Abstract
With English as the medium language of communication around the globe, EAP (English for Academic Purposes) research has increasingly gained its attention. For learners of EAP, it is necessary to be able to academically and persuasively produce written practices acknowledged by members of academic discourse community. Plenty amount of EAP studies, accordingly, have explored genre analysis, move analysis, and metadiscourse analysis of RAs (research articles). Up to date, limited attention has been given to another crucial academic written genre: master’s thesis (MA thesis), which is the first step young researchers must be engaged with in order to join the academic discourse community. Writing is the process and production of interaction among writer, readers, and discourse. Metadiscourse in academic writing refers to writer’s self-projection toward him/herself, readers, and disciplinary discourse community. Metadiscourse is crucially applied in academic writing to achieve writer preferred communicative purposes. Reformulation is a type of metadiscourse that functions to “supply additional information by rephrasing, explaining or elaborating what has been said to ensure the reader is able to recover the writer’s intended meaning” (Hyland, 2007a, p. 268). In other words, metadiscoursal reformulation markers are employed to facilitate comprehension and appropriateness of academic production. However, unlike other metadiscoursal research, little attention has been paid to reformulation markers, especially how they are used in MA theses as a research genre. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate reformulation markers and their discourse functions in MA theses. The present study integrates corpus analysis and discourse analysis to examine reformulation markers and their discourse functions in 60 MA theses by Taiwanese graduate students. There are 28 reformulation markers examined with a total of 3883 elicited reformulation data. A coding scheme modified from Hyland (2007a) is used to analyze discourse functions. The results show that there is a tendency toward the use of simple apposition reformulation markers and fixed connectors. The top five preferred markers in MA theses are parentheses, i.e., that is, especially, and particularly respectively, of which parentheses accounts for nearly half of the frequency. In the comparison of the distribution of reformulation markers with previous research (Hyland, 2007a), it is found that the distribution of MA theses in the present study (i.e. soft science fields) is actually more resemble to hard science fields. Regarding discourse functions, Expansion and Reduction together constitute about 80.00%, and Other 20.00%. It reveals the dynamic representation of metadiscoursal reformulation markers. It also pinpoints the importance and necessity of contextual discourse analysis in metadiscourse research. As for the subcategories of discourse functions, Specification and Presentation are used most frequently, while Implication and Explanation are least used. As compared to Hyland (2007a), the percentage that Paraphrase in MA theses is two times that of RAs, while the percentage of Specification in MA theses is only half of that in RAs. The result could be attributed to generic difference, graduate students’ familiarity with the application of such markers and their discourse functions. Mutual multifunctionality between reformulation markers and discourse functions found in the present study is corresponding previous studies (Adel, 2006; Hyland, 2005). It means that the realization of reformulation function is diverse, for it crucially depends on metadiscursive contextual factors. In the present study, parentheses and namely have more functions than the other markers in the top five reformulation markers. Moreover, both of that is (to say) and its form variant i.e. can trigger Expansion and Reduction function; however, Implication can only be performed by that is (to say) and Explanation by i.e. Furthermore, with regard to sectional distribution of reformulation markers and discourse functions, it is Literature Review, and Results and Discussions that account for the most frequency. It is also observed that the distribution of discourse functions and their subcategories in these two sections conforms to the move development in MA theses (Bitchener and Basturkmen, 2005, 2006; Kwan, 2006). Some research has revealed the importance of reader awareness construction and the advantages of explicit/implicit metadiscourse teaching in academic writing. It is, accordingly, suggested to combine implicit and explicit instruction of metadiscoursal reformulation markers in EAP curriculum design to equip learners with such essential linguistic knowledge which is highly valued in academic disciplinary discourse community. In addition, in EAP research, it is recommended to connect and to relate reformulation markers and discourse functions to research of move analysis in various disciplines, or even genres.
Published Version
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