Academic Genres Research Articles

Communicating disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience in 3MT presentations: How students engage with popularization of science

3MT (Three-minute thesis) presentations, in which students communicate their theses to non-specialist audiences within three minutes, have emerged as an important academic genre, echoing current practices in scientific communication where researchers report their research work to a heterogeneous audience. Although increasing attention has been paid to 3MT presentations, we still lack sufficient knowledge of how presenters should communicate disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience. To address this gap, this corpus-based study investigates the rhetorical organization of moves (i.e. discoursal units serving various coherent communicative functions in text) in 80 3MT presentations from six disciplines. It is found that orientation, rationale, purpose, methods and results are five obligatory moves, among which the results move comprises more than one-fifth of the total length. The rationale and results moves are more often applied in hard sciences than in soft knowledge fields. The findings shed light on advanced academic literacy and how students communicate disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience.

Metadiscourse variations in the generic structure of disciplinary research articles

Abstract Research articles have begun to occupy the status of a prominent academic genre, as publishing one is a significant way to gain credibility and to establish oneself as a researcher among members of a discourse community. One way to distinguish discourse communities is to look at the linguistic features used in the generic structure of their research articles. One of these linguistic features is metadiscourse which deals with the connection between authors, texts and readers. The present study adopted Hyland’s (2005a) model of metadiscourse to compare the use of interactional markers in the moves of 40 research article introductions from Applied Linguistics and Chemistry. Findings indicated some variations in the way that disciplinary authors employed interactional devices in introduction moves. These findings can be discussed in terms of familiarizing novice writers with discipline-specific features of their research article introduction and interpersonality in establishing a link between a text and readers.

From abstracts to “60-second science” podcasts: Reformulation of scientific discourse

This paper examines Scientific American's 60-Second Science podcasts from a genre perspective to identify structural and linguistic strategies for reformulating scientific discourse for diversified audiences. Move analysis of 110 representative texts revealed a dominant structural pattern consisting of an engaging Orientation, a foregrounded Claim followed by the establishment of its Credibility, the conventional Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion, and a distinctive Termination often flavored with witty humor. This pattern contains the essential components of academic abstracts, research presentations, and science news reports. However, despite some overlapping moves, 60-Second Science differs from any of these similar genres in terms of communicative purposes, target audiences, move sequences, and even types of move signals. Apart from common linguistic devices used in typical academic genres, other notable move signals include topic shifters, rhetorical questions, and voice shifts between the podcasters and researchers. Meanwhile, weaving researchers' voices into the podcasters', frequent use of engagement devices such as inclusive pronouns, reader pronouns, self-mentions, questions, and hedges result in a highly dialogic and interactional style. These structural and linguistic features may make 60-Second Science podcasts an authentic listening resource suitable for EFL students to acquire a basic awareness of academic spoken discourse and strengthen the interface between general and academic English.

Genre Analysis of Research Article Abstracts in English for Academic Purposes Journals: Exploring the Possible Variations across the Venues of Research

Research article (RA) abstracts play a pivotal role in settling the fate of the academic papers. Despite the abundance of research on investigating the generic structure of this academic genre, the variations in its move patterns between the two venues within a single area of research seem to have remained untouched. The current study attempted to explore the constituent moves and move patterns of RA abstracts published in a local (Iranian Journal of English for Academic Purposes) and an international (The Journal of English for Academic Purposes) journal in the field of applied linguistics. Drawing on Hyland’s (2000) five-move model, the RA abstracts were analyzed. The results indicated that the abstracts published in the two journals included the conventional moves. Furthermore, the most frequent moves were the purpose, method, and product in the two corpora. Moreover, although the results of the chi-square test pointed to no significant difference in terms of the frequency of the moves in the abstracts, the analysis divulged variations in the move patterns across the two sets of articles. The findings carry pedagogical implications for the academic writing course designers, materials developers, and instructors to enhance the novice researchers’ familiarity with the writing conventions to facilitate their accommodation by the scientific communities.

Return to Action

So we gotta get off our arses and stop just talking about it! Hear! Hear! I agree! It’s action that counts, not words, and we need action now! You’re right. We could sit around here all day, talking, passing resolutions, make clever speeches, it’s not gonna shift one Roman soldier! So let’s just stop gabbing on about it! It’s completely pointless and it’s getting us nowhere. I agree! This is a complete waste of time! They’ve arrested Brian! What? They’ve dragged him off! They’re gonna crucify him! Right! This calls for immediate discussion! (Monty Python, The Life of Brian, movie 1979). If you are haunted by anniversaries, the best thing is to ignore them! However, anniversaries as a periodical strategy of remembrance, sometimes of nostalgic feelings and mourning, may create an opportunity for applying new perspectives on both the past and the present, thereby creating new knowledge. We are more haunted, I believe, by all the inaugural or keynote speakers, keynote lectures and keynote articles, where well-established scholars, flattered by the request, seriously point towards the future, trying to predict trends and to draw the lines for future research by others. This is an overestimated academic genre. It is a genre concerning power over the discourse in the present and at least attempts to exercise this power in the future as well, most often in vain. However, and first of all, why in a multivocal world should we let anyone have a certain keynote status? Do they have a certain authority to lean back on? Or, as I would prefer, do they have good convincing examples to show? Secondly, are predictions about the future of any relevance to the community of teaching and research? Why not just wait and see what happens or clear your own path through the jungle of perspectives, methods and examples – free of authorities? Looking back on

Научная статья: тенденции изменения модели

The article aims to determine the changes in the model of the speech genre of the Russian academic article in the field of humanities over the past 120 years. Methodologically, the analysis is focused mainly on identifying cognitive (logical-structural), pragmalinguistic (identifying the leading speech strategies) and formal (the form, article sections, text volume) characteristics of articles. The research suggests that during the analyzed time period, divided into four parts (1900–1930, 1930–1960, 1960–1990, 1990–2020), this speech genre has acquired the features of a hypergenre due to the fact that the following mandatory elements were included into the model: an Abstract, Information about the author, and Keywords. According to the analysis, one can see a specific trajectory in the formation of a model of a Russian academic article genre, the strengthening of national ways of information presentation and addressing in contrast to the enhancement of formal indicators. The obtained data is confirmed by the analysis of the frequency of speech strategies implementation (analytical, characterizing, modeling, methodological, classifying, reviewing, problem stating, descriptive, informing) and the analysis of the peripheral speech genres included into the article – affiliation (gratitude, appreciation), evaluation (criticism, approval, reproach), reflexive (justification, reference to authority), and prognostic (forecast, recommendation, suggestion) ones. Fluctuation in their frequency reflects internal trends related to historical causes and changes in scientific paradigms. Thus, the results of the research on the academic article speech genre in the field of humanities indicate that the unification of the Russian and Western European (Scopus) models of this speech genre is not inevitable.

Theme choice in oral case presentations: Differences between medical novices and experts

The clinical case presentation is an important mode of professional communication as well as an academic genre in medical education. Examining both students' and experienced doctors' linguistic practices can reveal how students differ in their underlying knowledge, interpretation and execution of the case presentation that mark their novice status. In this paper, we describe differences in the use of theme in initiating sentences in case presentations produced by doctors and medical students. Theme analysis, an analysis of the linguistic elements that are used to begin a clause, was used. The data comprised 50 audio-recorded oral case presentations elicited from 20 doctors and 30 students in two medical schools. Choice of theme in doctors' and students' presentations was compared. The findings show that doctors and students differ significantly in their use of specific theme types indicating their different understanding and use of the oral case presentation as well as their social position in the professional field. Indexing students' novice status are differences in the use of conjunctive adjuncts, interpersonal, existential and pronoun themes, and marked themes as overt signalling of the presentation structure. These findings contribute to provide some insight on students’ learning trajectory and can inform appropriate educational interventions.

Experimenting with the Teaching of Academic Genres in the Target Culture: A Reflexive Testimony

This testimony discusses an experiment in teaching French academic genres in the context of a French reading and composition class held at UC Berkeley in spring 2020. The experiment was designed and implimenetd in collaboration with Emily Linares. The article describes the reasons for introducing students to these genres, within a multiliteracies framework and explains which pedagogical strategies worked best in this context, and why. It also points to possible socio-political implications of the experiment, which could also prove beneficial to minority students or students from underrepresented backgrounds in American universities.

Scaffolding the Case Analysis in an Organizational Behavior Course: Making Analytical Language Explicit

This article describes an innovative interdisciplinary collaboration between English faculty and an organizational behavior (OB) professor to scaffold case analysis writing in an upper-level OB course at an English-medium university in the Middle East. Case analysis writing is challenging for students as an academic genre or type of writing because they do not always know when to report on the case, when to explain OB concepts, and when to go beyond reporting or explaining by using analysis in support of claims. Combining the English faculty’s linguistic knowledge with the OB professor’s disciplinary knowledge, we developed visual support materials to make the valued features of case analysis writing explicit for students. We describe two sets of instructional materials that we used to help students meet genre expectations. We provide evidence from multiple data sources, including on-going analysis of student writing, that points to the effectiveness of our innovative interdisciplinary collaboration. Our findings provide evidence of the benefits of distributed responsibilities in teaching and assessing university students’ communication skills in disciplinary contexts, particularly for L2 learners.

Multimodality in the classroom presentation genre: Findings from a study of Turkish psychology undergraduate talks

Despite its obvious importance to learning and assessment across the academy, the undergraduate classroom presentation has received less research attention than other academic genres, and little is known about how multiple modes of communication are deployed within it. To explore how the use of different modes varied between sections, and how these actions affected the speech of presenters, this research into student presentations given at a university in Turkey combined a move-step analysis of speech with a mixed-methods study of multimodality. The study's main results were as follows: first, that presentation sections were distinctively configured by arrays of multimodal action; second, that the effectiveness of speech in performing specific moves in the genre was moderated in several specific ways by actions in other modes; and third, that some moves were performed in part by non-verbal actions. These findings are briefly discussed with reference to their theoretical and pedagogical implications.

A multimodal discourse approach to research pitches

The communicative purpose of oral academic genres is frequently achieved through multimodal ensembles (i.e., a combination of meaning-making resources or modes). This is the case in research pitches. However, little has been written about this genre and its multimodal nature. Drawing from previous research on multimodality (Jewitt, 2009; Norris, 2009; Valeiras Jurado, 2019), I examine traces of modal density, complexity and cohesion in research pitches’ opening and closing moves, which often reflect researchers’ need to persuade their audience of the importance of their research. The aim of this study is twofold. First, I analyse the rhetorical structure of six well-rated 3-min research pitches following Swales’ move theory (2004). Second, adopting a Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) perspective (Querol-Julián, 2011; Valeiras-Jurado & Ruiz-Madrid, 2019), I describe how the multimodal ensembles orchestrated by the speakers contributed to the communicative aim of the opening and closing moves. By way of conclusion, I derive pedagogical implications from the findings of this study.

A tale of two genres: Engaging audiences in academic blogs and Three Minute Thesis presentations

ABSTRACT This paper reports a cross-genre study of how academics engage their audiences in two popular but underexplored academic genres: academic blogs and Three Minute Thesis (3MT) presentations. Based on a corpus of 65 academic blog posts and 65 3MT presentations from social sciences, we examine how academics establish interpersonal rapport with non-specialist audiences with the aid of engagement resources. The analysis identified new ways of informing and persuading a more diverse audience of their research in both genres. Further analyses revealed more engagement features overall deployed in 3MT presentations, especially those seeking to bring audiences into the discussion by mentioning them explicitly, directing them to think in certain ways, and addressing them with questions. Academic bloggers, in contrast, emphasized shared knowledge and offered more parenthetical commentary. The variations are explained in terms of mode and context, especially the time-constrained and face-to-face competitive context of the spoken genre. The findings have important implications for academics to address their audiences in taking their research beyond specialist insiders, and they shed light on how engagement works in very different academic contexts with different modes.

Song and dance genre specifics in works for button accordion by the composers of the Department of Folk Instruments of Ukraine of Kharkiv I. P. Kotlyarevsky National University of Art

Recent years have provoked an increasing interest in button accordion arts of Ukraine therefore a great demand for button accordion performance based on song and dance genre features is to be of great importance. Our research work deals with the embodiment of the song and dance genres features in academic button accordion art. The above-mentioned phenomenon has led to the appropriate systematization of their transformations in the musicological viewpoint therefore is stated to be very novel. This systematization is revealed from stylization to various arrangements, further transcriptions, fantasies, paraphrases, works on the theme of other artists that is to create the genre-style transformation. The aim of the research is to determine the genre-style methods of composers’ work for button accordion on the basis of song and dance genre. Present scientific research scope led to the solution of the following tasks: the disclosure of methods of author’s song and dance originals processing, identifying the specifics of drama and means of musical expression, justifying the popularity of works in the domestic musical performance. The following methods are used: analytical, comparative-historical and structural-functional. Summing up the results, it can be concluded that stylizations of dance and song genre are stated to be a great component of button accordion art. The use of European modeling samples (gavotte, mazurka and musette) contributed to the button accordion performance leading to sound production sophistication, high refinement of the sound palette and dynamic nuance, which enriched the artistic means of expressiveness, contributed to the evolution of interpretive experience. In the arrangements and transcriptions (by other authors) of Latin American dance genres there was an enrichment of rhythmic intonation structures and timbre palette of the instrument that lead to great popularity among performers and listeners by the interaction of academic art and genres belonging to the ‘third layer’. Among the opuses created in the genre-style transformation of songs and dances, the re-intonation of the original musical compositions received high artistic results. The use of modern means of button accordion expression, construction of new musical forms, application of elements of musical polystylistics, modification of genres are aimed at multifaceted reproduction of the figurative content of the original source, giving it a new artistic value and concert life. In the musical works of button accordion composers, the direction of song and dance genres features continuously enriches the quantitative and qualitative musical literature, so the prospects for further scientific research are relevant and promising.

Markers of identification in Indigenous academic writing: A case study of genre innovation

AbstractThis study contributes to research into genre innovation and scholarship exploring how Indigenous epistemes are disrupting dominant discourses of the academy. Using a case study approach, we investigated 31 research articles produced by Mäori scholars and published in the journalAlterNativebetween 2006 and 2018. We looked for linguistic features associated with self-positioning and self-identification. We found heightened ambiguous uses of “we”; a prevalence of verbs associated with personal (as opposed to discursive) uses of “I/we”; personal storytelling; and a privileging of Elders’ contributions to the existing state of knowledge. We argue these features reflect and reinforce Indigenous scholars’ social relations with particular communities of practice within and outside of the academy. They are also in keeping with Indigenous knowledge-making practices, protocols, and languages, and signal sites of negotiation and innovation in the research article. We present the implications for rhetorical genre studies and for teaching academic genres.

Batyar Songs in Viktor Morozov’s Creativity

Relevance of the study. The batyar subculture has already become the subject of many scientific works of Polish and Ukrainian researchers as a social phenomenon with its own jargon and cultural traditions. In particular, this issue has become central in the works of U. Jakubowska, A. Kozytsky, O. Kharchyshyn, Y. Vynnychuk, N. Kosmolinska, W. Szolginia and others. Batyar songs as a layer of Lviv city music got a new life thanks to the creativity of V. Morozov, realized in the publication of three albums with neobatyar songs. This group of songs and its genre and intonation parameters have not yet been at the center of musicological research and open up new perspectives for learning of genetic links between urban music and popular contemporary music in Ukraine.The purpose of the study is to analyze the genre and intonation features of Viktor Morozov’s albums, the principles of their cyclization, to explore the genetic links between batyar and neobatyar songs.Results and conclusions. Each of the three albums “Only in Lviv” (“Tilku vi Lvovi”), “Heart of the batyar” (“Serdtse batiara”) and “Batyarsky blues” (“Batiarskyi bliuz”) reveals itself as a large genre, which structure builds an expanded musical dramaturgy. In many aspects, it is connected with principles of the cyclization of academic genres, in particular, the vocal cycle and the program suite. The basis of the dramaturgy development of the albums was the method of contrast at the level of thematic, genre, tempo-metric organization. In addition, all three albums actually formed the one line of transformation of batiar songs from the authentic sound of songs from the period of the 20–30s of the twentieth century, and to new author’s — neobatyar songs, there were created on the basis of modern genres.New plots and themes of the verbal text of neobatyar songs also directly appeal to the original period of the first Lviv batyars at the beginning of the 20th century. The love adventures of the batyars, the struggle for authority and respect among the representatives of the subculture, the love for the native city, the glorification of fearlessness, life with not burdened by laws and fear became the main topics in neobatyar songs too. A characteristic local dialect is preserved, including a combination of vocabulary of various language systems; the use of lexical distortions, obscene vocabulary takes on a new embodiment through modern neologisms, borrowings. Songs are still performed exclusively by men, and the main genre outline is dance, including polkas, waltzes, tango, staer and others. The phenomenon of the double nature of batiar songs is organically embodied, where folklore and author’s songs are expressed through a combination of anonymous and original songs of the prewar period and neobatyar songs created by the authors of the albums. The nebatyars headed by V. Morozov in the albums “Only in Lviv”, “Heart of the batyar” and “Batyar blues” deliberately appeal to the layer of batyar songs, aiming to give new life to the old batyar song genre in the context of modern musical trends, to save the unique phenomenon from oblivion, rethink them in the context of the realities of our time. Thanks to the conceptual approach to the creation of the aforementioned albums, the authors managed not only to organically continue the musical traditions of batyar songs, but also to give them new life at a fresh, even brighter artistic level.

Becoming a scholar

How might explicitly prompting graduate students to self-regulate intervene in their development of writing knowledge and practices across multiple semesters? This study takes a close look at how prompted self-reflection on writing intervenes in a graduate student’s development of self-regulation and genre knowledge as he transitions from MA to PhD program in rhetoric. We present the case of one graduate student, ‘Eric,’ who was explicitly taught conventions and strategies for writing and prompted to reflect on writing projects over several semesters using an in-process protocol. Aligning data from in-process protocols, interviews, and drafts of Eric’s writing, we construct a fine-grained narrative that shows a complex and recursive relationship among Eric’s development of knowledge about academic genres, self regulation practices, and sense of scholarly identity. This narrative raises questions about how genre knowledge and self-regulation inform each other in graduate-level writing, and it offers an example of a self-regulation intervention that may help graduate students develop specialized ways of writing.

SOUND IMAGE OF DUDUK IN CHAMBER‑SYMPHONIC WORKS OF A. TERTERYAN AND R. ALTUNYAN

SOUND IMAGE OF DUDUK IN CHAMBER‑SYMPHONIC WORKS OF A. TERTERYAN AND R. ALTUNYAN

Discourse Functions of Lexical Bundles in Pakistani Chemistry and Physics Textbooks

Lexical bundles (LBs) are indispensable building blocks and essential constituents of academic discourse. The appropriate utilization of the lexical bundle’s approach can effectively enhance students’ understanding of academic discourse. LBs in various academic genres have extensively been studied concerning written and spoken language. However, less research has been conducted to explore the occurrence, nature, and frequency of LBs in Pakistani academic discourse, especially in textbooks. Therefore, the present study aims to explore four-word common LBs and their functional taxonomies employed in Pakistani Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSSC) level textbooks of Chemistry and Physics. A specialized corpus of these textbooks was built which was run on Antconc software for the identification and extraction of the LBs in the corpus. The classification of the identified LBs was then carried out utilizing Biber functional taxonomies of LBs. The study found 102 LBs occurring in the selected textbooks. In functional categories, there was a dominant use of discourse organizers and referential expressions. The findings related to frequent strings of words which can have significant educational implications for teachers, language material developers, and syllabus designers. The list of LBs with discourse functions provided by this study can significantly be used to enhance students’ academic writing and their ability to comprehend different types of scientific texts.

Appraisal Resources in an Academic Genre: English versus Persian Nutrition Research Articles.

Academic study writers utilize a specific set of discursive resources backed up by both cultural and professional norms to be endorsed by the intended audience. The current study aimed to investigate if there were any significant differences between English and Persian academic research articles published in peer-reviewed journals in the field of nutrition in light of appraisal theory. To this end, a corpus of 40 English and 40 Persian academic research articles was analyzed in terms of three categories and subcategories of appraisal theory. The results revealed that the authors of both English and Persian research articles included more attitude resources followed by graduation and engagement resources. Furthermore, no significant difference was observed between these two sets of articles in terms of three major appraisal categories. The findings carry pedagogical implications for English for academic purposes courses to provide the academic discourse communities with the required discursive competencies.

Towards a Part-of-Speech (PoS) gram approach to academic writing: A case study of research introductions in different disciplines

This study innovatively applies the Part-of-Speech-gram (PoS-gram) procedure to the examination of language patterning and variability in a largely conventionalized part-genre (i.e., research introductions). Based on 400 article introductions from computer engineering (CE) and cognitive linguistics (CL), the study has identified key PoS-grams and their associated lexico-grammatical frames, using the written academic component of British National Corpus as the reference corpus. The analysis reveals key PoS-grams shared in CE and CL introductions, e.g., those associated with the step “purposive announcement”, as well as the discipline-specific ones such as the PoS-gram for structure-outlining only found in CE introductions. Compared to various forms of multi-word sequences like n-grams, the PoS-gram has the unique strength of grouping phraseologies with similar or identical structure and discursive functions and yet either recurrent or varying lexical choices under the co-selected grammatical categories. The advantage enriches analyses and helps yield pedagogically useful findings, in that patterning and variability is revealed not only in the overall function, structure and composition of PoS-grams but in such aspects of their recurrent or diversified tokens. This study illustrates the innovative application of corpus-based PoS-gram procedure to academic genres, which may inspire a promising new line of inquiry and the current genre pedagogy.