iReasearch学术科研网

摘要：A significant number of studies have examined the features of expert discoursal practices in science and academia, and many have focused on what happens to student writers working their way into the academic community. Less attention has been paid to how a scientific writer's voice continues to change after the Ph.D. dissertation. This study examines the shift in experienced scientific writers' disciplinary voice over the ten-year period following the doctoral dissertation. Using genre analysis triangulated with qualitative methods, a set of indexes that convey field geologists' disciplinary practices and concerns has been identified. Using a measure of standard deviation, the study then compares the use of these indexes by six writers from geology over ten years, and finds that disciplinary voice develops in similar ways. This paper contributes to ongoing discussions about how research on voice is useful for studies on second-language writing. In addition, using tools such as standard deviation allows for a closer analysis of the elusive notion of 'voice'. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：Institutional and corporate writing have been widely investigated over the last two decades by applied linguists, educationalists and ESP scholars, with special attention given to business correspondence, annual reports, press releases and, more recently, email messages and other digital media. Some kinds of documents, however, still await scrutiny. This exploratory study turns to the customer-complaint form, a well-established but relatively unresearched genre that frames the reporting of critical incidents to service providers. Its structure and wording are described contrastively across a sample of texts produced by British and Italian organisations. The results highlight several differences between the two samples in terms of structure, wording of requests/instructions, and conventional indirectness. While many of these are language-driven, others may be interpreted as an expression of national perceptions of the duties and expectations of the parties involved. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：Intercultural studies have shown the existence of rhetorical variation in the prevalent discourse practices of multilingual scholars and those of English-speaking scholars. In this paper, we examine comparatively the typical rhetorical practices used in the Introduction section of 80 research articles written in English and 80 in Spanish in four disciplines in the fields of Health Sciences and Humanities/Social Sciences. We particularly examine how writers present their research studies in Move 3 (Swales, 2004), with a special focus on those steps that add promotional value to one's research. The results revealed that, within the same field, the English texts present a higher degree of rhetorical promotion than the Spanish texts in each of the disciplines analysed. However, when comparing the two broad fields, the Spanish texts in Health Sciences present a higher degree of promotion than the English (and Spanish) texts in Humanities/Social Sciences. This indicates that, in shaping the promotional features of the (sub)genre in question, when professional and national cultural variables interact simultaneously, cultural factors tend to override the influence of disciplinary context. However, when broad fields of knowledge are compared, it is the disciplinary conventions in specific professional subcultures that seem to prevail over national cultural factors. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：In the last 20 years, technological advancement and increased multidisciplinarity has expanded the range of data regarded as within the scope of languages for specific purposes (LSP) research and the means by which they can be analyzed. As a result, the analytical work of LSP researchers has developed from a narrow focus on specialist terminology coupled with generic discourse analysis to a wide-ranging set of perspectives involving multiple methods and databases. This article aims to explore this 20-year expansion process by examining the development of the domains of LSP research in which certain methods have been particularly productive and by providing an outline of how each method has been applied within LSP research. Among the areas examined are lexical and register analysis, genre analysis, conversation analysis, ethnography, and multimethod approaches. It is argued that developments in LSP analysis have generally been in the direction of greater contextualization of discourse, moving away from a concentration on lexicogrammatical features of text to include analysis of spoken and written discourses of specific domains. The article concludes with some comments on the needs, priorities, and challenges for future research in the analysis of LSP. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This article highlights aspects of an interdisciplinary (chemistry-applied linguistics) English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course- and materials-development project. The project was aimed at raising genre awareness among chemistry students and faculty, in addition to improving students' disciplinary reading and writing. As part of the project, full-length chemistry journal articles were analyzed. We describe select results of this analysis and the prominent role played by chemists in the process. Emphasis is placed on the organizational structure of chemistry journal articles, focusing on the Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion (A-IMRDC) sections. Two predominant organizational patterns emerged from our analyses, specifically A-IMR[DC] and A-IM[R(DC)], with brackets signifying sections merged under one major heading. Move-analysis findings are converted into easy-to-interpret instructional tools labeled 'move structures akin to flow charts' for two target audiences (chemistry students and faculty). The rhetorical structure of the chemistry journal article is then compared to journal articles published in biochemistry, an overlapping discipline. The article concludes with pedagogical implications and suggestions for ESP professionals engaged in genre analysis. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：This paper presents an analysis of the major generic structures of empirical research articles (RAs), with a particular focus on disciplinary variation and the relationship between the adjacent sections in the introductory and concluding parts. The findings were derived from a close 'manual' analysis of 433 recent empirical RAs from high-impact English-language journals in 39 disciplines in the fields of engineering, applied sciences, social sciences and the humanities. This analysis reveals that while many empirical RAs follow the 'standard' Introduction -- Method -- Results -- Discussion (IMRD) pattern, this structure is not the default option for organizing such studies. The findings indicate that the most frequently used structural pattern is Introduction -- Literature Review -- Method -- Results and Discussion -- Conclusion (ILM[RD]C). The other prominent patterns found in the corpus are IM[RD]C, IMRDC, ILMRDC and ILMRD. The paper identifies and highlights the importance of the sections that are not fully accounted for in the conventional IMRD framework, namely the Literature Review (L), the merged (as opposed to separated) Results and Discussion [RD], and the Conclusion (C). The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the study for academic writing research as well as the design of RA writing courses and materials for research students and early-career academics. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：Several previous studies have investigated the use of questions to facilitate interactions in academic lectures in tertiary education. However, the issue of how disciplinary cultures influence the patterns of questions in lectures has received little attention. Therefore, this study aims to examine the interdisciplinary differences in professors' use of questions in terms of both their forms and functions. The corpus used in this study consists of 15 small-class lectures from three academic divisions: Humanities & Arts (HA), Social Sciences & Education (SS) and Physical Sciences & Engineering (PS). These data are a subset of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Previous studies on academic spoken English have reported that, compared with other contextual factors, the disciplinary culture seems to exert a more critical influence on the use of various linguistic features. However, the results of this study show far more similarities than differences across different disciplines. Based on the major findings pertaining to the use of question forms and functions across the three divisions, it is suggested that for questions in academic lectures at the tertiary level, the influence of genre seems to outweigh that of disciplinary culture. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：Numerous studies have investigated the occurrence of modifiers in a variety of settings, especially academic research writing and casual spoken contexts. This study extends previous research in two ways: (1) it examines pragmatic force modifiers (PFMs) (Lin, 2010; Nikula, 1996) in lectures in BASE and MICASE in order to reveal their functions specific to the particular genre; (2) it compares and contrasts the frequency and use of PFMs in the corpora and monologic/interactive sub-corpora in an attempt to identify similarities and differences potentially associated with academic cultures and lecturing styles. The results imply that although academic cultures appear to contribute to the distributional patterns of PFMs in the corpora, their functions are primarily dependent on the interplay between generic norms and lecturing styles. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：Using a 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. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：This paper seeks to analyse discourse patterns of legal opinions in two languages and cultures -- namely, Legal Problem Question Answers (LPQs) in the UK academic writing context and Pareri (Ps) in the Italian professional writing context. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of discourse in this paper, based on the tenets of genre analysis, was carried out on a small collection of Model Answer texts to Problem Questions used in the two legal cultures. Findings indicate that while LPQs and Ps mostly bear similarities in the relevant rhetorical organisational patterns, they also show differences in the use of lexico-grammatical resources. It is argued that the generic and discoursal patterns resulting from the written data are determined by the writers' disciplinary (legal) culture and language, which are appropriate to legal discourse practices of Western local jurisdictions. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：There has been increasing interest in the possible applications of corpora to both linguistic research and pedagogy. This study takes a corpus-based, genre-analytic approach to discipline-specific materials development. Combining corpus analysis with genre analysis makes it possible to develop teaching materials that are not only authentic but also research-supported. An RA corpus consisting of 60 research articles from three major journals of computer science was constructed. A word frequency list derived from the corpus was analyzed to develop a vocabulary profile for the genre. Move analysis was also conducted based on a self-developed coding scheme of rhetorical moves in the target genre. The move codes were tagged in the corpus texts so that individual moves and move patterns could be retrieved for the purpose of developing research-based online teaching materials for graduate students of computer science. Numerous examples of specialized vocabulary, grammatical usage, and move structures that showcase and characterize academic computer science discourse were used in not only lessons but also learning tasks, discussion topics, and online writing models. The paper ends with a discussion of the usefulness and effectiveness of the online RA writing materials, based on student feedback and assessments. We combine corpus-based with genre-analytic approach to develop research-based online courseware for graduate students of computer science. We build a corpus of 60 research articles. We analyze word frequency and rhetorical moves in each section from the corpus. The online courseware includes examples of specialized vocabulary, grammatical usages, move structures, and learning tasks. The usefulness and effectiveness of the online courseware are evaluated by student feedback and assessments. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：There is currently much interest in creating pedagogically-oriented descriptions of formulaic language. Research in this area has typically taken what we call a 'form-first' approach, in which formulas are identified as the most frequent recurrent forms in a relevant corpus. While this research continues to yield valuable results, the present paper argues that much can also be gained by taking a 'function-first' approach, in which a corpus is first annotated for communicative functions and formulas are then identified as the recurrent patterns associated with each function. We demonstrate this approach through a comparative analysis of introductions to student essays and research articles. Focusing on one particularly common communicative function, the analysis demonstrates that (1) this function is more common in student essays than in articles; (2) both the choice to use the function and the choice of linguistic forms that realize the function vary across subject areas in research articles, but not in student essays; (3) research articles tend to be more formulaic in expressing the function than student essays; and (4) some parts of the forms used are highly formulaic, while others are more open. The key formulas are described and suggestions made regarding their pedagogical presentation. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]