1-L2 no se limita al conocimiento del inglés como lengua nativa o su conocimiento enciclopédico, sino que entran en juego la construcción semiótico-epistemológico-cultural personalmente asumidas, las acciones intelectuales en la adquisición de la L1 y la L2 Mu et al (2015) no establecen relación entre los planos, es presumible que la robustez de la construcción discursiva avanza del plano textual, pasando por el interpersonal, para arribar al ideacional que subsume a los anteriores. Asumiendo la interacción L1-L2 durante la entrevista entre integrantes de la misma disciplina, se facilitará el abordaje textual, desde el punto de vista semántico, pero los otros dos planos, el ideacional y el interpersonal, encontrarán barreras semióticas, e incluso literales las cuales deben ser conquistadas (ver fig. ...
Desde un enfoque semiótico-epistemológico de base piagetiana, la adquisición de la lengua nativa, la pragmática de su habla y su escritura se sustentan en acciones simbólicas preoperatorias. En cambio, la adquisición de una segunda lengua se subordina a procesos operatorios sintético-semánticos. Esta diferencia es sustantiva para analizar la injusticia lingüística que puede cometerse al entrevistar aspirantes con diferentes esquemas semiótico-epistemológicos. Bajo este enfoque, se analizó la interacción docente-aspirante en entrevistas de admisión a un posgrado en sustentabilidad en México, generalizable a cualquier posgrado de países latinos hispanohablantes nativos. La interacción se refiere inglés-español como lenguas nativas y segundas lenguas: docentes hispanohablantes con inglés como segundas lengua, relacionados, en la entrevista, con aspirantes anglófonos nativos y anglófonos como segunda lengua oficial, en los que el español es su segunda lengua. Tenemos así aspirantes anglófonos nativos (L1); anglófono con inglés como lengua oficial (L2), hispanohablantes nativos (L1’) y docentes hispanoparlantes (L1’) y con inglés como segunda lengua (L2’). Con esta categorización, construimos tres escenarios de interacción semiótico-epistemológica. Aportamos a llenar el vacío investigativo respecto al inglés y el español más allá de su dominio instrumental en cuanto a segundas lenguas. Se alerta sobre el peligro de la admisión inequitativa y utilitaria.
... However, the general English-centered perspective in academic writing research is also reflected here as the conversation is heavily biased toward English and contrastive studies between currently dominant languages in the academic context. As a result, English is probably the most extensively investigated language in the MD framework (Ädel, 2010;Aull, 2015;Hyland, 2005), accompanied by Mandarin Chinese (e.g., Hu & Cao, 2011;Kim & Lim, 2013;Mu et al., 2015), Persian (Gholami et al., 2014;Khabbazi-Oskouei, 2016), and Spanish (Mur-Dueñas, 2011;Navarro et al., 2022). Many MD studies compare the use of MD markers either across languages or between varieties and proficiency levels of languages, where one of the languages is typically English (e.g., Ädel, 2010;Bax et al., 2019;Dahl, 2004;Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2016;Mur-Dueñas, 2011), or across disciplines (Dahl, 2004;Hyland & Jiang, 2016;Ngai et al., 2018), and across genres in first and second language (e.g., Hyland, 2004). ...
... However, the distributional patterns of other interactive markers exhibit more variation in terms of frequency; for example, Estonian uses relatively more endophoric markers but relatively fewer frame markers than English and Chinese. Interactional MD devices are much more often used in English and occur less in Chinese (Mu et al., 2015). Most common interactional markers in English and Chinese are hedges. ...
... Although it is beyond the scope of this article to reconcile these opposing outcomes, it is necessary to be aware that the presentation of the results of MD analysis can be very sensitive to the choices made during the analysis process. Similar concerns have been pointed out in previous research; for example, there is no consensus about what units (words, constructions or sentences) are usually coded as MD (Ädel, 2023;Mu et al., 2015). Given such differences in methodologies and our lack of more specific knowledge about which MD exactly were included in these studies, the above generalizations may suggest some tendencies, but undoubtedly need more thorough investigation in future research. ...
This article presents the development of a specialized data set for analyzing Estonian metadiscourse markers in academic usage, extending Hyland's interpersonal metadiscourse model to a non-Indo-European language. Our goal is to show how metadiscourse, as a feature of a writing tradition, can reveal aspects of writing in languages other than English, complementing the traditionally Anglo-centric perspective in metadiscourse research. By analyzing 21 Estonian linguistics research articles, we offer a transparent procedure to address methodological issues in metadiscourse studies and demonstrate the need for language-specific adjustments in the framework. We introduce statistical methods for analyzing multidimensional associations among marker categories, linguistic level, and rhetorical text structure. The findings suggest that Hyland's metadiscourse model can be adjusted for specific languages, highlighting the influence of language structure on metadiscourse category variation and linguistic expression levels. The study reinforces that the distribution and manifestation of metadiscourse are shaped, among other factors, by unique writing traditions.
... Research has explored the role of IMRs in research articles (Lee & Casal, 2014), abstracts (Ashofteh et al., 2020), postgraduate dissertations ( ; Deng et al., 2021), argumentative essays (Ho & Li, 2018), and L2 academic writing (Al-Mudhaffari & Hussin, 2020;Al-Zubeiry, 2023). Research has also shown remarkable variations of IMRs across cultural rhetorical contexts (Mu et al., 2015), disciplinary contexts (Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2021), speech and writing (Zhang, 2019), book reviews (Bal-), high-rated and low-rated argumentative essays (Ho & Li, 2018), and successful and less successful argumentative essays (Lee & Deakin, 2016). Other studies have established that the effective use of IMRs contributes to the quality of writing (Ho & Li, 2018), and persuasion (Ho & Li, 2018;Lee & Deakin, 2016), and they tend to affect the acceptability of academic writing for publication (Bajwa et al., 2019;Mu et al., 2015). ...
... Research has also shown remarkable variations of IMRs across cultural rhetorical contexts (Mu et al., 2015), disciplinary contexts (Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2021), speech and writing (Zhang, 2019), book reviews (Bal-), high-rated and low-rated argumentative essays (Ho & Li, 2018), and successful and less successful argumentative essays (Lee & Deakin, 2016). Other studies have established that the effective use of IMRs contributes to the quality of writing (Ho & Li, 2018), and persuasion (Ho & Li, 2018;Lee & Deakin, 2016), and they tend to affect the acceptability of academic writing for publication (Bajwa et al., 2019;Mu et al., 2015). ...
... This finding suggests that the use of IMRs in academic writing is influenced by cultural and rhetorical contexts ( ; Loi & Lim, 2019). Previous research has also highlighted significant differences in the use of IMRs between L1 and L2 academic writers, such as disparities observed in the employment of IMRs between L1 Chinese and L1 English writing (Mu et al., 2015). Similarly, in this study, the lack of IMRs in Yemeni L2 writing may have been influenced by cultural and rhetorical preferences in Arabic writing. ...
Interactional Metadiscursive Resources (IMRs) are established as the most common rhetorical features that assist writers in achieving interaction with the discourse community. The purpose of this study was to compare the use of IMRs in research articles (RAs) authored by Yemeni L2 writers and L1 English writers, while also examining the extent to which both groups employ these resources to achieve persuasive purposes. Based on Hyland's (2019) model, AntConc was used as an analytical tool in a corpus-based methodology to analyze the use of IMRs in their context of use, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Moreover, Swales' models were adapted to identify rhetorical moves in the different sections of RAs. The findings indicate that L1 writers tended to use IMRs more frequently and effectively to pursue ethos and pathos. However, Yemeni L2 writers tended to use IMRs sparingly, lacking familiarity with their persuasive role. L1 writers tended to express epistemic and affective stances and used these resources throughout their research, while Yemeni L2 writers tended to focus more on propositional content, using limited IMRs in their writing. Furthermore, unlike L1 English writers, who tended to negotiate their claims in the RA introduction and engage their audience in the RA conclusion, Yemeni L2 writers almost exclusively strengthened their line of argument when initiating and concluding their research. The study Citation in APA style: Al-Mudhaffari, M., Hussin, S., & Abdullah, I. H. (2024). Comparative analysis of interactional metadiscursive resources in academic writing by L2 and L1 English writers.
... In her teaching context, the researcher observed that ESL students now struggle with using MD markers. Asghar (2015), Mu et al. (2015), Lu (2011), Dafouz-Milne (2008, and Hyland (1999) all found that students have a limited grasp of MD markers and choose to use particular MD indicators, like transition markers and self-mentions, only in their writing (Zali et al., 2020). This study aimed to learn how ESL students used MD markers. ...
... Considering prior studies on academic writing, which is uncommon in this field, we plan to investigate and analyse one type of MD, namely interactional MD, in expository essays written by Malaysian ESL students. Aziz et al. (2016) explored gender identities in argumentative essays, Mohamad Noor and Mohamed Alam (2017) concentrated on academic projects, Lo et al. (2014) detected metadiscourse usage in persuasive writing, Tan and Eng (2014) recognised metadiscourse use in persuasive writing, Aziz et al. (2016) studied on gender identities in argumentative essays, Mohamad Noor, and Mohamed Alam (2017) focussed on the academic projects, Lo et al. (2020) and Lo et al. (2021) explored the patterns of boosters in drafts of doctoral research proposals, Zali et al. (2020) looked on evaluative writing by comparing two different courses, hard and soft science, Rahmat et al. (2020) studied on gender differences, and Mohamed et al. (2021) stressed on good persuasive essays. ...
... An MD study of 195 persuasive solid essays written by Malaysian student authors was conducted by Mohamed et al. in 2021. According to Tan et al. (2012's simplified MD framework for ESL lay writers, the study examined the frequency of MD markers used in both organisational and interpersonal discourse markers in the essays of good undergraduate writers, as well as how these MD markers are identified and classified into main categories and subcategories. ...
This study highlights how critical MD should be used in ESL writing. Based on Hyland's metadiscourse (MD) table (2005), this study examined interactional MD markers in 40 expository essays written by ESL students taking different courses. The study sought to determine whether learners in separate course groups differed in their choice of MD and whether both groups used the exact amount and type. The quantity and variety of materials employed by the two groups varied to some extent. While hard science students were quite aggressive in their writing, soft science students created more MD traits and were more interpretative. Keywords: Interactional Metadiscourse; Expository Writing; ESL Learners eISSN 2514-7528 ©2022. The Authors. Published for AMER & cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour StudiesCollege of Built Environment, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/jabs.v7i23.417
... While previous studies have provided noteworthy evidence on the deployment of stance markers across English and Chinese RAs, there are some lacunae to fill in. First, some studies (e.g., Mu et al., 2015;Li and Xu, 2020) only focused on one discipline with limited data. Second and most important, previous studies scarcely delved into the systematic use of stance markers in the specific conclusion section. ...
... He reported that both groups showed a tendency for hedges, while differences existed in the higher use of emphatics and attitude markers by Anglo-American authors. Later, Mu et al. (2015) identified that English academic writers tended to use more interactional markers than Chinese writers, with a significant difference in hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions from the overall generic organization in applied linguistics RAs. ...
... First, it aims to interpret how writers construct their stance in the discourse community with a top-down, comprehensive, integrated, and accurate taxonomy, which is appropriate for our study. Second, this model has been widely used in recent studies (e.g., Abdollahzadeh, 2011;Mur-Dueñas, 2011;Hyland and Jiang, 2016), including the comparison between Chinese and English (e.g., Mu et al., 2015). Table 2 presents the main types of stance markers illustrated with examples from our corpus. ...
Research article conclusions form an important sub-genre in the academic community. This study aims to compare the use of stance markers in English and Chinese research article conclusions and investigate how stance markers may vary in soft and hard sciences. Based on Hyland's stance model, an analysis of stance markers over 20 years was made in two corpora, which were compiled with 180 research article conclusions in each language from four disciplines. It was found that English writers and soft science writers tended to make statements more tentatively by hedges and craft their persona more explicitly through self-mentions. However, Chinese writers and hard science writers made their claims with more certainty by boosters and showed their affective attitude more frequently through attitude markers. The results reveal how writers from different cultural backgrounds construct their stances and also unveil the disciplinary differences involved in stance-taking. It is hoped that this corpus study will inspire future research on stance-taking in the conclusion section and also help cultivate writers' genre awareness.
... Previous research has revealed inconsistent results in terms of the use of self-reference in these two languages. For instance, Mu et al. (2015) compared the usage of metadiscourse in English and in Chinese RAs published within the field of Applied Linguistics and found that Chinese RAs exhibited a greater inclination to employ self-mention markers as a means of establishing an authorial presence in contrast to English RAs. In contrast, Lee (2013) compared self-reference practice in RAs across three different fields (Literature, Education, and Chemistry) and found that English RAs were more inclined to use first-person pronouns while Chinese RAs demonstrated a stronger inclination to employ depersonalized NPs. ...
... The variations in the use of self-reference in Chinese and English academic writing may pose challenges for writers who need to write in both languages (e.g., Kim & Lim, 2013;Lee, 2013;Mu et al., 2015). According to Sheldon (2009), L2 scholars face a greater risk of encountering challenges such as reduced interest in and diminished appreciation of their work (Duszak, 1994), as they are often influenced by the rhetorical conventions of their first language when composing RAs. ...
This study explored the use of author self-reference from cross-linguistic/cultural and cross-disciplinary perspectives in research articles (RAs). Based on a self-built corpus consisting of two disciplines (Computer Science and Linguistics) and two languages (Chinese and English), this study extracted the self-reference markers and compared their uses across the linguistic/cultural and disciplinary corpora. The cross-linguistic/cultural analysis showed that English RAs contain a higher frequency of first-person pronouns, while Chinese RAs tend to utilize more inanimate NPs in both disciplines. The cross-disciplinary comparison identified that English Computer Science texts are characterized by a more explicit authorial persona, while Chinese RAs display a mitigated authorial presence in the text construction. The findings contribute to our knowledge of how the specific disciplinary community and cultural conventions influence writers' manifestation of their authorial presence.
... Previous research has revealed inconsistent results in terms of the use of self-reference in these two languages. For instance, Mu et al. (2015) compared the usage of metadiscourse in English and in Chinese RAs published within the field of Applied Linguistics and found that Chinese RAs exhibited a greater inclination to employ self-mention markers as a means of establishing an authorial presence in contrast to English RAs. In contrast, Lee (2013) compared self-reference practice in RAs across three different fields (Literature, Education, and Chemistry) and found that English RAs were more inclined to use first-person pronouns while Chinese RAs demonstrated a stronger inclination to employ depersonalized NPs. ...
... The variations in the use of self-reference in Chinese and English academic writing may pose challenges for writers who need to write in both languages (e.g., Kim & Lim, 2013;Lee, 2013;Mu et al., 2015). According to Sheldon (2009), L2 scholars face a greater risk of encountering challenges such as reduced interest in and diminished appreciation of their work (Duszak, 1994), as they are often influenced by the rhetorical conventions of their first language when composing RAs. ...
... Hylands' (2005) model (see Table 1 in section 2.2) of interactional metadiscourse was adopted for the analysis of the use of Arabic interactional metadiscourse as it was on based a large-scale genre corpus, and many researchers (e.g., Ho & Li, 2018; Lee & Deakin, 2016) found it reliable (Mu et al., 2015). In addition, the sub-categories of the interactional metadiscourse (see Table 2) were also adopted. ...
... , so Arabic-speaking writers prefer to give the reader the opportunity to analyse the parts of the texts. Second, the focus of the current analysis was on the introduction sections, which does not require the writers to offer their assessment and evaluation of the information they convey; instead, in academic writing, authors strive to ascertain and rationalize their arguments (this also explains why boosters were used more frequently in this corpus) and the originality of their research (Mu et al., 2015). Comparing this finding to other studies that focused on other genres like technical writing (e.g., Herriman, 2022), it was found to be inconsistent whereby attitude markers occurred predominantly in the instruction manuals. ...
A considerable body of research has investigated the use of metadiscourse in academic writing in different languages, and it is assumed in the literature that the use of metadiscourse is language- and culture-specific. However, little research has investigated how Arab writers interact with their readers in Arabic research articles (RAs). Thus, following Hyland’s (2005) models, this study explores the use of the interactional metadiscourse in the introductions of 94 Arabic RAs totalling 88,350 words published between 2013-2022. Findings showed that Arab writers tend to establish a relationship with readers and involve them as discourse participants through the use of the inclusive pronoun naḥnu نحن ‘we’ and the rhetorical forms. Arab writers used both grammatical and lexical items to express their views with confidence with a high degree of commitment. They were found to use reader-accuracy markers to mitigate their arguments. They, however, appeared not to evaluate what is presented through their personal feelings, and this might be due to sociocultural reasons, which requires further investigation.
... In addition, the different linguistic realizations of moves and steps have also been the object of scholarly investigation (Gholami & Ilghami, 2016). Various linguistic features in the different segments of RAs have been analyzed (e.g, discourse markers by Traugott, 2007; phrasal complexity by Ansarifar et al., 2018; reporting verbs by Thomas & Hawes, 1994; modals and verb tenses by Muangsamai, 2018; metadiscourse markers by Mu et al., 2015; and many more). ...
... This pattern shows the writers' commitment to involve the readers as they go through the text, a cultural trait that may be attributed to Confucian thought and China's collectivist tendency, which fully appreciate the importance of group harmony and a set of everyday ethics that probably influenced the way Chinese RA writers constructed the RA methodology section and engaged with the readers to a large extent. This result also concords with the findings of Mu et al (2015) who claimed that Chinese writers often use the exclusive 'we' rather than the individual 'I', which is indicative of collectivism in their culture. ...
A cornucopia of research has been recorded on metadiscourseacross disciplines and languages. Still, this currentstudy is the first to analyze how metadiscourse markers (MDMs) help realize the functions of moves and steps in the Methods sections of research articles (RAs) involving differentdisciplines and Englishes. The current researchis concerned with the identification of MDMs in the moves and steps of the Methods section of social science, business, and linguistics RAs written by American English (inner circle), Philippine English (outer circle), and Chinese English (expanding circle) RA writers. Utilizing a qualitative-quantitative mixed methodology, it shows that engagement MDMsare the highly preferredinteractional MDMs, that culture and discipline are two variables that account for the variations in MDMs use, that soft disciplines likesocial sciences andhumanities seem to demand more writer accountability to assertions made, and that both the expanding and outer circles of Englishes sometimes behave like the inner circle English with apparent similarities and differences in the utilization of MDMs. Instructional implications were suggested based on the results of our present work.
... As part of metadiscourse, code glosses have also been studied cross-linguistically, e.g. in Chinese (Mu et al., 2015) and Spanish (Mur-Dueñas, 2011). Both studies use Hyland's (2005) model of metadiscourse (albeit slightly modified) and investigate research articles within a single discipline. ...
... Both studies use Hyland's (2005) model of metadiscourse (albeit slightly modified) and investigate research articles within a single discipline. Mu et al. (2015) found that there were generally more metadiscourse features in English RAs (written by English native speakers or authors affiliated with English-speaking institutions) than in Chinese RAs (written by Chinese native speakers). In particular, English writers used twice as many code glosses as Chinese writers in their texts. ...
Following a large body of research on metadiscourse in academic writing, this paper explores one feature of textual metadiscourse, code glosses, in English L2 academic texts written by Czech university students. The study draws on Hyland’s metadiscourse model (2005), which characterizes code glosses as devices that elaborate propositional meanings by rephrasing or explaining what has been said. Thus, they can help readers understand the writer’s intended meaning or contribute to the formation of persuasive arguments. The corpus consists of 48 English L2 Master’s theses representing three disciplines – linguistics, literature and English language teaching (ELT) methodology, totalling almost 950,000 words. The results are compared with professional writing represented by English L1 research articles from the same disciplines. The findings reveal differences in the frequency and functions of several code glosses, as novice writers are shown to overuse certain devices. The findings also indicate cross-disciplinary variation, as reformulation and exemplification proved to be much more prominent in linguistics and methodology than in literary studies.
... Previous literature is predominantly interested in metadiscourse strategies by writers speaking different languages. While more investigations are devoted to English texts written by writers from different cultural backgrounds (e.g., Abdollahzadeh, 2011;Lee and Deakin, 2016), fewer studies have sought to explore texts written by English native-speakers compared to those by native-speakers of other languages (e.g., Mu et al., 2015;Li and Xu, 2020). However, they have hardly compared metadiscourse simultaneously across cultures and across languages. ...
... British-American and Chinese scholars demonstrated markedly different persona in the academic texts when anticipating, acknowledging, challenging and suppressing potentially divergent positions. The findings were in consistency with the previous research (e.g., Hyland, 2004;Mu et al., 2015). Chinese ESL scholars demonstrated the same tendency of using interactional devices as the British-American counterparts although the former used significantly fewer interactional devices and expressed their cognitions and arguments in a more straightforward way. ...
Metadiscourse represents a producer’s intention to guide a receiver’s interpretation of the textual meanings. It is a highly dynamic topic in discourse analysis and language education. Related studies provide a way to understand language in use, and contribute to a better understanding about the relationship between the seemingly unconscious language choices and the social contexts. Based-on a corpus of 150 research articles (RAs) written by English L1 scholars, Chinese ESL scholars and Chinese L1 scholars, this study compared their interactive and interactional metadiscourse strategies cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. Quantitative results manifest significantly higher metadiscursive frequencies in English-medium RAs than in Chinese-medium RAs, and significantly higher metadiscursive frequencies in RAs written by British-American scholars than by Chinese scholars. Also, Chinese ESL writers reveal L1-based transfer of discourse conceptualization. Apart from providing with cultural explanations, this study then particularly discusses cognitive implications of culture-specific and language-specific metadiscourse variations by addressing the connections between metacognition and metadiscourse. With the proposed Model of Correlated Metadiscourse and Metacognition, it argues that metadiscourse is the linguistic reflection of metacognition and that metacognition exerts mediation and monitoring over cognitive objects partly by the means of metadiscourse.
... Cross-linguistic variations in the use of metadiscourse including endophoric markers have been studied in RAs, MTs and essays written in English and other languages, such as Chinese (Kim and Lim 2013;Mu et al. 2015), Spanish (Mur-Dueñas 2011; Lee and Casal 2014), Catalan and Spanish (Martín-Laguna and Alcón 2015) and French and Norwegian (Dahl 2004), among others. ...
The aim of this study is to contribute to cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary discourse analysis, shedding light on English L2 learners’ metadiscursive practices. Focusing on a specialised learner corpus of English-medium Master’s theses written by Czech university students, the research explores the occurrence of endophoric markers and their characteristics. To enable cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison, a reference corpus of representative L1 English academic discourse was compiled. A new taxonomy used here, which draws on Hyland’s list of endophoric markers (2005) and an extensive literature review, categorises endophoric markers into three groups: purely directional, markers using specific words, and a category combining the first two. The study investigates the occurrence and function of these markers, focusing on anaphoric, cataphoric, and non-directional references. It also aims to identify differences in the usage of endophoric markers in English between L2 novice writers and experienced L1 academic writers, providing insights into trends and patterns in the employment of endophoric markers in academic writing in a way that accounts for disciplinary and linguistic factors. The results reveal higher endophoric marker frequencies in the Master’s Thesis Corpus, suggesting distinctive discourse patterns among Czech learners using English as an L2, with a predominance of specific endophoric markers and notable cross-disciplinary variation.
... Researchers choose an appropriate inferential statistic based on the types of variables listed in Table 3. For instance, Mu et al. (2015) used Chi-square tests to determine whether the differences between the frequencies of metadiscourse in academic corpora were significant, with the independent variable being language and the dependent variable being the frequencies of metadiscourse. effective strategies for teaching language learners how to navigate the complex landscape of stance-taking in various communicative situations. ...
Stance is a psychological state that encompasses the speaker’s beliefs, evaluative abilities, and attitudes. Since the late 1980s, corpus-assisted approaches have been predominantly employed in the field of stance-taking, yet no systematic literature review has been conducted on how corpus linguistics assists stance research. This study reviewed 453 articles published from 2004 to 2023 and revealed key insights into the evolution of corpus linguistics within this interdisciplinary domain. The review examines the evolving role of corpus linguistics in conjunction with other linguistic strands, such as pragmatics, (critical) discourse analysis, systemic-functional linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discursive psychology, to offer a nuanced understanding of stance-taking across diverse genres and contexts. It also identifies a shift from a focus on lexical-grammatical stance markers to a broader exploration of functional categories, syntactic structures, acoustic-phonetic features, and other non-linguistic devices such as multi-modal stance-taking. Additionally, the review highlights a growing emphasis on corpus-driven approaches, which analyze linguistic patterns in a bottom-up manner. It also underscores the increasing application of corpus methods across diverse genres, including academic, political, corporate, and media discourse. Future research should investigate the intricate interplay between stance and other linguistic phenomena, considering social, cultural, and psychological factors. It should also leverage advanced AI technologies with corpus linguistics to gain a comprehensive understanding of stance-taking, with a focus on multi-modal and interactional stances within digital communication contexts. This study consolidates existing knowledge, identifies research gaps, and suggests pathways for further investigation into stance across different communicative settings.
... It has been well-established that academic writing is an interactional, dialogic and essentially persuasive process (Guinda & Hyland, 2012;Hyland, 2005a;Khedri & Kritsis, 2020;Mu et al., 2015). Khedri (2016) stated that "once authors have positioned themselves in their texts, they show an authorial voice with which they expose themselves as specialized, esteemed members within an assumed disciplinary community" (p. ...
The present study explored authorial presence in the abstracts across three purpose-built discipline-specific corpora of RAs in major but relatively less represented disciplines in corpus studies: Civil Engineering (CE), Political Sciences (PS) and Veterinary Medicine (VM). In particular, due to less attention having been paid to these fields, we examined explicit authorial references with a functional perspective in a corpus of abstracts totaling over one million words. To this end, we first conducted a preliminary search for explicit third-person plural author references in the corpora and manually analysed a total of over 6,000 instances to check if they were all markers signaling an authorial presence in the text. Following this, second manual analyses concentrated on categorizing the rhetorical functions of self-mentions based on Xia's (2018) framework. The preliminary findings showed that the frequency of "we"-based authorial references in PS outweighed that in the other disciplines (PS: 722.13; CE: 636.81; VM: 481.30 per 100,000 words). Regarding the density of authorial references, we found that each discipline favored being more visible with divergent authorial roles in their abstracts. For example, PS were more rhetorically present in their abstracts by "proposing a theory or approach" whereas CE and VM authors used fewer self-mentions to mark their presence frequently with this rhetorical device. With respect to the functional analyses of the self-mentions of "we", all three disciplines displayed more low-stakes functions such as "recount experimental procedure and methodology". We focused on the significance of cross-disciplinary and functional analysis in the study in order to contribute to designing activities in EAP for each discipline.
... Due to their importance, hedges and boosters have attracted remarkable interest in the literature such as the use of hedges and boosters across cultures (Mu, Zhang, Ehrich, & Hong, 2015;Mur-Dueñas, 2011), academic disciplines (Ken Hyland, 1998), undergraduate students' essays (Ho & Li, 2018;Lee & Deakin, 2016), post-graduate writing (Hyland, 2004(Hyland, , 2010Risda et al., 2018) non-native writing (Abdollahzadeh, 2011;Loi, Lim, & Wharton, 2016;Vassileva, 2001;Yagız & Demir, 2014). However, the study of hedging and boosting in advanced Arab L2 writing is relatively scarce and so research on these features in this context could yield fruitful pedagogical implications (Yagız & Demir, 2014). ...
ABSTRACT
Academic writing is recognized as a persuasive endeavor that involves various interactional strategies to help writers express viewpoints and engage with members of their discourse community. Among the most frequently used interactional features in academic writing are hedges and boosters, referred to as interactional metadiscourse (MD) strategies. These strategies are typically employed to convey the author's stance on the content presented. Due to cultural variations in rhetorical strategies, L2 writers might use hedges and boosters in ways that are not favored in the Anglo-American context. This study aims to explore the use of these features in Yemeni L2 academic writing. To this end, 34 applied research articles by Yemeni L2 writers were examined. The analysis of hedges and boosters was based on Hyland’s (2005) MD model and Halliday & Matthiessen's (2004) taxonomy of hedges. Using Hyland’s model, a software concordance tool was utilized to identify instances of hedges and boosters in the corpus. Moreover, all potential interactional MD features were analyzed individually to examine their metadiscoursal functions in context. The findings indicate that interactional MD strategies were employed in relatively small proportions. Contrary to previous research assumptions, hedges were used slightly more than boosters, especially in the conclusion sections of the research articles, although the differences were not significant. It was also found that hedges and boosters were used for limited purposes. This study has important pedagogical implications for the teaching of L2 writing.
Key words: Genre analysis; academic writing, Hedges, boosters, L2 writing
... On the other hand, researchers publishing in English-medium medical academic journals often adopt a more tentative stance to present their findings, frequently qualifying their statements. Our findings align with previous comparative studies on translated and non-translated abstracts across various disciplines, highlighting that hedges are more prevalent in the latter (Escudero & Swales, 2011;Friginal & Mustafa, 2017;Gong et al., 2021;Hyland, 2000Hyland, , 2005bMu et al., 2015). This trend is deeply rooted in Socratic and Aristotelian philosophical traditions that value epistemological practices such as engaging in debate and argumentation as a process of constructing knowledge (Tweed & Lehman, 2002). ...
This study examines the linguistic and rhetorical characteristics of English medical research article abstracts (RAAs), a crucial medium for the global dissemination of medical information. Two corpora were compiled for analysis: the first consisting of non-translated English medical RAAs sourced from ten leading English-language medical journals, and the second of English medical RAAs translated from ten prominent Chinese medical journals. The findings of the study reveal several key points: 1) Translated medical RAAs exhibit lower levels of tentativeness, primarily due to a significant underrepresentation of hedges (e.g. likely); 2) Translated medical RAAs display higher levels of assertiveness, as indicated by the more frequent use of boosters (e.g. significantly); and 3) No significant difference was observed between the two types of medical RAAs in terms of their use of attitude markers, indicating a similarity in the attitudinal approach when presenting medical research findings in both translated and non-translated medical RAAs. These divergences can be attributed to the unique rhetorical and disciplinary conventions that govern the dissemination of medical knowledge in China compared to Western countries, highlighting the influence of cultural and linguistic norms on scientific communication. This investigation offers novel insights into the translation of medical RAAs, shedding light on cross-cultural divergences in the presentation of medical findings and enriching the discourse on scientific communication across languages.
... Previous studies have suggested the importance of metadiscourse in a variety of genres and fields, including academic discourse like postgraduate dissertations [11], undergraduate textbooks [23], business discourse like company annual report [24], advertising slogans and headlines [25], CEO letters [26], and media discourse like newspapers [10,27] and news interviews [13]. There has been a recent trend in metadiscourse that emphasizes its use for pragmatic purposes, such as metadiscourse and knowledge construction [28], metadiscourse and rapport building [29], as well as metadiscourse and identity construction [15,16,30]. However, research into metadiscourse in tourism genres under the new media context remains underdeveloped. ...
Social media publicity has become an important way for the official tourism agency to promote the city image and interact with the public. In order to explore the linguistic devices that support tourist city publicity, a corpus-based comparative study is conducted on the use of metadiscourse and identity construction in 10.13039/100005801Facebook posts on the public pages of the city Xiamen in China and Sydney in Australia. The corpus consists of 344 posts with a total of 12, 175 words on the page of Xiamen and 315 posts with a total of 12, 319 words on the page of Sydney collected over the same 1-year time span. Combining the statistical results of metadiscourse use and identity types with the analysis of specific examples, it is concluded that both posters use three categories of metadiscourse to construct the identities of introducer, inviter and evaluator for the purpose of promoting good city image and forming good interaction with the public. The differences in the frequencies of metadicourse and identity occurrences in the two corpora suggest different focuses on city publicity. This study has implications for the writing of tourist city publicity posts as well as raising posters’ awareness of employing metadiscourse to construct identity and build rapport with readers so as to enhance the impact of the tourist cities.
... Similarly, Yang (2013) observed less frequent employment of hedges in Chinese-authored research articles and a major cross-linguistic difference in modality realisation as Chinese authors adopted modal verbs more frequently when writing in English than in Chinese. Further investigations confirm these findings, revealing cross-linguistic variations in metadiscourse resource use and authorial writing conventions between English and Chinese academic discourse (e.g., Chen and Zhang, 2017;Kim and Lim, 2013;Mu et al., 2015). ...
Research on translation shifts, especially divergence in modality, that occur to English translations of Chinese research article abstracts is rare. The article aims to explore the linguistic changes in modality use, a linguistic device for expressing authors' evaluative judgement, in the abstracts of Chinese research articles and their English translations. By adopting a three-step analytical coding procedure from Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study analyses the cross-linguistic modality shifts in modal value, type and orientation in English translations of Chinese research article abstracts (RAAs) from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. It is found that 1) quantitatively, a considerable number of modality shifts have been observed in translated RAAs on value, followed by type and orientation, in which the distributions present a stronger and more objectivised stance resulting from a loss of modality on low-value implicit proposition; 2) qualitatively, Chinese-specific lexical, syntactic, and textual factors are associated with modality shifts, including lexical ambiguity, "run-on" sentences, and implicit information structure. The findings provide evidence of how original authorial modal stance is influenced by translators and integrated into academic discourse. The study also paves the way for future investigations of possible variables (e.g., the speech-written mode) in modality shifts. Ó 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
... The perception of academic discourse has evolved from the notion that it solely conveys objective and impersonal truths to recognising it as a form of persuasive discourse, acknowledging the potential for audience interaction and engagement with the writer (Hyland, 2005). The judicious application of hedging strategies enables academic article authors to effectively navigate their relationships with their own propositions and arguments, while also contributing to the establishment of power dynamics between authors, readers, and reviewers (Mu et al., 2015). ...
Hedging devices play a crucial role in mitigating claims and reducing directness in academic writing. Their utilisation in scholarly discourse facilitates tentativeness and fosters effective communication. The present study investigates the use of hedging devices by Indonesian researchers in the soft sciences. The dataset comprises 2,511,423 words from 400 research articles authored by Indonesian scholars. The results demonstrate that Indonesian researchers in the field of soft sciences utilised hedges at a rate of 103.77 words per 10,000 words, which is comparatively lower when contrasted with the usage of hedges observed in articles published in internationally renowned journals authored by both native and non-native English speakers. Additionally, modal auxiliary verbs were identified as the most commonly employed category of hedging devices, with the modal verb can being the predominant hedging item across all types of hedges. The findings contribute to understanding hedging practices among non-native English speakers, particularly in the Indonesian academic context. This study concludes by suggesting a potential area for improvement in academic writing among Indonesian researchers, especially in the humanities and social sciences.
... Gillaerts and Van de Velde (2010) investigated changes in the usage of three interactional markers in abstract writing in applied linguistics over three decades, conducting a quantitative analysis of abstracts of different studies published in the Journal of Pragmatics. Mu et, al. (2015) compared the usage of metadiscourse in 20 English and 20 Chinese RAs and investigated its contribution to knowledge construction. Following an established model of metadiscourse, they found English RAs exhibited more metadiscourse features, particularly interactional ones, than Chinese RAs. ...
Audience metadiscourse refers to the speech choices made by the speakers to indicate their metapragmatic awareness of the audience. It encompasses expressions including directly referring to the audience as “you” and “we”, generic expressions, imperative expressions, and rhetorical interrogative expressions. This study primarily focuses on describing and analyzing the representational forms, pragmatic functions, and different metapragmatic awareness reflected in audience metadiscourse in self-built corpus of Chinese-American new year speeches during about ten years. This study helps to enrich the dimensions of metapragmatic analysis by focusing on the pragmatic functions and usage of audience discourse from the perspective of the audience, highlighting the interpersonal and interactive nature of language use.
... Currently, the researcher observed in her own teaching context that learners faced a lot of problems in using metadiscourse markers. Previous research studies (Asghar, 2015;Mu et al., 2015;Lu, 2011;Dafouz-Milne, 2008;Hyland, 1999) also showed that students have limited knowledge of metadiscourse markers, in which they preferably used certain metadiscourse markers only which are transition markers and self-mentions (Zali et al., 2020). For that purpose, this research was conducted to investigate the use of metadiscorse markers by ESL learners. ...
This study analysed interactional metadiscourse markers on 40 expository essays by ESL learners from hard and soft science courses based on metadiscourse table of Hyland (2005). The study aimed to examine whether both groups used the same amount and type, and whether learners in different course groups differed in their selected metadiscourse. There were some differences in the amount and types used by both groups. Soft science learners produced more metadiscourse features and they were more interpretative meanwhile hard science learners were very assertive in their writings. This study indicates the importance of using metadiscourse in ESL writings
... Many studies are focusing on the content of EAP teaching. Mu et al. (2015) proposed the importance of intercultural differences in metadiscourse of Chinese and English research articles. Gao and Cui (2021) conducted a three-year-long case study to trace an English teacher's journey in EAP reform from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory and identity research, hoping to "help push policymakers to open diversified education programs for preservice teachers to meet the new expectations of Chinese society better" (p. ...
The field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has gained considerable attention, mainly due to the growing importance of English teaching and the need for preparing international professionals. The primary academic emphasis of this field is largely centered on the study of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). It has become increasingly important for China to provide EAP education to its vast population of college students, who represent a significant proportion of global tertiary-level English learners. By doing so, they can improve their academic literacy and participate more effectively in international academic communication. In 2016, China’s College English Test Examination Board issued the National College English Test Syllabus which emphasized the importance of academic English literacy in the test design. This syllabus was released during a contentious debate among Chinese academics about the role of EAP in college English teaching and testing. Despite this heated discussion, there are currently few studies that have analyzed the linguistic nature of academic English tests in a quantitative manner. This paper calculates the academic word coverage of the reading passages in two crucial English proficiency tests designed for college students in China, the College English Test (CET) and the Test of English for Academic Purposes (TEAP). It is found that the academic word coverage of CET is increasing from the year 2013 to 2021 and that the academic word coverage of TEAP is slightly higher than that of CET. In this sense, these English tests can meet the requirements for measuring Chinese college students’ academic literacy. It is also found that there is a positive correlation between academic word coverage and language difficulty as is indicated by Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level. These findings provide an empirical reference for the study of academic English tests in China, and other parts of the world, and contribute to EAP teaching and testing reform for the development of students’ academic literacy.
... Endophorics are the least frequently used interactive resource among Korean L2 writers. The prevalence of transitions, in particular, has been documented elsewhere for both native writers and L2 writers (e.g., Cao & Hu, 2014;Ha, 2014;Huh & Lee, 2016;Hyland, 2004;Hyland & Jiang, 2018;Hyland & Tse, 2004;Khedri et al., 2013;Kim & Lee, 2014;Mu et al., 2015). The previous studies showed that transition markers, mainly consisting of conjunctions and adverbial phrases, are essential in managing the logical flow of the writing, thereby attributing to the high frequency in academic writing. ...
... In the literature on interactive metadiscourse, the relative importance of frame markers has not been treated in much detail. The prevailing studies draw on a systematic analysis of the use of five main categories of interactive metadiscourse in research article abstracts (El-Dakhs, 2018;Ozdemir & Longo, 2014), in research articles (Mu et al., 2015), in different genres (Hempel & Degand, 2008), and cross-linguistic contexts (Dahl, 2004, Mur Duenas, 2011. Up to now, far too little attention has been paid to the specific employment of frame markers (Hyland & Zou, 2020). ...
Metadiscourse is now a widely used term in academic discourse analysis. How academics employ rhetorical devices to structure their texts, establish reader-writer interaction and stamp their authorial stance regarding the conventions of the disciplines, cultures, and genres has been the subject of many studies. Despite the growing prominence of the term, however, some features of it, one of which is frame markers, have gone unnoticed. Frame markers signal the boundaries in the academic discourse for the readers' understanding, and they are a crucial rhetorical feature of metadiscourse. The present study examines the deployment of frame markers in research articles written between 2010 and 2019. Based on the analysis of frame markers in a corpus of research articles across four disciplines in social sciences, there were marked variations across the four disciplines in the use of frame markers and the occurrences of their sub-categories. The findings suggested that academic communities have a decisive role in constructing text structures in research articles. The results might offer guidance to academic writers on shaping the texts that their readers find persuasive.
... LSP professionals thus need to adapt their teaching and materials to capture the particularities of each discipline in each language Kuteeva & Airey, 2014;Mu et al., 2015), despite their lack of training in materials development (Bocanegra-Valle & Basturkmen, 2019). This demands a turn toward multilingual and multiliteracy language tutoring (gustaffson & ganobcsik-Williams, 2016) which will help teaching staff and students to "value diverse language resources and academic experiences and thus echo discourses of democratisation and diversification" (Kaufhold & Yencken, 2021, p. 8). ...
At a time when multilingualism is spreading across university contexts all over the world, this article focuses on the major repercussions that the coexistence of different languages has on Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP). After analysing the interface between LSP and multilingualism, the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU is put forward as a very good case in point of how multilingual universities are endeavouring to face the many challenges that the multilingual turn entails. The article underscores the need to foster collaboration not only between content and LSP specialists, but also between LSP practitioners in different languages.
... El primero trata de comparar el uso del MD en dos o más idiomas, siendo el inglés el objeto principal de comparación. Por ejemplo, hay investigaciones que comparan el inglés con el finlandés (Crismore, Markkanen y Steffensen, 1993;Markkanen, Steffensen y Crismore, 1993), el español (Mur-Dueñas, 2011Lee y Casal, 2014;Carrió-Pastor, 2016), el chino (Loi y Lim, 2013;Mu et al., 2015), el árabe (Alghazo, Al Salem y Alrashdan, 2021), el persa (Abdi, 2011), el turco (Akbas y Hardman, 2018), el checo (Dontcheva-Navratilova, 2020) o el esloveno (Peterlin, 2005). El segundo subtipo se enfoca en comparar los recursos metadiscursivos empleados en textos escritos por hablantes nativos y no nativos de una lengua (Mauranen, 1993a(Mauranen, , 1993bValero-Garcés, 1996;Blagojevic, 2004;Ädel, 2006). ...
El metadiscurso (en adelante, MD) es un concepto que se refiere al modo en que el emisor utiliza el lenguaje reflexivo para interactuar con el receptor. Este término ha adquirido un creciente interés en la comunidad académica en las últimas décadas, siendo un tema importante y ampliamente discutido en el campo de la lingüística aplicada, en particular en el análisis del discurso, la pragmática y la enseñanza de lenguas.
Concretamente en el discurso académico escrito, el uso del MD se considera crucial por dos razones. En primer lugar, ayuda a los autores a organizar las diferentes partes de la información, permitiéndoles así guiar a sus lectores a través de los marcadores textuales. Al respecto, destacan algunos marcadores metadiscursivos (es decir, expresiones lingüísticas explícitas) que realizan esta función: además, primero, como se ha mencionado, por tanto, es decir, etc. En segundo lugar, el empleo del MD permite a los autores expresar su postura sobre la información proposicional e involucrar a sus lectores en la co-construcción del texto mediante los marcadores interpersonales. Entre los marcadores metadiscursivos que desempeñan esta función podemos citar: puede que, en nuestra opinión, efectivamente, curiosamente, veamos, etc.
Pese a que existen ya diversas revisiones de la literatura sobre el MD, se han identificado ciertas incongruencias en ellas. Por ejemplo, las revisiones no tienen la suficiente sistematicidad en lo que respecta a los estudios incluidos y las perspectivas analizadas. Por ello, mediante esta revisión de la literatura que presentamos vamos a intentar actualizar el estado de la cuestión de forma exhaustiva.
... for alternative positions by indicating that the authorial position is one option of many possibilities, such as via modal expressions (e.g. may), also known as 'hedges' in metadiscourse traditions (see Chen & Zhang, 2017;Hyland, 2005Hyland, , 2016Mu et al., 2015). With formulations of attribute, 1 the writer takes a neutral or distanced stand by attributing the proposition to external sources, by means of reporting verbs about communicative or mental processes (e.g. ...
Students of English as a foreign language (EFL) are often found to have weak control over authorial stance for constructing persuasive argumentation in academic writing. However, little interventional research has been reported on improving students’ stance-taking, particularly the patterning of stance resources. To fill the gap, we conducted this quasi-experimental study to explore the effects of the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) Engagement system as a pedagogical affordance on improving EFL students’ stance-taking with a pre- and post-test design. Forty-six Chinese EFL undergraduate students were randomly assigned either to a treatment group or a comparison group. The treatment group was provided with a seven-week intervention which included explicit instruction in stance-taking, while the comparison group received regular writing instruction that did not involve the teacher teaching stance-taking explicitly to students. Upon completion of the intervention, we conducted qualitative analysis of stance patterns and found across-group differences. Students in the treatment group were more capable of establishing argumentation through an alternation of contractive and expansive stances. The stance patterns for introducing external sources further indicate their enhanced undertaking of authorial responsibility and better incorporation of sources. However, both groups kept using unspecified sources in stance attributions. We conclude our study with a discussion of pedagogical implications.
... Yet, no published studies exist investigating metadiscourse usage of Moroccan L2 writers of English in any academic writing genre. Oddly so, studies of the sort have been conducted targeting L2 writers of English in neighbouring countries, e.g., Egypt and Saudi Arabia (Awad Al-Dawoody Abdulaal, 2020) and Tunisia (Dallagi, 2021) and in distant countries, e.g., Finland (Mauranen, 1993), Sweden (Ädel, 2022), Hong Kong (Hyland, 2002;Mu et al., 2015). Such a conglomerate of studies contributes significantly to the creation of writing courses and pedagogies, better aiding L2 writers to establish a stance, negotiate for and against their claims and meet the demands of their discourse communities. ...
Arguably, the Moroccan academic writing stratosphere has long been understudied. Such oversight is particularly discerning given how beneficial these studies can be for L2 writers of English. To this end, using Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse framework, the current research studies interactional metadiscourse practices in a small corpus of 15 applied linguistics research article abstracts. These were collected from two Moroccan-based peer-reviewed journals. A "thick" approach for both frequency and textual analysis was adopted. Such an approach led to having contextually grounded results better matching the corpus nature. We can report that the abstracts exhibited a limited degree of reader interaction, shown by the low percentage of interactional markers and their functional orientation. This was attributed to the nature of the discourse community, disciplinary changes, and rhetorical transfer. We recommend that more effort be taken towards creating better academic courses for students in Morocco and elsewhere. We call for scholars of the field to kindly consider students as a source of input in this type of research. |
... In this respect, Turkish and Chinese writers are no exception. In their study, Mu et al. (2015) highlighted that Chinese writers, especially applied linguists, have recently shown a strong tendency to publish RAs in international refereed journals in English in order to secure recruitment, reappointment, promotion or other employment-related benefits in China (p. 136). ...
In the reviewed literature, many studies have compared the research articles written by L1 and L2 speakers of English. In this regard, comparing L2 speakers of English from two different linguistic backgrounds distinguishes this study from similar studies. While writing research article abstract, writers need to calculate what weight to give to their arguments while showing credibility and authority at the same time. Given these reasons, the use of hedges and boosters in RA abstract is a worthwhile topic to be searched. The goal of this study is to investigate the hedging and boosting strategies in research article abstracts of Turkish and Chinese scholars. They were identified and analyzed in accordance with Hyland’s (2000) hedging and boosting list. The results of this study showed that Turkish and Chinese academics didn’t show much statistical difference in their frequency of hedges, but they preferred to choose different hedging strategies in some instances.
... Considering different types of modal adjuncts in terms of interpersonal metafunction, this study found adjuncts of intensity appeared most frequently both in Chinese EFL (14.65%) and English L1 (14.60%). And the difference between English L1 and Chinese EFL RAIs was negligible (0.05%), which could be explained by Mu et al. (2015) who illustrated that academic genre needs to be objective and impersonal in persuasion. Another reason for this might be the genre of research articles, which is computer science and engineering. ...
Promotion is a major strategy in Research article introductions (RAIs) to attract reader's attention and gain recognition. Building on previous researches that suggest promotion in RAIs could be realized by different kinds of linguistic elements and rhetoric structures, this study collected 100 SCI RAIs in the discipline of computer science as data and explored the promotion realized by interpersonal metafunction and rhetoric structure of modal adjuncts. Meanwhile, in order to identify if there are differences and similarities of promotion between Chinese EFL RAIs (English RAIs written by Chinese scholars) and English L1 RAIs (English RAIs written by English and American scholars), this study quantified lexical features by examining lexical density, lexical variety and position of modal adjuncts. Results showed that the modal adjuncts could realize promotion through varying interpersonal metafunctions (temporality, modality, intensity and comment) and the model of Create a Research Space (CARS). However, more comprehensive promotion was realized in English L1 RAIs through interpersonal metafunction conveyed by more frequent, more kinds of and more positions of modal adjuncts. Besides, this study also verified that modal adjuncts were encoded of CARS to realize promotion in both Chinese EFL RAIs and English L1 RAIs in the same way because of the same strategies (familiarity and logic) and similar linguistic features. These results are discussed in terms of "constraint communication", and discipline background drawn on for knowledge claims in same and different types of academic writing of promotion between Chinese EFL RAIs and English L1 authors.
... Boosters which becomes the second highest in this research, was generally in the third highest position in other studies (Jin & Shang, 2016;Zali et al., 2020;Zhang & Sheng, 2021). Engagement makers, which is in the third position to use by students in this university, in fact frequently used by Chinese students in writing their abstract (Jin & Shang, 2016;Mu et al., 2015;Zali et al., 2020;Zhang & Sheng, 2021). Next, attitude markers are not typically widely used by students when writing abstracts (Jin & Shang, 2016;Mazidah et al., 2022;Zali et al., 2020;Zhang & Sheng, 2021). ...
Writing is one of the essential things that all students must do. In writing, the delivery of ideas needs to be arranged so that the writing is easy to understand and practical. One type of writing is when students write a research article for their final project or thesis. Abstract writing is one of the crucial sections of a final project or thesis because the abstract contains an outline of the research they did. In writing abstracts, metadiscourse markers were possible because they aimed to organize a sequence of ideas, attract readers' attention, and indicate how important the information was presented. This study investigated one hundred and twenty abstract theses from six study programs at Universitas Qomaruddin. They are English Department (PBI), Mathematic Department (PMT), Industrial Engineering (TI), Electrical Engineering (TE), Mechanical Engineering (MS), and Informatics Engineering (IF). Hyland (2005) formulated the interactional metadiscourse investigated as the primary reference. The results showed that all six study programs applied interactional metadiscourse markers when writing their abstracts. Moredespite different styles and preferences in applying markers. In terms of usage of overall metadiscourse, PBI applied the most markers, while MS applied the least. In terms of variants of metadiscourse, PBI also applied the most, and MS applied the least varied markers. The reasons behind more or less usage of interactional markers were influenced by how familiar they were with using English, as it also revealed their writing style. PBI is one example that their exposure to English pretty helps them vary the way they arrange their ideas in their abstracts. However, other surprising groups were PMT and IF groups, which frequently showed the uses of metadiscourse markers. It also strengthened that English was not only dominated by English department students. It was more on how this language was known to many students at Universitas Qomaruddin. It is hoped that English as one of the international languages is no longer a big problem for students, especially in the case of abstract writing.
... Previous studies on metadiscourse have produced differing, at times, conflicting results. A substantial number of previous intercultural studies claimed that metadiscourse use differs from one language and culture to another (e.g., Abdollahzadeh, 2011;Çapar & Deniz Turan, 2019;Hu & Cao, 2011;Mauranen, 1993;Moreno, 1997;Mu, Zhang, Ehrich & Hong, 2015;Zarei & Mansoori, 2010). Yet, the claim that linguistic and cultural differences may cause writers to use different metadiscourse markers is now extensively challenged. ...
A considerable amount of research has already established that
academic writing is an interactive accomplishment, the success of which
largely depends on appropriate writer‐reader relationship. Yet, the
nature of this relationship has been the subject of few studies. Also
scarce are the studies on how academic writers address the needs of
their readers and so, through elaboration, manage their interactions
with them. Drawing on a corpus of 68 research articles (RAs) from the
field of applied linguistics, this study explores how experienced writers
(EWs) and novice writers (NWs) elaborate their ideas in their RAs to
address their readers’ needs, and in so doing, manage their relations
with them. Analysis of the corpus revealed that reformulation and
exemplification, complex features of academic writing, serve important
rhetorical functions. The results also show that these two groups of
writers manage writer‐reader relationship differently, differing in the
type, number, (un)even distribution, and use of code glosses. These
results are discussed, and pedagogical implications are offered
... As stance markers are used by writers to "engage with the socially determined positions of others" (Hyland, 2005a, p. 52), the deployment of these linguistic sources is expected to vary across different linguistic and cultural communities. For instance, Chinese journal articles are found to include fewer metadiscourse features, especially interactional metadiscourse features (hedges, boosters) than English research articles (Mu et al., 2015). The lower density of metadiscourse features in Chinese journal articles is also consistent in different parts of the articles, including abstracts (Hu and Cao, 2011) and introductions (Kim and Lim, 2013). ...
Dissertation is the most important research genre for graduate students as they step into the academic community. The abstract found at the beginning of the dissertation is an essential part of the dissertation, serving to “sell” the study and impress the readers. Learning to compose a well-organized abstract to promote one's research is therefore an important skill for novice writers when they step into the academic community in their discipline. By comparing 112 dissertation abstracts in material science by Chinese and American doctoral students, this study attempts to analyze not only the rhetorical moves of dissertation abstracts but also the lexical-grammatical features of stance in different abstract moves. The findings show that most of the abstracts include five moves, namely, Situating the research, Presenting the research, Describing the methodology, Summarizing the findings, and Discussing the research. However, fewer abstracts by Chinese students include all five moves. In addition, the choices of stance expressions by the two groups vary across the five abstract moves for different communication purposes. The results of this study have pedagogical implications for facilitating the development of academic writing skills for L2 writers.
... La mayoría de las investigaciones existentes sobre el metadiscurso se han centrado casi en exclusiva en su dimensión interactiva en los géneros científicos y académicos escritos en inglés (Mur-Dueñas 2011;Mu et al. 2015;Kawase 2015; ...
The study compares interactional metadiscourse used by American and Chinese corporate leaders in corporate social responsibility [CSR] statements to serve the interpersonal and persuasive purposes of the genre. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted on the corpus of English CSR statements made respectively by corporate leaders of 21 Chinese and 21 American companies from 2015 to 2019. The results indicate that although both American and Chinese sub-corpora are rich in interpersonal resources, the American CSR statements overall utilize remarkably more interactional metadiscourse features than the Chinese CSR statements. Specifically, the American CSR statements employ more hedges and boosters for argumentation and persuasion. They also use more polarized attitude markers for overt expressions of emotions, in comparison to the Chinese CSR statements which favor moderate emotional appeals through centralized attitude markers. The American CSR statements use more first-person pronouns to accentuate authorial stance, whereas the Chinese CSR statements utilize more third-person pronouns to play down authorial presence. These differences can be traced to the influences of different social-cultural backgrounds and communication traditions rooted in the Chinese and American contexts.
Research has been embraced in the Philippines for many years now. In education, due to its importance among college students, the researcher aimed at knowing how far students know about devices that they use in research writing. The researcher had used descriptive interpretation by employing frequency count and independent sample t-test to compare the significant difference in the use of hedges and boosters between the two programs. Hedges and boosters were sourced out from a total enumeration of 41 research papers from both programs, 31 from BSED and 10 from BEED. The most frequently used hedging devices in the research papers both introduction and conclusion sections of BSED Program are Type III. “This study” ranked as first, “It” ranked as second, “The study” ranked as third, and “may”, a Type I hedging device, ranked as fourth whereas in BEED program, “It” ranked as no. 1, “This study” ranked as no. 2, and “The study” ranked as no. 3. The most used boosting device in both BSED and BEED programs is “should”. The most used hedging device across all programs is “This study”. The boosting device, “should”, gained the highest number of use and ranked as the most frequently used booster. This study rejects the claim that there is significant difference in the frequency of the use of hedges and boosters when grouped according to program. The language intervention activities constructed by the researcher were directly compared against the result of the study. These activities are as follows: lecture about metadiscoursal devices, scouting hedges and boosters in authentic materials, debate, essay writing, and feature article writing. In conclusion, the study of hedges and boosters helps to portrait an important component of academic argument since claims and argumentation are tried to be included by writers in their academic writing (Bruce, 2005, as cited in Tran, 2013). The language intervention activities might be of big help to these students after all both programs will mandate their 4th year students to write research paper, an academic write-up, as a requirement for graduation.
Linguistic expressions of surprise (i.e., surprise markers) are epistemically motivated and inherently connected to knowledge construction. Taking a frame semantic approach, this study examined how surprise markers were used by academic writers to disseminate knowledge in research articles. Based on a self-built corpus of 640 journal articles totaling four million words, the study explored how the use of surprise markers was mediated by various factors, including disciplinary background (i.e., applied linguistics, history, biology, mechanical engineering), gender (male vs. female), geo-academic locations (Core vs. Periphery), and time of publication (1985–1989 vs. 2015–2019). Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with 16 disciplinary informants. Corpus-based quantitative analyses of surprise markers and a thematic analysis of the interviews uncovered distinct patterns in the use of surprise markers across the variables examined. These findings deepen our understanding of how surprise markers in academic writing function within specific linguistic and situational contexts, highlighting the intricate nature of knowledge construction in scholarly discourse.
Using categorization of interactive metadiscourse, the present study attempted to contrastively compare editorials of two writing cultures, Filipinos and Americans. The objectives of the study were identifying the cultural features revealed by the Filipino editorialists and Anglo-American editorialists, and determining how the two writing cultures differ in the utilization of interactional metadiscourse resources in their editorials. A total of 180 editorials served as the corpus of the study; 90 from the Philippine Daily Inquirers (PDY) and 90 from the New York Times (NYT). The findings revealed that American editorialists significantly employed metadiscource resources as compared to Filipino editorialists specifically the employment of code glosses and transitional devices. This can be attributed to their writing confidence in utilizing their native language for Americans, while second language for Filipinos. Cultural, political, and social realities also play a critical role in the utilization of metadiscoursal resources in writing.The pedagogical implications were provided for future research directions.
bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:
Zhihu live talks, as a major online knowledge commodity, enable speakers to provide professional information and interact with the audiences. The use of hedges and boosters has been associated with the realization of such a goal.
Literature review:
Previous research has indicated the relevance of disciplines or genres in the use of hedges and boosters in academic discourse; however, little is known about the use of these metadiscourse markers in Zhihu live talks as a new register for popularizing professional knowledge.
Research questions:
1. What are the disciplinary variations in the use of hedges and boosters in medical science and health (Med) and education (Edu) live talks? 2. To what extent do speakers’ characteristics (i.e., expertise and community status) have an impact on the use of hedges and boosters in Med and Edu live talks?
Research methods:
We collected the transcripts of 123 Med and 126 Edu live talks, as well as the demographic information of each speaker. Following a framework adapted from Hu and Cao, we conducted an analysis of the frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters, and how they associate with speaker characteristics in each category of live talks.
Results:
The two corpora exhibited significant differences in the frequencies and functions of hedges/boosters, and the differences can be attributed to the conventions of knowledge making in medicine and education disciplines. In addition, speaker characteristics have some impact on the use of hedges and boosters, such as speakers’ levels of conformity to disciplinary conventions or their strategic efforts in relational management.
Conclusion:
The findings can guide different speakers to configure metadiscourse to inform, argue, and direct while popularizing professional knowledge of different disciplines.
This study compares the move structure and metadiscourse features of the results and discussion sections in English research articles and MA theses in applied linguistics. We collected 31 results and discussion sections in English research articles by expert writers and 31 MA theses in English by Chinese students. The quantitative analysis found notable differences in opening and closing moves, move frequency, move sequence, and the distribution of metadiscourse markers across moves. For example, M3S2 ( comparing results with literature ) and M3S3 ( accounting for results ) occurred more frequently in research articles. Frame markers occurred more frequently across M2 ( reporting results ) in MA theses. We also employed the qualitative approach to demonstrate the differences between these seemingly similar genres based on the textual analysis of data. The following possible reasons behind the differences were identified: the writing requirements, purposes, the writers’ prior learning and writing experience, English proficiency, and genre knowledge as well as the audiences. The findings not only provide insights into the interaction between move and metadiscourse, but also have implications for the learning and teaching of academic writing.
The outbreak of highly contagious COVID-19 in the world has drawn considerable attention to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) because of their great advantage of liberating education from temporal and geographical restrictions. Compared with academic lectures and classroom teaching, MOOCs are featured by higher openness, briefer lectures, the invisibility of learners, and learners’ subjective initiative as the chief driving force.
The present study intended to investigate the use of boosters in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). It examined whether native and non-native speakers of English differed from each other in boosters’ use based on Hyland (2005) across academic divisions, levels of interactivity, genders, and academic roles in academic spoken English. The results of the UNIANOVA inferential test revealed that not only did native speakers of English utilize boosters more frequently than non-native ones across the four variables, but they also employed boosters in a way that was specific to academic divisions, levels of interactivity, genders, and academic roles. Besides the influence of culture and proficiency on boosters’ use, this corpus analysis study found that native English speakers put their statements under focus so that they sound convincing to the audience in soft sciences more than the hard ones. It also indicated native speakers’ greater attempt to convince their audience of the truth in their propositions, show new pieces of information as true, and back their own manipulative or persuasive purposes in highly interactive speeches more than the other levels of interactivity. Furthermore, it was shown that female native speakers exceeded to express opinions, state a suggestion with confidence in their knowledge of the topic, and minimize the possibility of accepting other options in academic spoken English of the MICASE. Ultimately, it illustrated that native academic speakers of English of faculty role rated higher to strengthen their existence, position, argument, claims, and commitment to their speech.
I marcatori metadiscorsivi giocano un ruolo importante nella gestione e nella produzione dei testi scritti soprattutto per quanto concerne il livello intermedio-avanzato. Il presente contributo intende analizzare l’uso dei marcatori metadiscorsivi nei testi argomentativi prodotti dagli apprendenti sinofoni d’italiano in contesti L2 e LS, nonché osservare se e in che misura tale uso si differenzia dalle caratteristiche della lingua target. Il lavoro conclude con alcune implicazioni utili al fine di proporre strategie didattiche efficaci da indirizzare ad apprendenti sinofoni.
As the number of Chinese-speaking academics and students who use English as an additional language for academic communication keeps growing, there has been much research on the cross-linguistic/cross-cultural influences between Chinese and English in written academic discourse, particularly on how Chinese academics and students differ from their Anglophone counterparts in English academic writing. This chapter focuses on Chinese ethnolinguistic influences on academic English produced by writers from various Chinese speech communities and presents a summary of the Chinese characteristics of English L2 academic writing. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the concept of Chinese English and the approaches to studying Chinese English. Next, it discusses Chinese influences on academic L2 English in various aspects, including lexico-grammar, syntax, discourse organization, and pragmatics. In view of English as a lingua franca, the chapter ends by calling for a reconceptualization of the divergences from English L1 norms as potential features of a culture-specific English variety in academic writing.
Based on Hyland’s (2005) interactional metadiscourse model and the identity construction category proposed by Sun (2015), this study attempts to make a comparative analysis on the characteristics of the frequencies of interactional metadiscourse between Chinese masters’ theses and international journal articles, as well as on the similarities and differences of author identity constructed with interactional metadiscourse. The findings are as follows: (1) from the frequencies of interactional metadiscourse, Chinese masters employ significantly fewer hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mentions in their academic writing than international journal authors, while utilizing markedly more engagement markers. Regarding the subcategories of attitude markers, the two author groups possess notable differences in judgment markers, appreciation markers and affective markers, in which the significant difference in judgment markers is relatively low. The results suggest that the frequency of interactional metadiscourse utilized by Chinese masters in academic writing is inferior to that by international journal authors. (2) The identity categories constructed with interactional metadiscourse by the two author groups are in the descending order of researcher, interactor, and evaluator. Compared with international journal authors, significant differences are discovered in the identities of self-initiated interactor, other-initiated interactor, self-evaluator, other-evaluator, cautious originator, and confident researcher constructed by Chinese masters, whereas no difference is found in the careful advisor identity constructed by the two author groups. This study enriches the research of interactional metadiscourse from the perspective of identity construction, and the findings could provide references for improving students’ awareness of academic writing.
The present study was carried out to compare and contrast the use of metadiscourse elements in
Persian and English research articles. The research tried to find out how English and Persian made use
of metadiscourse elements, and whether the two languages differed in using metadiscourse resources
in academic texts. The corpus used in this study, which was analyzed based on Hyland and Tse (2004)
taxonomy, comprised 19 articles and 102,293 words in the two languages, English and Persian. The
intralingual analysis showed that both Persian and English used interactive resources more than
interactional ones, emphasizing the significance of text coherence over interpersonal function of
language in the academic genre. Compared with English, Persian capitalized on more interactive
resources, which shows that Persian puts a premium on textuality at the expense of reader
involvement, hence, being comparatively less reader responsible. The results support the interlingual
rhetorical differences in the use of metadiscourse resources to sustain solidarity with the readers and
also to convey the intended propositional message (Mauranen, 2001; Valero-Garces, 1996; Blogojevic,
2004)
In the last few decades the interpersonal nature of academic communication has been stressed in English for Academic Purposes literature. Taking metadiscourse as the analytical framework, this paper focuses on the cross-cultural analysis of interpersonally driven features in research article writing in a single discipline, Business Management. It aims at analysing to what extent the different contexts (i.e. the US international and the Spanish national) influence the strategic use of metadiscourse features in this discipline. The analysis is based on a corpus of 24 research articles from this discipline: 12 of them written in English by scholars based at North-American institutions and published in international journals, and another 12 written in Spanish by Spanish scholars and published in national journals. Significant differences are reported on the overall frequency of metadiscourse features as well as on the particular incidence of some categories in the two sub-corpora. The particular linguistic/cultural contexts of publication seem to influence scholars’ rhetorical choices when writing their research articles. New knowledge appears to be interpersonally negotiated in different terms in research articles in the two cultural contexts within this disciplinary domain.
Notwithstanding the existence of previous investigations into how research results are presented in different academic disciplines, fewer studies have looked into how authors pave the way for their results, the interdisciplinary differences in ‘result pavements’, and the interconnections between their communicative functions and linguistic choices. Using the techniques of genre analysis, I have analyzed two corpora of research reports in applied linguistics and education in order to identify the possible ways in which experienced writers schematically pave the way for their findings. Using evidence based on authentic research articles, this study demonstrates how writers set the stage for their research results by (i) demonstrating their control of the structure and flow of result-related information, (ii) connecting past research with a current finding while furnishing pertinent background elements that lead the readership progressively to specific findings, (iii) regenerating readers’ interest in their initial research purposes, and (iv) deploying locatives to embed results in a ‘space-saving strategy’ aimed at presenting an abridged Results section. I have also analyzed interdisciplinary differences in the frequencies of these rhetorical steps and the range of intricate linguistic mechanisms employed by authors as communicative resources in each step to establish a smooth rhetorical transition that sets the stage for their research results.
Developments in characterizing discourse communities and their various genres are hoped to provide more insight into the nature of language in use. Such characterizations gradually tend to include the rhetorical and less visible aspects of different genres in different discourse communities. The trend seems rewarding due to the multilingual membership in discourse communities and inevitability of interference from speech communities. Although several studies have tried to describe the distribution and nature of metadiscourse marking across disciplines and languages, no systematic attempt was made, to our knowledge, to introduce a practical model that presumably guides the users in the real time of writing. By analyzing metadiscourse samples from the genre of research article of academic discourse community, this study embarks on introducing a tentative model based on Gricean cooperative principle (CP) that is hoped to help the multilingual members of academic discourse community in the use of metadiscourse markers. The Gricean categories of CP, developed here, are hoped to provide a practical framework that informs how to use rather than how is it used of metadiscourse in writing research articles. Such a model can be assumed an improvement against coarse-grained holistic guides for the use of metadiscourse offered by previous studies. The attempt also led to a new classification of metadiscourse and added two new metadiscourse strategies of collapsers and disclaimers.
This comparative study draws on an interpersonal model of metadiscourse to examine disciplinary and paradigmatic influences on the use of interactional metadiscourse in the post-method sections of 120 research articles. These research articles were drawn from three social science disciplines (i.e., applied linguistics, education, and psychology) and two research paradigms (i.e., quantitative and qualitative research). Quantitative analyses showed that the applied linguistics and education research articles used boosters more frequently than the psychology research articles. Furthermore, the applied linguistics subcorpus deployed more reader references but fewer self-mentions than the psychology subcorpus. Cross-paradigmatic comparisons revealed that the quantitative research articles made more frequent use of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers as a main type, and directives as a subtype than the qualitative research articles. Qualitative analyses identified additional cross-disciplinary and cross-paradigmatic differences in the choice or function of specific metadiscoursal resources. These observed differences are attributable to the knowledge-knower structures characteristic of the disciplines and the epistemologies underlying the research paradigms.
This comparative study draws on an interpersonal model of metadiscourse to examine disciplinary and paradigmatic influences on the use of interactional metadiscourse in the post-method sections of 120 research articles. These research articles were drawn from three social science disciplines (i.e., applied linguistics, education, and psychology) and two research paradigms (i.e., quantitative and qualitative research). Quantitative analyses showed that the applied linguistics and education research articles used boosters more frequently than the psychology research articles. Furthermore, the applied linguistics subcorpus deployed more reader references but fewer self-mentions than the psychology subcorpus. Cross-paradigmatic comparisons revealed that the quantitative research articles made more frequent use of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers as a main type, and directives as a subtype than the qualitative research articles. Qualitative analyses identified additional cross-disciplinary and cross-paradigmatic differences in the choice or function of specific metadiscoursal resources. These observed differences are attributable to the knowledge-knower structures characteristic of the disciplines and the epistemologies underlying the research paradigms.
The present study examines the use of metadiscourse in English and Chinese research article introductions in the field of educational psychology. The corpus for this study comprises 40 introductions of research articles - 20 Chinese and 20 English - in the field of educational psychology. Hyland's (2004) model of metadiscourse has been employed as the analytical framework for the present study. The similarities and differences in the use of metadiscourse (i.e. the interactive and interactional resources) between the two sets of texts are looked at from a socio-cultural point of view. The findings of the present study provide some insights into the teaching and learning of academic English writing for Chinese ESL (English as a Second Language) students.
The present paper starts out by assuming that, despite a relative uniformity of research articles (RAs) imposed by the requirements of the genre, there will be significant intercultural variation in the rhetorical preferences of national cultures. Its aim is to find evidence for or against this assumption. To do so, it focuses on one micro-level feature of text rhetoric, the use of causal metatext (or text about text) in orienting readers in the interpretation of cause-effect intersentential relations (CEISRs). An empirical contrastive analysis of 36 RAs in English and 36 RAs in Spanish on business and economics written by native speakers of each language is carried out. In fact, the results show that both language groups seem to make CEISRs explicit with similar frequency. In addition, they use similar strategies for expressing CEISRs, as reflected in the amount of emphasis given to the causal relation, the basic mechanism of coherence used and the choice of peripheral or integrated signals. Moreover, those strategies appear similarly distributed. The only differences across the two languages are shown in their tendencies towards verbal or nominal anaphoric and anaphoric-cum-cataphoric signals. Thus, overall, these results tend to suggest that it is the writing conventions of the RA genre, and not the peculiarities of Spanish and English writing cultures, that govern the rhetorical strategies preferred by writers to make the CEISR explicit and the frequency with which these are made explicit.
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Recent ESP research into academic writing has shown how writers convey their stance and interact with readers across different disciplines. However, little research has been carried out into the disciplinary writing practices of the pure mathematics academic community from an ESP genre analysis perspective. This study begins to address this gap by applying Hyland’s stance and engagement framework to pure mathematics research articles. The data consists of a corpus of 25 articles collected from five authors and semi-structured interviews with the same authors. The results of the corpus analysis reveal a low number of hedges and attitude markers compared to other hard and soft disciplines, but higher than expected shared knowledge and reader references. Furthermore, triangulation with interview data suggests that the epistemology and research practices of the discourse community can account for these frequency patterns, and that writers are conscious of the need to situate oneself within the norms of the discourse community by adhering to disciplinary writing conventions. The study also confirms that Hyland’s framework can be usefully applied to pure mathematics research articles, although the boundaries between categories in the taxonomy are fuzzier than a stance/engagement dichotomy might suggest.
Hedges and boosters are important metadiscursive resources for writers to mark their epistemic stance and position writer–reader relations. Building on previous research that suggests notable cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences in the use of hedges and boosters in academic discourse, this comparative study investigates the use of such discourse markers in academic article abstracts. Based on a corpus of 649 abstracts collected from 8 journals of applied linguistics, this study examines if hedging and boosting strategies differ (a) between applied linguists publishing in Chinese- and English-medium journals and (b) between authors of empirical and non-empirical academic articles. Quantitative analyses indicated that abstracts published in English-medium journals featured markedly more hedges than those published in Chinese-medium journals and that abstracts of empirical research articles used significantly more boosters than those of non-empirical academic articles. Textual analyses further revealed that the distinct patterning of hedges and boosters in Chinese and English abstracts had a joint, interactive effect on the authorial certainty and confidence conveyed therein. These results are discussed in terms of culturally preferred rhetorical strategies, epistemological beliefs, lack of facility in English as a second/foreign language, and the nature of supporting evidence drawn on for knowledge claims in different types of academic writing.
This article presents a study on the linguistic strategies used for projecting specific personas in the academic writing of Italian students of English. The issue of authorial stance, namely to what degree writers feel themselves to be not simply writers but also authors with the authority to say something meaningful, has been the topic of much research. A rather obvious linguistic strategy to claim authorial presence is to use first person reference and the corresponding determiners. However, not only is the I emerging from the text, by its very nature, plural, but different genres are associated with differing degrees of I-ism, and these expectations and conventions vary from culture to culture and from period to period. In the context of academic writing, the task of acquiring genre conventions that require authors to position themselves in the text in a certain way, is particularly difficult for L2 students because, being, at the same time, strongly under the influence of their own culture, both genre and cultural conventions might be operating simultaneously. In this paper I explore rhetorical positioning in the academic writing of Italian students of English by delving into the use and function of the first person pronouns I, we, me, and us and their respective determiners. The issue the study investigates is how rhetorical positioning through the use of personal pronouns contribute to project an identity in the practice of the academic writing of Italian students of English.
This research focuses on the structural construction of scientific titles in English and Spanish in research papers (RP) and review papers (RVP) in the biological and social sciences. The questions raised were (i) whether structural construction is a key distinctive feature between RP and RVP titles; (ii) whether the inherent peculiarities of scientific disciplines imprint differences on the structural constructions of RP and RVP titles; and (iii) whether language-specific differences can be identified. To this end, a total of 1140 titles were analyzed, words per title were counted to measure their length and all structural constructions detected were registered. The major findings are: (a) the prevalence of nominal-group titles as a linguistic strategy of scientific discourse rather than as a disciplinary, generic or language characteristic; (b) the frequency of full-sentence construction in RP titles of the biological sciences; (c) the predominance of RP compound titles in the social sciences, and more flexibility of Spanish in the use of punctuation marks for the division of this title type; and (d) statistically significant differences in the length of RP titles in terms of discipline and language. Lines of evidence from this research contribute to underlining suggestions on how to guide novice scientists to write titles appropriately.
Using Swales’ (1990, 2004) Create-A-Research-Space model (CARS) as an investigative tool and Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, this article reports on a pragmatic two-level rhetorical analysis of the constituent moves and steps of research article introductions and focuses on the identification and mapping of the metadiscoursal features most frequently employed to signal such moves. Findings reveal that the application of Swales’ CARS models shows no radical departure from the traditionally prescribed M1+M2+M3 rhetorical pattern, and unveil the existence of particular step combinational patterns to achieve different communicative purposes. On the one hand, a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the metadiscourse in the moves indicates that evidentials, transition markers and code glosses are the most pervasive interactive categories. On the other hand, interactional metadiscourse is best reflected through the use of hedges and boosters. It is through a balanced combination of these two types of metadiscoursal features that writers manage to guide readers through the argumentative nature of the introduction to position themselves within the wider research context while abiding by the politeness conventions that underlie academic writing. This study has pedagogical implications for the writing practices of native and non-native researchers and contributes to the widening of current research on the genre of the RA.
A great deal of research has now established that written texts embody interactions between writers and readers. A range of linguistic features have been identified as contributing to the writer's projection of a stance to the material referenced by the text, and, to a lesser extent, the strategies employed to presuppose the active role of an addressee. As yet, however, there is no overall typology of the resources writers employ to express their positions and connect with readers. Based on an analysis of 240 published research articles from eight disciplines and insider informant interviews, I attempt to address this gap and consolidate much of my earlier work to offer a framework for analysing the linguistic resources of intersubjective positioning. Attending to both stance and engagement, the model provides a comprehensive and integrated way of examining the means by which interaction is achieved in academic argument and how the discoursal preferences of disciplinary communities construct both writers and readers.
A great deal of research has now established that written texts embody interactions between writers and readers, but few studies have examined the ways that small acts of reformulation and exemplification help contribute to this. Abstraction, theorisation and interpretation need to be woven into a text,which makes sense to a particular community of readers, and this invariably involves frequent reworkings and exemplifications as writers assess the processing needs, knowledge and rhetorical expectations of their readers to present and then interpret ideas as they write. Known as code glosses in the metadiscourse literature, these elaborations help to contribute to the creation of coherent, reader-friendly prose while conveying the writer's audience-sensitivity and relationship to the message. Drawing on a large corpus of research articles, I explore how professional academic writers monitor their texts for readers in this way to restate information or provide examples as they construct their arguments. Analysis of the corpus reveals that elaboration is a complex and important rhetorical function in academic writing, and that both its use and meanings vary according to discipline.
In Western tertiary contexts, critical analysis is firmly established as one of the most desirable characteristics of student writing. In subject guidelines and assessment criteria, the distinction between successful and less successful writing is often couched in terms of critical analysis as opposed to description. Student writing which merely describes aspects of theories, issues or concepts is not highly valued. A functional linguistic investigation of 20 successful essays written by trainee teachers shows, however, that forms of descriptive writing such as naming, taxonomising, and reporting are intrinsic to students' attempts at critical analysis. This paper argues that descriptive writing has an important role in disciplinary learning for novice students. It also argues that the discussion of critical analysis and critical thinking in tertiary learning could benefit from a linguistic perspective on how critical analysis is realised in student writing. This could assist educators in demystifying for novice writers what critical analysis is.
Creativity is widely invoked in certain educational and other public discourses, and has been quite extensively theorised and investigated in some circles, but still receives little attention in EAP discussions of students’ academic writing. After outlining likely reasons for this avoidance, my paper explores what students and teachers in one setting had to say about creativity and related topics as they commented upon academic writing in a university English Language degree programme. Data are drawn from questionnaire responses and interview transcripts, starting from keyword searches. The discussion relates participants’ comments and concerns to themes more commonly found in the EAP literature, especially questions of accommodation, content and writing task. A case is made for renewing attention to creativity and to what this may involve in EAP pedagogy, particularly but not exclusively when working with present or future teachers of English Language in multilingual settings.
Studies into the organization of information in the medical research paper have tended to present accounts of the structure of information in sections in isolation. The structure of information in all sections of the medical research paper was investigated using Swales' (1981, 1990) genre-analysis model. An eleven-move schema was identified, out of which nine were found to be “normally required” and two “optional”. Each schema was found to embody “constituent elements” and to be characterized by distinct linguistic features. The study provides insights into the nature of discourse organization in this genre of written discourse.
This rhetorical study investigated the employment of interpersonal metadiscourse in applied linguistics articles written in English by Anglo-American and Iranian academic writers. To this end, a representative sample of 60 conclusion sections written by the two groups of writers was selected as the corpus. The two groups of writers were compared in terms of their use of “hedges”, “emphatics”, and “attitude markers” in the extracts. The interpersonal categories were also broken down into subtypes depending on the linguistic items used, and analyzed for distribution in the conclusion sections. The functional–contextual analysis shows similarities and differences in the rhetorical behaviour of these authors in their use of interpersonal metadiscourse. There was a remarkable tendency by both writer groups towards hedging their propositions. Pronounced differences were mainly in the higher use of emphatics and attitude markers by Anglo-American authors. High certainty avoidance and abstinence from attitudinal language was noticeable amongst Iranian experts. The differences are attributed to the degree of rhetorical sensitivity to and awareness of audience, purpose, cultural leanings, and the proclivities of the disciplinary genre. The implications of this study can be helpful in academic writing, EFL writing instruction, and genre analysis.Research highlights▶ Hedging is very common in English and Iranian applied linguists’ academic discourse. ▶ Iranian academics abstain from expressing attitudes. ▶ Cultural leanings affect the rhetoric of Iranian academic experts.
One of the most troubling aspects of non-native writing in English is the attribution of authorship. Taking a writing conference, an MA thesis and a transcript of a new story as illustrations, it is argued that in academic writing the facts presented are inseparable from who is taken to have presented those facts. Because academic writing is as much the construction of an authorial self as the presentation of fact, the attention of English teachers to the mechanics of attribution and reference may mask this deeper discourse process. It is suggested that the original, creative, rational and individualistic authorial self expected in English academic writing represents a construct of Utilitarian ideology which is likely to be in conflict with both current changes in English and with the culturally constructed selves of non-native speaking students of English.
This paper considers teaching practice in short, intensive, pre-service TESOL certificate courses, drawing upon outcomes of recent research into the experiences of participants on courses offered internationally by a UK-based provider.
Qualitative methodology led to the identification of 26 critical issues, including several related to the teaching practice component of such courses. It is suggested that the component is used by tutors primarily for assessment purposes while practice and feedback take on a secondary function, leading to an emphasis on assessable performance at the expense of developmental practice.
The implications of this for trainees, tutors, and language students are discussed. An opportunity to improve the quality of initial TESOL training is identified, through courses designed to account for current conceptions of adult learning and reflective practice, in which a more learner-centred approach to both trainees and language learners is taken, and trainees are guaranteed authentic and developmental practice opportunities.
This paper deals with interpersonality in research article abstracts analysed in terms of interactional metadiscourse. The evolution in the distribution of three prominent interactional markers comprised in Hyland's (2005a) model, viz. hedges, boosters and attitude markers, is investigated in three decades of abstract writing in the field of applied linguistics in the broad sense. On the basis of a quantitative corpus survey of abstracts in Journal of Pragmatics, two major points are made. One is that the distribution of hedges, boosters and attitude markers in abstracts, when compared with their distribution in research articles, supports the idea that abstracts are not just pale reflections of the full-length articles, but rather have a specific make-up, which can plausibly be linked to their function. The second point is that the use of interactional metadiscourse in abstracts has undergone interesting changes in the course of the past 30 years. On the whole, the degree of interpersonality realised by hedges, boosters and attitude markers diminishes over time, though notable differences exist with regard to the subcategories in the interactional domain. In the discussion section, we try to arrive at an explanation for the changes that have occurred, taking genre, discourse community, research practice and rhetoric strategy into account.
This article describes a contrastive study on rhetorical differences between Italian and English sales promotion letters. It is assumed that cultural differences affect discourse genres traditionally considered as standardized, ritual or even formulaic, written business communication being a case in point. It was our goal to investigate how information is presented and what rhetorical strategies are used in order to obtain compliance by a given readership in a given culture. To answer these questions of an essentially pragmatic and ethnolinguistic nature, research focused on analyzing contrastively a corpus of authentic Italian and English business letters. Of course, within the genre ‘business letter’ it is possible to distinguish sub-genres or repertoires (chasing money, requesting, offering, sales promotion, etc.). The letters in the corpus were classified according to these repertoires, defined on the basis of their prototypical discourse features as well as the specific social action within the business organization that they were meant to perform. Once classified, they were analysed according to two criteria. At the macro-textual level the analysis focused on rhetorical structure, mainly drawing on the notion of move. At the micro textual level the analysis concentrated on the pragmatic use of mood, modality, reference system and metadiscourse. This paper, in reporting the findings of the research project, will focus on the cultural preferences that Italian and English writers show—both at the macro- and micro-textual level—when engaged in sales promotion letter writing. It will be shown that there are differences in the ways in which discourse patterns are organized as well as in the use of mood and modality for the expression of politeness.
This article explores the extent to which published advice on the organisation and structure of theses and dissertations concurs with what happens in actual practice. The study examines guides and handbooks which focus on thesis and dissertation writing and postgraduate research. The sample texts examined were master's and doctoral theses written in a number of different study areas at a major research university. The study found that only a few of the books examined devoted a substantial amount of space to this topic. It also found a wider range of thesis types than the guides and handbooks would suggest occurs. The study identified four main kinds of thesis: ‘traditional: simple’, ‘traditional: complex’, ‘topic-based’ and ‘compilations of research articles’. The article argues for teaching materials which show students the range of thesis options they might have, highlight the kind of variation that occurs in actual texts, and consider the rationale for the various choices they might make.
This study investigated differences in vocabulary knowledge as a potential explanation for perceived differences between placed and promoted students in a university EAP reading course. Students in an advanced reading course (N=59) were tested on their vocabulary knowledge using the Vocabulary Levels Test Form B [Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] at the beginning of the academic semester. Additionally, the promoted students' (n=29) vocabulary scores were compared to their own scores from the beginning of the intermediate course one semester earlier. Analysis of the data shows that students placed directly into the advanced reading course upon entry to the university have statistically significantly greater vocabulary knowledge than students promoted into the course after one semester of study in the EAP program. This difference was observed for both general as well as academic vocabulary knowledge. Moreover, promoted students' vocabulary scores showed no significant increase over their initial scores as intermediate students for either general or academic vocabulary knowledge despite the fact that they had taken one or more university content courses. Potential reasons for these results as well as curricular implications are discussed.
Metadiscourse refers to aspects of a text which explicitly organise the discourse, engage the audience and signal the writer's attitude. Its use by writers to guide readers and display an appropriate professional persona is an important aspect of persuasive writing. Its role in establishing and maintaining contact between the writer and the reader and between the writer and the message also makes it a central pragmatic concept. Based on a textual analysis of 28 research articles in four academic disciplines, this paper seeks to show how the appropriate use of metadiscourse crucially depends on rhetorical context. The study identifies a taxonomy of metadiscourse functions and suggests that metadiscourse reflects one way in which context and linguistic meaning are integrated to allow readers to derive intended interpretations. It is argued that metadiscourse provides writers with a means of constructing appropriate contexts and alluding to shared disciplinary assumptions. The study of academic metadiscourse can therefore offer insights into our understanding of this concept and illuminate an important dimension of rhetorical variation among disciplinary communities.
The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as evaluation, stance and metadiscourse, have attracted increasing attention in the literature over the last 10 years and now form an important element of many ESP courses. A relatively overlooked interpersonal feature, however, is what we shall call `evaluative that'. This is a structure which allows a writer to thematize attitudinal meanings and offer an explicit statement of evaluation by presenting a complement clause within a super-ordinate clause (as in We believe that this is an interesting construction). In this paper, we explore the frequencies, forms and functions of evaluative that in two corpora of 465 abstracts from published research articles and masters and doctoral dissertations written by L2 students. Comparing student and published use of the structure across six disciplines, we find evaluative that is widely employed in these abstracts and is an important means of providing author comment and evaluation. We also show similarities and differences in how these groups used the structure by exploring what writers chose to evaluate, the stances they took, the source they attributed the stance to, and how they expressed their evaluations.
This study investigates the construction of stance through nouns in two corpora of theses, 200,000 words in politics/international relations and 300,000 words in materials science. It examines nouns which are preceded by sentence initial deictic This and which serve to encapsulate earlier propositions. Such forms are called ‘retrospective labels’ by Francis G. (1994). Labelling discourse: an aspect of nominal-group lexical cohesion. In M. Coulthard (Ed.), Advances in written text analysis (pp. 83–101). London: Routledge, and can be exemplified as follows: ‘Despite its lack of physical basis, the Potts model… has been very successful… This mystery…’. It is shown that through encapsulation, such nouns organise the text and indicate to the reader how the information is to be understood. In so doing they enable the writer to take a stance as a competent member of the discipline. Disciplinary differences are seen in the choice of noun, with higher frequencies in the politics corpus of both metalinguistic nouns (e.g. ‘argument') and nouns that are inherently marked for stance (e.g. ‘confusion'). It is argued that this variation is due to differences between the disciplines in research practices and the construction of knowledge. I suggest that this use of nouns is important for thesis writers, as it constitutes a valuable resource for the construction of convincing arguments and the expression of appropriate stance.
Paraphrasing is considered by many to be an important skill for academic writing, and some have argued that the teaching of paraphrasing might help students avoid copying from source texts. Few studies, however, have investigated the ways in which both L1 and L2 academic writers already use paraphrasing as a textual borrowing strategy when completing their academic assignments. To expand our understanding of university students’ paraphrasing strategies, the present study analyzed L1 (n = 79) and L2 (n = 74) writers’ use of paraphrase within a summary task and developed a method for classifying these paraphrases into four major Paraphrase Types: Near Copy, Minimal Revision, Moderate Revision, and Substantial Revision. The study then compared the L1 and L2 writers’ use of these Paraphrase Types within their summaries. It was found that, while both groups used about five paraphrases per summary, L2 writers used significantly more Near Copies than L1 writers. Conversely, the summaries of L1 writers contained significantly more Moderate and Substantial Revisions than those of the L2 writers. Implications of these findings for future studies of students’ textual borrowing strategies are discussed with a particular focus on issues related to plagiarism and the teaching of paraphrasing in university writing classrooms.
This study investigates the phraseological patterning that occurs in reporting clauses used to make references to others’ research. It examines finite reporting clauses with that-clause complement and draws upon two corpora of theses written by native speakers in contrasting disciplines: approximately 190,000 words in politics/international relations and 300,000 words in materials science. The findings show that both disciplines use significant numbers of these reporting clauses and that they most frequently occur as integral citations with a human subject. Following the work of [Francis, G., Hunston, S., & Manning, E. (1996). Collins cobuild grammar patterns 1: Verbs. London: HarperCollins], the reporting verbs are analysed into semantic groups. Further evidence of patterning is found in both the verb groups and the tenses that occur. In both corpora, the most frequent verb group is argue (e.g., argue, note, suggest) and the most frequent tense is present (e.g., Skinner arguesthat…). In materials science, however, there are almost as many instances of the find/show verb group (e.g., show, find, observe) and these occur predominantly in past tense (e.g., Sun (1990) showedthat…). The rhetorical functions of these patterns are discussed and explanations proposed based on genre and discipline. This research underlines the importance of phraseology in academic writing and ends by suggesting how working with patterns can be beneficial in raising students’ language awareness.
This paper compares the rhetorical organization of research article introductions in Brazilian Portuguese and in English within a subfield of Applied Linguistics. Using Swales’ (1990) CARS model as an analytical tool, this exploratory study investigated 20 research articles. The findings indicate that introductions in Brazilian Portuguese tend to follow a different pattern from that of the model, whereas the introductions in English follow it closely. Different explanations are offered to account for the cross-cultural differences.
While email has been used in L2 composition classrooms as a way to develop fluency, it can also be used as a means of creating and sustaining relationships, as it is often used outside the classroom. This paper examines the way students in a graduate-level ESL course used email on their own initiative to interact with their instructor. The paper examines 120 email messages received by the instructor during the course and categorizes them into four areas: (1) phatic communion, (2) asking for help, (3) making excuses, and (4) making formal requests. From these categories, representative samples were chosen to illustrate what rhetorical strategies the writers used to achieve their purpose for sending the email messages. The results show that the students were able to employ a wide variety of rhetorical strategies to interact with their instructor outside of the traditional classroom setting. For these students, email seemed to be an important means for interacting with their instructor. Moreover, the students exhibited a good ability to switch between formal and informal language, depending upon the rhetorical context of the message. In the conclusion, some of the issues regarding teaching the use of email are discussed.
This article describes a contrastive textlinguistic study of rhetorical differences between texts written by academics with different cultural backgrounds. It is assumed that, despite a relative uniformity of academic papers imposed by requirements of the genre, there is significant intercultural variation in the rhetorical preferences of writers. The cultural differences between texts written by Finnish and Anglo-American academics are explored with respect to metatext use in papers from economics journals. The results indicate that Anglo-American writers use more metatext or text about text than Finnish writers. It seems that Anglo-American writers are more concerned with guiding and orienting the reader than Finns, and show more explicit presence of the writer in the text. This is taken to reflect a more reader-oriented attitude, a more positive notion of politeness, and a generally more explicit textual rhetoric. Finnish writers show a more negative kind of politeness and a greater tendency towards implicitness in their writing. Such differences may result in unintentionally inefficient rhetoric when the target audience does not share the writer's assumptions and attitudes.
This paper is a corpus-based study of how native speaker computing students and experts use the pronoun I when elaborating their methodology (‘methodological I’). Using two corpora, (i) a student corpus of about 62,000 words of postgraduate computing project reports, written at the end of the MSc programme and roughly equivalent to the master’s dissertation; and (ii) an expert corpus of about 88,000 words of computing articles taken from prestigious journals, a quantitative analysis of the students’ and experts’ texts reveals that almost 80% of the personal pronouns found in the student corpus are of I, while the figure in the expert corpus is less than 3%. Over 400 occurrences of I in the student corpus, but only six occurrences of I in the expert corpus, were classified as methodological. A qualitative analysis of the data in the student corpus reveals how methodological I can help to achieve a range of textual effects. Methodological I is used to recount procedure step by step, to the extent that even unsuccessful stages of the research process are included. These failures are attributed to lack of knowledge, skills, or equipment. Working in concert with language which stresses the tight deadlines the students are obliged to meet, methodological I can promote the researcher by highlighting their resourcefulness in managing to get their project completed on schedule. Methodological I also helps the student writers to justify their procedure, showing it to be sound and rigorous, thus indirectly promoting the researcher by associating them with methodological diligence. However, even when the students feel obliged to record their procedural failures, methodological I can help them create a favourable impression on the reader by constructing them as tenacious neophytes whose repertoire of computing skills has increased considerably as a result of working on their research project. The study ends with the pedagogical implications of the findings for EAP teachers and students.
This paper presents a description of a major class of vocabulary, signalling nouns, which have important discourse functions in establishing links across and within clauses. This class of noun is particularly prevalent in academic discourse. The description is based on a reading of the literature and, more importantly, the author's own corpus data. The synthesis represents the first attempt to bring this diverse work together under one umbrella. The description provides a framework which is likely to be of value to materials writers and teachers and learners in English for Academic and Specific Purposes.
Academic writing is not just about conveying an ideational ‘content’, it is also about the representation of self. Recent research has suggested that academic prose is not completely impersonal, but that writers gain credibility by projecting an identity invested with individual authority, displaying confidence in their evaluations and commitment to their ideas. Perhaps the most visible manifestation of such an authorial identity is the use of first person pronouns and their corresponding determiners. But while the use of these forms are a powerful rhetorical strategy for emphasising a contribution, many second language writers feel uncomfortable using them because of their connotations of authority. In this paper I explore the notion of identity in L2 writing by examining the use of personal pronouns in 64 Hong Kong undergraduate theses, comparisons with a large corpus of research articles, and interviews with students and their supervisors. The study shows significant underuse of authorial reference by students and clear preferences for avoiding these forms in contexts which involved making arguments or claims. I conclude that the individualistic identity implied in the use of I may be problematic for many L2 writers.
This research uses experimental and control group data to show that students’ correction of grammatical and lexical error between assignments reduces such error in subsequent writing over one semester without reducing fluency or quality. A second study further examines how error correction should be done. Should a teacher correct errors or mark errors for student self-correction? If the latter, should the teacher indicate location or type of error or both? Measures include change in the accuracy of both revisions and of subsequent writing, change in fluency, change in holistic ratings, student attitudes toward the four different kinds of teacher response, and time required by student and teacher for each kind of response. Findings are that both direct correction and simple underlining of errors are significantly superior to describing the type of error, even with underlining, for reducing long-term error. Direct correction is best for producing accurate revisions, and students prefer it because it is the fastest and easiest way for them as well as the fastest way for teachers over several drafts. However, students feel that they learn more from self-correction, and simple underlining of errors takes less teacher time on the first draft. Both are viable methods depending on other goals.
For more than a century, linguists have been interested in the study of frequent word combinations. The present study investigated a special type of word combination, lexical bundles, defined as a sequence of three or more words that co-occur frequently in a particular register [Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Longman, London, 1999]. The goal was to improve the understanding of the function of lexical bundles in academic prose by comparing the use of such bundles by published authors in history and biology and by students at three different levels in those disciplines. The first part of this study focused on a corpus of published writing from history and biology journals. The most frequent four-word lexical bundles in that corpus (called target bundles) were identified and classified structurally and functionally. The second part concentrated on students' use of those target bundles. The findings of this study indicated that students rarely used these target bundles in their writing. In addition, when students did use certain bundles, their use did not correspond to the uses of bundles employed by professional authors. Finally, some pedagogical implications of the findings, as well as suggested paths for future research, are introduced and discussed.
The present study assumes that, despite the relative uniformity of research articles (RAs) imposed by the requirements of the genre, there may be intercultural variation in the rhetorical preferences of different writing cultures. This study develops further Moreno's [Text 18 (1998) 545] model for the comparison of the metatext employed in English and Spanish to signal premise–conclusion intersentential coherence relations. It does so by focusing on the types and preference of use of retrospective cohesive mechanisms employed in premise–conclusion metatext to label the premise from which the upcoming conclusion is to be drawn. Variability is sought in different aspects of the label arriving at the following conclusions: (1) With regards to the extent to which authors make explicit reference to the stretch of discourse from which the upcoming conclusion is to be drawn, Spanish academics show a greater tendency towards the use of fuzzy labels; (2) The overall distribution of the lexical range of labels is also different, with English showing a greater tendency towards the use of non-metalinguistic labels. Retrospective labels have a greater tendency to add interpersonal meanings in English both (3) through the label itself and (4) through its modification; (5) The various ways in which modifiers in retrospective labels add ideational meaning seem to be distributed differently.
This study uses a genre-based analysis of 20 research articles (RAs) from the discipline of sociology to present a provisional, pedagogically usable description of the communicative categories or “moves” (Swales 1981, 1990) found in the Results sections. These categories are described in terms of function, lexis, and grammatical form, and a model of the typical, cyclical patterns formed by combinations of the categories is given. The categories found extend and refine previous models of this section, reveal certain similarities with the Discussion sections of hard science RAs, and provide evidence of disciplinary variation.
There is a popular belief that scientific writing is purely objective, impersonal and informational, designed to disguise the author and deal directly with facts. But while ESP courses often provide the linguistic means to accomplish this invisibility, they often ignore the fact that effective academic writing always carries the individual's point of view. Writers also need to present their claims cautiously, accurately and modestly to meet discourse community expectations and to gain acceptance for their statements. Such pragmatic aspects of communication however are vulnerable to cross-cultural differences and L2 students are rarely able to hedge their statements appropriately. This paper argues that hedging devices are a major pragmatic feature of effective scientific writing and that students should be taught to recognise and use them in their own work. It examines the frequency, functions and realisations of hedges and discusses a range of strategies for familiarising students with their appropriate use.
The paper presents a contrastive analysis focusing on the differences in the use of two selected metatext categories, previews and reviews, in English and Slovene research articles. The analysis is based on the hypothesis that the use of the selected metatext categories is more restricted in Slovene academic writing than in English academic writing. Thirty-two research articles from the fields of mathematics and archaeology (16 in English and 16 in Slovene) are analysed according to a set of criteria established in advance, and the quantitative results of the analysis are further examined statistically. The results show that the number of occurrences of the selected metatext categories in the sample of English research articles is larger than in the sample of Slovene articles, although the difference in the use of the selected metatext categories is smaller between the two languages than between the two disciplines.