Abstract
Cross-cultural differences in academic discourse as a field of applied linguistic research became mainstream at the end of the 20th century. Two fundamental concepts emerged at that period: one highlighted universal features of academic discourse, the other focused on ethnocultural peculiarities of cognitive and textual structures. Research in the field of academic discourse becomes particularly significant when applied to training and education of academic staff. Accepting the idea of universal features of academic discourse, we, however, tend to support the concept claiming that academic writing style may contain markers of ethnocultural identity of their authors. So, the aim of our research was to identify markers of ethnocultural identity in medical research texts. The study included comparative discourse analysis of research focused medical texts created by English-speaking (ES) and Russian-speaking (RS) authors. The results obtained have drawn us to the conclusion that despite universal features that scientific medical texts of the same genres share, they nevertheless manifest specific properties depending on the linguistic and cultural affiliation of their authors, i.e. markers of ethnocultural identity. This knowledge can contribute to international academic communication.
Highlights
Cross-cultural differences in academic discourse as a research topic became relevant at the end of the 20th century
Type-token ratio is defined as the proportion of different words or words from different word families used in a text to all words in a text. [13] «Lexical diversity is a measure of how many different words are used in a text, while lexical density provides a measure of the proportion of lexical items in the text» [13, p. 61]
"Lexical coverage" is defined as the percentage of words that characterized the "apprehensibility" of the text for the reader [14; 15]. This criterion is determined by comparing the words used in the texts of articles with a General Word List (GWL) and an Academic Word List (AWL)
Summary
Cross-cultural differences in academic discourse as a research topic became relevant at the end of the 20th century. Two fundamental concepts emerged in that period: one highlighted universal features of academic discourse, the other focused on cultural identity of cognitive and textual structures [1]. There have been a number of studies that support the following assumption: the differences in academic style may be associated with the author’s national and cultural identity. Kaplan [2] compared translations from different languages into English, as well as English-language texts created by authors of different nationalities, emphasising the fact that, despite the expected "linear pattern" of constructing an English paragraph, there were distinctive features in the structure of the paragraph arrangement and development in the texts of native and non-native English-speaking authors. In another study Clyne examined the problem of the degree with which national identity manifested itself in academic texts. The author addressed the question whether this manifestation could affect the writer’s performance in international academic communication [3]
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