Navigating Disciplinary Dialogues: An Exploratory Analysis of Dialogic Stance

Abstract

A number of studies have focused on the analyses of theses, articles, and book reviews as academic genres, yet there are also other genres that have recently appeared in academic journals and need to be analyzed. One of these genres is the so-called “disciplinary dialogues,” which are relatively short academic texts written by experts to discuss a specific issue rather than reporting research. This study focuses on authors’ interaction in disciplinary dialogues. The data for the study is a specialized corpus comprised of 37 disciplinary dialogues published in a journal in the Applied Linguistics field. Discourse analysis was employed. The findings illuminate a rich array of writing strategies employed by authors to establish a dialogic stance, such as referring to other scholars/studies, asking rhetorical questions, explicitly showing disagreement/agreement, using hedging devices, using evaluative and reflective language, and suggesting future research ideas. The paper ends with the pedagogical and research implications of the findings.