Advanced Academic Literacy Research Articles

“The results might not fully represent…”: Negation in the limitations sections of doctoral theses by Chinese and American students

Abstract The ability to achieve social interaction is both a key feature of research writing and an important aspect of advanced academic literacy. It can be seen in how doctoral students employ rhetorical resources to acknowledge limitations in thesis writing while securing a positive view of the research. Negation is one of the crucial interactional options, but less explored in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) literature. In this study, we drew on the appraisal theory to see negation as a disclaim marker that engaged with alternative positions and employed corpus analysis to examine the forms and functions of negation in the ‘limitations’ section of doctoral theses. To better understand how student writers exploit negation to achieve the rhetorical end, we further explored co-articulations of negation with other appraisal resources. A corpus-based analysis of 100 doctoral theses by Chinese and American doctoral students in applied linguistics showed that American students made significantly more use of negation, especially pairing negation with engagement and graduation resources. We attribute the difference to genre and culture norms and also raise pedagogical implications on the cultivation of students’ rhetorical awareness and the classroom teaching of research writing.

Scaffolding Summary Writing through the ‘Reading to Learn’ Pedagogy

Summary writing is a core competency for students pursuing university studies, but the demands of the reading-to-writing process can be fraught for those students new to the university context, particularly international students for whom English is an additional language. This paper reports on a study that investigated the effectiveness of using the Reading to Learn (R2L) pedagogy for students’ summary writing in an online environment. International English as an additional language students enrolled in four separate iterations of an advanced academic literacy unit offered by an Australian university, and were taught academic reading and summary writing online using the R2L pedagogy. Pre- and post-tests were administered in the first and last weeks of the unit each trimester. In the weeks between the tests, tutorials (2 h×9 weeks) consisted of structured and scaffolded teacher–student interactions, which guided the students through reading and summarising and moved from a high level of teacher input to greater student independence in the reading-to-writing process. Results found significant improvement in students’ abilities to comprehend and summarise key ideas from a source text and to write grammatically sound and complex sentences. However, the instruction did not show any impact on cohesion, vocabulary or punctuation. Despite the limitations of the study, the results confirm previous results as to the value of R2L, which provides a scaffolded approach to reading and writing.

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.

Material Design for Teaching Citations Skills in Scientific Writing

Citations are important rhetorical devices that when properly and strategically employed, allow writers to promote their current research findings persuasively and efficiently. As knowledge construction is progressive and cumulative, specifically in scientific disciplines, it is evident that acquiring skills for adequate and effective application of citations is essential for success. Scientific writers are required to possess advanced academic literacy skills in order to ably position their study within the framework of existing knowledge, and strategically employ citations to advance the acceptability of their research findings. This paper endeavors to propose materials for teaching the rhetorical functions of citations in advanced academic writing courses. The tasks are designed specifically to raise students’ awareness of citation norms, especially in their own specific disciplines. Since the practice of citing the work of others ethically is highly challenging for emerging research writers, materials suggested in this paper can be beneficial to instructors who are involved in developing advanced discipline-specific writing courses, or short-term academic writing workshops.

Unpacking vulnerability in academic writing and publishing: a tale of two non-native English speaker scholars in China

ABSTRACT Adopting ‘vulnerability’ as an analytical lens and informed by a qualitative case study approach, the present study investigates two Chinese scholars’ academic writing and publishing practice. The findings reveal different sources and forms of vulnerability that influenced the participants’ professional engagements, social interactions and emotional experiences in academic writing and publishing. The findings also demonstrate how the participants developed their advanced academic literacy about writing and micropolitical literacy about publishing to cope with potential vulnerability, and went on to construct their preferred identities as academic researchers and writers. The paper ends with some practical implications on how to promote a supportive and sustainable publishing culture in higher education.

Advanced academic literacy development: a case study of a successful Chinese doctoral student

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the process and its effect for a doctoral student's advanced academic literacy (AAL) development in the context of student-supervisor relationship (SSR). The data sources comprise an authentic three-year tutorial record and 68 reflective learning journals written by a successful Chinese doctoral student of linguistics. The case shows that the participant developed a cognitive, cooperative, dialogic and instructive student-supervisor relationship and her learning activities in doctoral education are rich and constructive. The participant built her expertise mainly through knowledge acquisition and by a significant amount of academic writing practice for publication. Aided by her supervisor, the participant successfully joined as a research member the given sociocultural community. This socialisation promotes her professional identity transformation. The findings also reveal some weaknesses in the participant's AAL development, such as a lack of solid theoretical knowledge base, meaningful peer interaction, and in-depth integration into the international academic community.

Nominal stance construction in L1 and L2 students' writing

The study of stance and how academic writers convey an attitude to their material and readers has become an important area of teaching research in EAP in recent years (Hyland & Guinda, 2012). A relatively neglected means of stance expression, however, has been the Noun Complement structure. This study examines this structure as a nominal stance construction which is associated with students' advanced academic literacy. Through a corpus-based contrastive interlanguage analysis, this study compares the use of this stance construction in argumentative essays of 366 Chinese university students (L2) with those of 82 American students (L1) of similar age and educational level. Results show that the L2 students use significantly fewer instances of this construction especially in the event, discourse and cognition types of stance nouns, which are bound up with the generic conventions of argumentative essays. But they show a propensity to invest personal affect by pre-modifying the stance nouns with attitudinal adjectives and first-person possessives. The paper discusses a number of issues raised by the research and makes pedagogical suggestions for EAP writing instruction.

“Blogfolios” and their role in the development of research projects in an advanced academic literacy class for ESL students

This paper focuses on “blogfolios”, online interactive blog-based portfolios, developed by students for class projects in Electronic Literacy. Blogfolios may contain interactive images, podcasts, and web-log discussions on a variety of researched academic topics. The impact of academic blogfolios on the second language learner’s ability to develop and present quality academic research is explained.

The Challenges of Writing Exposition: Lessons From a Study of ELL and Non-ELL High School Students

The purposes of the study we describe here were (a) to identify the challenges that English Language Learner and non–English Language Learner high school students in an urban public school district experience when composing in the genre of exposition, a genre considered to be central to advanced academic literacy; and (b) to relate these challenges to characteristics of the writing they produce. We present a descriptive inventory of the challenges these adolescents faced when composing in the genre of exposition and also compare the challenges that the 2 groups experienced both in relation to each other and in relation to characteristics of the writing they produced. Finally, we relate our findings to implications for improving writing instruction and assessment for adolescents.

Literary intertextuality in genre-based pedagogies: Building lexical cohesion in fifth-grade L2 writing

Literary narrative is a highly privileged genre in subject English classrooms in school and university contexts. This article investigates how an explicit instructional focus on the language in this literary genre supported language minority students in developing advanced academic literacy. Through a systemic functional linguistics and ethnographic analytic framework, the study explores how an urban school teacher's genre-based pedagogy in literature, implemented with the support of a professional development initiative, afforded her 5th grade students with a meta linguistic awareness of how to use an expanded repertoire of linguistic choices in their genre writing. An SFL analysis of students’ texts over the course of five months reveals how the teacher's explicit focus on intertextuality encouraged her language minority students to borrow and play with lexical patterns, such as repetition, taxonomic categorization, and synonymy from children's literature, to build the genre sequences in their narratives and other academic writing. The concluding section of the paper discusses possible implications, including the importance of an explicit instructional focus on literature as an intertextual resource in teaching writing.

Three ESL students writing a policy paper assignment: An activity-analytic perspective

How university students write from sources has been an issue of long-standing interest among researchers of advanced academic literacy. Previous research in this regard in the context of L2 writing has tended to focus on novices' textual borrowing; less attention has been given to exploring the potential light that theories from other intellectual domains may shed upon students' process of source-based academic writing. The study to be reported in this paper used activity theory as an analytic tool to examine three ESL students' activities of fulfilling a policy paper assignment at a university in Hong Kong. In the paper I present a description of the activity system concerned and its internal contradictions, characterize the sequences of actions that constituted the individual students' activities, and analyze the students' source-use practices in terms of their efforts to address a set of source-bound systemic tensions. At the end of the paper I propose a few lines of future explorations using activity theory as a heuristic to study literacy activities in academic contexts.

Entering the conversation: reaction papers in advanced academic literacy

Amongst academics working with postgraduate students, there has recently been increasing interest in ways of supporting advanced academic literacy (AAL). This is a concern for us at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where we teach a diverse group of postgraduate students, most of whom are subject practitioners in higher education but newcomers to the study of education. We argue that the development of AAL cannot be taken for granted – it needs to be mediated and practised in situated tasks. Our concern is how most effectively, within our context, to encourage awareness of the underlying, often unarticulated norms for participation in this complex social interaction with a disciplinary community to which our students are newcomers. In this article we demonstrate that the use of reaction papers provides opportunities for legitimate peripheral participation in both the cognitive and social processes of AAL.

PhD topic arrangement in ‘D’iscourse communities of engineers and social sciences/humanities

This article is the result of a grounded theory investigation into the ways PhD topics are assigned by supervisors in engineering and selected by students in the social sciences/humanities in UK universities, broadly referred to as ‘topic arrangement’, which can be regarded as one aspect of academic socialisation into academic Discourse communities. Interview data was collected from thirteen Iranian PhD students studying in different UK universities and six of their supervisors during 2000–2001. One further interview was conducted with a professor of sociology. The interviews were transcribed, thematically coded, and analysed using NUD.IST. The results show that PhD students themselves often select PhD topics in the social sciences/humanities, whereas PhD topics are often assigned to PhD students by engineering supervisors. The reason for this difference in practice between these two fields seems to stem from different ideologies on what constitutes a PhD across disciplines, as well as funded projects, which are more likely to be available to engineering supervisors and students. Throughout the paper, a modest attempt has been made to draw the attention of EAP practitioners to a redefinition of the concept of Discourse with a big ‘D’, which includes linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of advanced academic literacy.

Reading & writing

06–273Andrews, Richard (York U, UK; rja3@york.ac.uk), Carole Torgerson, Sue Beveton, Allison Freeman, Terry Locke, Graham Lowe, Alison Robinson & Die Zhu, The effect of grammar teaching on writing development. British Educational Research Journal (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 32.1 (2006), 39–55.06–274Astika, Gusti (Satya Wacana U, Salatiga, Indonesia; astika@uksw.edu), A task-based approach to reading English for specialised purposes. English in Australia (www.englishaustralia.com.au) 22.2 (2005), 14 pp.06–275Ayoola, Kehinde A. (Lagos State Polytechnic, Ikorodu, Nigeria; kehinday77@yahoo.co.uk), Challenges to a new generation of Nigerian writers in English. English Today (Cambridge University Press) 22.1 (2006), 3–9.06–276Banerjee, Jayanti & Dianne Wall (Lancaster U, UK; j.banerjee@lancaster.ac.uk), Assessing and reporting performances on pre-sessional EAP courses: Developing a final assessment checklist and investigating its validity. Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Elsevier) 5.1 (2006), 50–69.06–277Bitchener, John (Auckland U Technology, New Zealand; john.bitchener@aut.ac.nz) & Helen Basturkmen, Perceptions of the difficulties of postgraduate L2 thesis students writing the discussion section. Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Elsevier) 5.1 (2006), 4–18.06–278Brantmeier, Cindy (Washington U, USA; cbrantme@artsci.wustl.edu), Advanced L2 learners and reading placement: Self-assessment, CBT, and subsequent performance. System (Elsevier) 34.1 (2006), 15–35.06–279Byrne, Brian (U New England, USA; bbyrne@une.edu.au), Richard K. Olson, Stefan Samuelsson, Sally Wadsworth, Robin Corley, John C. DeFries & Erik Willcutt, Genetic and environmental influences on early literacy. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 29.1 (2006), 33–49.06–280Castles, Anne (U Melbourne, Australia; acastles@unimelb.edu.au), Timothy Bates, Max Coltheart, Michelle Luciano & Nicholas G. Martin, Cognitive modelling and the behaviour genetics of reading. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 29.1 (2006), 92–103.06–281Cheng, An (Oklahoma State U, USA; an.cheng@okstate.edu), Understanding learners and learning in ESP genre-based writing instruction. English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier) 25.1 (2006), 76–89.06–282Conlon, Elizabeth G., Melanie J. Zimmer-Gembeck, Peter A. Creed & Melinda Tucker (Griffith U, Australia; e.conlon@griffith.edu.au), Family history, self-perceptions, attitudes and cognitive abilities are associated with early adolescent reading skills. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 29.1 (2006), 11–32.06–283Fitze, Michael (Dubai Women's College, Dubai), Discourse and participation in ESL face-to-face and written electroncic conferences.Language Learning & Technology (http://llt.msu.edu/intro.html) 10.1 (2006), 67–86.06–284Grigorenko, Elena L. (Yale U, USA & Moscow State U, Russia; elena.grigorenko@yale.edu), Damaris Ngorosho, Matthew Jukes & Donald Bundy, Reading in able and disabled readers from around the world: same or different? An illustration from a study of reading-related processes in a Swahili sample of siblings. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 29.1 (2006), 104–123.06–285Halleck, Gene B. (Oklahoma State U, USA; halleck@okstate.edu) & Ulla M. Connor, Rhetorical moves in TESOL conference proposals. Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Elsevier) 5.1 (2006), 70–86.06–286Hayiou-Thomas, Marianna E. (U York, UK; m.hayiou-thomas@psychology.york.ac.uk), Nicole Harlaar, Philip S. Dale & Robert Plomin, Genetic and environmental mediation of the prediction from preschool language and nonverbal ability to 7-year reading. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 29.1 (2006), 50–74.06–287Hood, Susan (U Technology, Sydney, Australia; sue.hood@uts.edu.au), The persuasive power of prosodies: Radiating values in academic writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Elsevier) 5.1 (2006), 37–49.06–288Keenan, Janice M. (U Denver, USA; jkeenan@du.edu), Rebecca S. Betjemann, Sally J. Wadsworth, John C. DeFries & Richard K. Olson, Genetic and environmental influences on reading and listening comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading (Blackwell) 29.1 (2006), 75–91.06–289Koutsantoni, Dimitra (U Birmingham, UK; dkoutsantoni@yahoo.com), Rhetorical strategies in engineering research articles and research theses: Advanced academic literacy and relations of power. Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Elsevier) 5.1 (2006), 19–36.06–290Kwan, Becky S. C. (Hong Kong Baptist U, Hong Kong, China; becky@hkbu.edu.hk), The schematic structure of literature reviews in doctoral theses of applied linguistics.English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier) 25.1 (2006), 30–55.06–291Lee, David & John Swales (Nagoya U, Japan; david_lee00@hotmail.com), A corpus-based EAP course for NNS doctoral students: Moving from available specialized corpora to self-compiled corpora. English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier) 25.1 (2006), 56–75.06–292Okamura, A. (Takasaki City U of Economics, Japan; okamura@tcue.ac.jp), Two types of strategies used by Japanese scientists, when writing research articles in English. System (Elsevier) 34.1 (2006), 68–79.06–293Pecorari, Diane (Mälardalen U, Sweden; Diane.Pecorari@mdh.se), Visible and occluded citation features in postgraduate second-language writing. English for Specific Purposes (Elsevier) 25.1 (2006), 4–29.06–294Piller, Bonnie & Mary Jo Skillings (California State U, San Bernardino, USA; bpiller@csusb.edu), English language teaching strategies used by primary teachers in one New Delhi, India, school. TESL-EJ (www.tesl-ej.org) 9.3 (2005), 23 pp.

Reading & writing

Reading & writing

Rhetorical strategies in engineering research articles and research theses: Advanced academic literacy and relations of power

Research articles and research theses constitute two key genres used by scientific communities for the dissemination and ratification of knowledge. Both genres are produced at advanced stages of individuals' enculturation in disciplinary communities present original research aim to persuade the academic community to accept new knowledge claims, and are the result of social negotiations between authors and disciplinary gatekeepers. However, despite their similarities, these two academic genres differ as regards the status of their authors in academic discourse communities and the power asymmetries between themselves and disciplinary gatekeepers. Awareness of these differences in relations of power and of the social forces behind the formation of genres, which are constituents of advanced academic literacy, defines the rhetorical strategies used by the authors of these two genres. This is revealed by a comparison of 17 research articles and nine samples of research theses from the fields of electronic and chemical engineering. The analysis of the texts focuses on the density and function of hedges and, in particular, discourse-based strategic hedges and of their personal or impersonal expression. The analysis indicates that students hedge more than expert authors and virtually wholly refrain from taking personal responsibility for their claims. Expert authors, on the other hand, hedge less than the students and often use personally attributed hedges. The comparison additionally indicates differences in the frequency of certain types of strategic hedges between RA authors and students.

EFL writers' social networks: Impact on advanced academic literacy development

For non-native English writers, second language (L2) advanced academic literacy encompasses knowledge of the rhetorical, linguistic, social and cultural features of academic discourse as well as knowledge of English as used by their academic disciplines. Literacy is acquired through a socialization process embedded in social practice, patterned by social institutions [ Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community. London: Routledge ] and interactions between learners and their academic discourse community members. These interactions may also be identified as a writer's social network, which, in turn, may influence the writer's attitude to second language academic literacy acquisition. Adopting a social network perspective, this paper poses two questions: (1) What type of relationships do English as a Foreign Language (EFL) graduate students form in order to develop L2 academic literacy? (2) What impact do these relationships have on students' acquisition of L2 academic literacy and writing. The results suggest that the composition of a writer's social network affects L2 advanced academic literacy acquisition and practice as disciplinary communication. Implications for FL practitioners are considered.

“It's like a story”: Rhetorical knowledge development in advanced academic literacy

In the academic ranks of schooling, writing tasks move gradually from a focus on the transmission of knowledge to the transformation of knowledge. As a more complex writing task, knowledge-transforming requires writers to engage in the rhetorical act of persuading readers of their work's value, significance, and credibility. At the graduate level, writers may be wrestling with these issues for the first time, often discovering this more occluded rhetorical dimension only after they have become somewhat more comfortable with issues of generic form or subject-matter content. This paper explores the nature and role of rhetorical knowledge in advanced academic literacy through the writing of two multilingual writers. As these writers engage in high-stakes writing tasks, their rhetorical knowledge of disciplinary writing becomes more explicit and more sophisticated, influenced by mentoring, disciplinary participation, identity, and task exigency.

Points of focus and position: Intertextual reference in PhD theses

This paper investigates the nature of texts produced for assessment at the highest level of advanced academic literacy: PhD theses. Eight theses from within a single department (Agricultural Botany) at a British university are the subject of study, and the contexts in which these texts were written are investigated through interviews with the supervisors. The notion of a genre of the PhD thesis is problematized and it is argued that a genre-analytic approach can be highly generative. Finally, the ways that the writers manipulate focus and position within their texts is explored through an investigation of citation practices in the theses.

Journal of English for Academic Purposes Special Issue: Advanced Academic Literacy

Journal of English for Academic Purposes Special Issue: Advanced Academic Literacy