Abstract
Adopting Hyland's (2002) framework of reporting words (RVs), the paper investigates the use of RVs in Master's theses written in English by students of two disciplines, Economics and Management and Natural Resources. The data were drawn from two sub-corpora, each consisting of 82 Literature Reviews, where other authors' research is summarised and commented on. Besides determining the most frequent communicative functions, in this paper, the RVs are further analysed in terms of the verb tense, voice, and subject-agent. The findings revealed significant differences between the two disciplines. In the former, most RVs were in the present active with named-author as the subject, conveying a neutral attitude towards the reported message and neutrally summarising previous research outcomes. Most RVs were in the past tense in the latter, reporting on past research procedures or outcomes. The findings reveal infrequent use of evaluative or critical verbs. Each discipline's predominant choice may suggest writers' lower ability to highlight the cited sources' direct relevance to their research. The study hopes to contribute to the efficacy of teaching English for Academic Purposes to non-native speakers. It has pedagogical implications for academic writing in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at non-philological tertiary education institutions.
Highlights
The paper examines the use of reporting verbs (RVs) in the citation
The research was performed on 164 Master’s theses written in English by non-native speakers, students of two English programs studied at CULS Prague, Economics and Management and Natural Resources
Our findings revealed a predominant use of Research Acts verbs in Natural Resources texts, describing procedures or processes performed in previous studies or introducing results or conclusions of the previous research
Summary
The paper examines the use of reporting verbs (RVs) in the citation. Citing the work of others is a significant part of academic discourse, and RVs unarguably belong among its most essential features. Swales (1990) was the first to make a distinction between an integral and non-integral citation. The former contains the name of the reported researcher in the grammar of the reporting sentence and emphasises the messenger, e.g. “Swales (1990) makes a distinction...” The latter refers to the researcher only in parenthesis or superscript numbers, emphasising the reported massage (Lee, Hitchcock and Casal, 2018). This paper focuses on RVs in reporting structures irrespective of the (non) integrity or the citation conventions used. The research was conducted on Literature Review sections of Master theses written in English by second language (L2)
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