Expert Writers Research Articles

Corpus Routes and Experiments in Language Teaching

Corpus quantitative approach in teaching, which is of growing interest, entails some revision of the L2 vocabulary selection procedures and provides solutions for a wide range of practical problems. The focus throughout is on the discussion of research on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of language which both teaching content and language acquisition practice could draw on. This research regards human language as a rank distribution, which has serious implications on quantitative aspect of learner’s vocabulary. We also looked into the ways to factor in the data from a small professional discourse corpus in order to target the units that have the greatest statistical prominence. Both BNC and our own collection of texts are explored. The study also elaborates on academic writing cohesive devices and grammar patterns introduction, which is approached through concordancing corpus strings to (i) provide frequency evidence and (ii) introduce a contrast in usage in various corpus genres. Striking differences that are evidenced by the frequency lists could be related not only to register, but also to the choice and instances of academic cohesive clusters which are favoured by the apprentice writers and the expert writers. With the aim of capitalizing on corpus approach a number of small-scale corpus research tasks were developed. This study also uses corpus tools and data to give a seemingly subjective phenomenon of hedging some quantitative measurement. While experimenting on corpus in the classroom, the attention of learners was drawn to various means of hedging, such as lexical bundles or down-toners that manifest themselves as important communicative strategies. Thus, corpus was used to inform both the language instructor and the student in the classroom to look in detail at differences in the use of lexical and grammatical units in different varieties of language, address contrasting register variations, and readily provide contemporary professionally relevant examples of actual language usage. It has to be noted that university students have a tendency not to perceive register violations as language errors on a par with those of grammar, lexis or punctuation. Hence, corpus investigation as raising awareness tool also proved to be an effective teaching material generator. Nowadays syllabi have the opportunity to be rather sensitive to the quantitative evidence that corpora offer us; what is more, as a result of this study, we would conclude that university students are responsive to the small-scale investigation of register differences, lexico-grammatical frequency and patterning, which have been brought directly into the L2 classroom.

Understanding the Sustainable Growth of EFL Students’ Writing Skills: Differences between Novice and Expert Writers in Their Use of Lexical Bundles in Academic Writing

Lexical bundles, as building blocks of discourse, play vital roles in helping members from the same academic community achieve successful communication and disseminate sustainable disciplinary knowledge. However, little attention has been paid to lexical bundles in postgraduate writing. Drawing on Biber et al.’s (1999) structural taxonomy and Hyland’s (2008a) functional taxonomy, we identified and compared lexical bundles in two self-built corpora, an EFL student writing corpus and an expert writing corpus. The results indicate considerable structural differences between the two groups: the student writers used verb phrase-based bundles more frequently and prepositional phrase-based and noun phrase-based bundles less frequently. In terms of function, although the two academic groups showed similar distributions of the three main functional categories, as student writers they exhibited insufficient reader-awareness and incomplete knowledge of stance expressions. It is hoped that the findings will shed light on future pedagogical practices to help novice writers improve their academic writing competence as a sustainable goal in enhancing their academic scholarship.

Interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers in research articles of Indonesian expert writers

Academic writing articles serve as the medium of communication among scholars to share knowledge and new inquiries and are made in such a way that the idea they deliver is both understandable and accepted. One essential action to accomplish this is by employing metadiscourse markers. Metadiscourse is viewed as an essential element of credible written texts created by students of ESL and native speakers, by which the intelligibility of communication in research articles can be accomplished through suitable discipline conscience, norms, and belief to track the writers’ pathway to academic promotions. Therefore, employing descriptive qualitative approach, this study aims at investigating the utilization of interpersonal metadiscourse markers and their functions in academic writing. Analysing discussion section of research articles written by Indonesian expert writers, the results show that the metadiscourse markers in the articles are found to be similar to the commonly used markers among academic community, including interactive and interactional markers. Moreover, the employment of markers in the articles reveal the functions of them to indicate relation between sentences, involvement of readers, existence of example, limitation of commitment to propositions, emphasis on general practice and certainty, and reference to the writer.
 HIGHLGHTS:
 
 The appropriate utilization of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers in research articles indicates the international norm of academic writing. 
 The Indonesian expert writer articles fulfill the intelligibility of communication in international research articles. 
 The writing course in the universities needs to emphasize the essential functions of metadiscourse markers.

Disciplinary Recognized Self-Presence: Self-Mention Used With Hedges and Boosters in PhD Students’ Research Writing

Despite the existing extensive research on stance markers such as hedges, boosters, and self-mention in academic writing, few studies, however, examined the co-occurrence of these stance markers to help authors project their identities in writing. In this study, we examine how self-mention with boosters and hedges are used by writers of different groups to manifest authorial presence and what functions they realize in research writing. Two self-compiled corpora were constructed to compare the discursive practice between Chinese PhD students and journal article writers from four disciplines in hard applied and hard pure science. In general, student writers use fewer self-mention with boosters but more self-mention with hedges than expert writers. An examination of the rhetorical functions of these devices shows that both expert and student writers employ most self-mention with boosters for presenting research findings, but students are more inclined to invest self-mention with boosters than expert writers when describing research procedures or elaborating arguments. Meanwhile, self-mention with hedges are mostly used for elaborating arguments, but compared with expert writers, students seem to overly obscure their presence in this function.

Learning to be expert writers: feedback in secondary English

ABSTRACT Feedback is a cultural tool through which English teachers can facilitate secondary students’ evaluative expertise in their writing development. While there is increased concern to use feedback to enhance learning at all educational levels, there is currently little empirical knowledge of how secondary teachers of English design feedback for complex appraisal. Using data from two qualitative studies, this paper explores practices drawing on Anglophone cultures of secondary schooling for subject English. Observation, artefact and interview data are analysed using a socio-cultural theoretical lens. Cultural tools including student planners, peer feedback and discussion linked students’ self-regulated learning to community norms for evaluating written texts. Two distinctive feedback conditions for written texts in the school subject of English are identified: the disciplinary practices of evaluation of texts within community cultural values, and the role of cultural tools in co-regulation of learning in the classroom context.

A Corpus-Based Study on Phrasal Complexity in Computer Science Abstracts of Novice and Advanced Writers

The correlation between phrasal complexity and L2 writers’ writing proficiency has been confirmed by numerous studies, among which the empirical studies on measuring of L2 writing have attracted much attention in English for academic purposes. Based on the hypothesized developmental indices of noun phrase modifications, this study examines, from the corpus-driven approach, the linguistic realization of phrasal complexity on abstracts written by international advanced academic writers and Chinese graduate L2 writers of computer science. The results show that while both groups illustrated the developmental stages of academic writing, many complexity measures of noun phrase modifiers significantly distinguish L2 learners from expert writers, especially in post-modifiers. The findings thus support previous studies on writing developmental stages, presenting a thorough understanding of graduate L2 writers’ and advanced writers’ of EAP writing through analysis of pre-modifiers and post-modifiers.

Informing Academic Writing Pedagogy through the Study of Phrase-frames

Second Language Development (SLD) research has investigated aspects of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) to understand how English language learners (ELLs) develop linguistic faculties related to language production, especially in academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010; Biber, Gray & Ponpoon, 2011; Kyle & Crossley, 2018; Lu & Ai, 2015). Contributing to the current body of SLD research, this study addresses complexity in expert academic argumentative essays by investigating language at the phrasal level through phrase-frames (PFs). Phrase-frames are fixed or semi-fixed syntactic structures with a variable slot that might be considered another measure of syntactic complexity. This study aimed to identify if native and non-native expert writers in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) displayed significant differences in their use of these frames concerning their predictability, variability, and function. Results of the study indicated expert academic writers in this corpus use highly variable, highly unpredictable structures which confirm the complexity, elaboration, and explicitness unique to the academic register. Understanding of these register features through the identified PFs was used to develop sample pedagogical materials to promote more complex writing in academic genres.

Stance Markers in Expert versus Novice English Academic Writing in Applied Linguistics

Stance, as a category of metadiscourse, involves a writer-oriented dimension in which writers express a textual voice to convey their judgments and commitments to potential readers. The present study investigates the use of stance markers in English academic writing with a focus on the degrees of academic expertise. The study has compiled two corpora, one consisting of novice writing (i.e., master’s theses written by Korean graduate students) and the other consisting of expert writing (i.e., published research articles) drawn from the discipline of applied linguistics, and has analyzed both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of stance practices within these corpora. The quantitative findings indicated that Korean novice writers employed significantly fewer stance markers than expert writers. The two groups of writers also made different choices in the employment of stance devices in different sections of research articles. Meanwhile, the qualitative analysis revealed that Korean novice writers often used inappropriate combinations of hedges and boosters, thereby failing to make an effective appeal to readers about their arguments. In addition, self-mentions were used differently by novice and expert writers, with only the latter group exploiting this category to maximize the perceived significance of their own research in the academic field. These findings are discussed in terms of pedagogical implications for EAP writing.

Metadiscursive Nouns in Conclusion Subsections of Novice Writers’ PhD Dissertation and Expert Writers’ Research Articles

Academic discourse is the product of agreement negotiation among members in academic communities. The primary rhetorical function of academic discourse is to persuade the readers into agreeing upon the writers’ claims. This rhetorical function can be embodied through textual linking and stance expressing realized by linguistic devices. Metadiscursive nouns, as an extension and supplementation of metadiscourse, combine these two functions and contribute to the cohesion of textual organization and the conveying of writers’ stance. This study explores the difference in the employment of this linguistic device in PhD dissertation written by Chinses advanced English learners as novice writers and research articles published in international journals written by expert writers in the field of foreign linguistics and applied linguistics. The purpose of this study is to reveal the different ways of knowledge construction by means of metadiscursive nouns in the two genres and the interactional conventions embedded in the academic communities. Explicit instruction strategies are provided to enhance the pedagogical practice in academic writing.

Identity Construction in Academic Writing of Student Writers Who Use English as an Additional Language: A Literature Review1

Abstract Academic writing is social interaction between writer and reader, during which writers can employ discursive and non-discursive features to construct their identities. However, many student writers who are users of English as an additional language (EAL) may find it challenging to construct their identities in academic writing. Properly constructed identity in academic writing can help EAL student writers develop a stronger sense of self, exercise their agency, and negotiate the academic discourse. Therefore, this paper reviews empirical studies on EAL student writers’ identity construction when they write in English to investigate the features of identities that EAL student writers construct in texts and the factors that influence their identity construction. The findings show that, compared with expert writers and native-English-speaking (NES) counterparts, EAL student writers tend to present a weak authorial identity. Furthermore, EAL student writers tend to be more engaged with texts than with readers and lack commitment to their claims. The identities that EAL student writers construct in academic writing are also interwoven with EAL students’ English proficiency levels, educational experience, disciplinary conventions, genre affordances, and audience awareness. The findings of this literature review can help teachers and educators raise EAL students’ identity awareness and facilitate students in strategically constructing writer identities in academic writing.

‘According to…’: The impact of language background and writing expertise on textual priming patterns of multi-word sequences in academic writing

This paper investigates the impact of language background and writing expertise on textual priming patterns with a focus on textual position and semantic association of the multi-word sequence according to… in English research papers. Comparisons were made on the usages of according to…in four corpora of English research papers, covering writing by Chinese-speaking learners of English (L2 learners), L1-English novice writers and two groups of L1-English experts who differed in their disciplinary membership. Results show that L2 learners and L1 experts tend to use according to… in different textual positions. Specifically, L2 learners exhibit a strong bias towards using the sequence at the very beginning of paragraph-initial sentences whereas L1 experts prefer to use it in the second half of non-initial sentences. In addition, L2 and L1 usages demonstrate differences in semantic categories associated with according to…. However, few differences were found between L1 novice and expert writers in either textual positions or corresponding semantic categories. We argue that establishing textual priming patterns of multi-word sequences could be challenging for L2 learners due to L1 transfer as well as insufficient L2 exposure. Pedagogical interventions are recommended to teach priming patterns of multi-word sequences in English for Academic Purposes.

Lectura, escritura y oralidad en perfiles de egreso de educación superior: contrastes entre instituciones y carreras

La llamada "sociedad del conocimiento" requiere escritores y oradores expertos, que participen en contextos ciudadanos, administrativos y profesionales complejos y dinámicos. Sin embargo, estudios previos sugieren que esta formación se relega al currículum oculto en educación superior. Este artículo busca identificar la presencia de la lectura, la escritura y la oralidad en algunos instrumentos curriculares clave del sistema de educación superior chileno. Se seleccionaron diez universidades con rasgos institucionales diferenciados y cinco carreras diversas; se recolectaron 50 perfiles de egreso públicos y diez modelos educativos; y se codificaron cualitativamente las competencias letradas implícitas y explícitas, junto con las concepciones subyacentes, con cuantificación posterior. Los resultados muestran que la lectura, la escritura y la oralidad aparecen invisibilizadas o con baja frecuencia y con una visión reproductiva y generalista en los perfiles de egreso universitarios chilenos, en particular en carreras como Pedagogía en Educación Básica. A partir de estos hallazgos, se sugiere que los procesos de innovación por competencias y acreditación de carreras e instituciones estén informados por una concepción contemporánea de la lectura, la escritura y la oralidad como competencias complejas, retóricas, epistémicas y disciplinarmente situadas, que requieren un lugar explícito y un compromiso institucional en la formación de profesionales.

Examining Engagement in the Discussion Section of Marketing Research Articles

Studies have shown that the use of Engagement resources is a subtle task for research article writers, making the appropriate use of such resources a complex topic for less experienced writers. For this reason, the present study examined expert writers' ways of positioning their work in marketing research articles on Discussion sections to highlight how Engagement resources can be managed successfully. Drawing on the Engagement subsystem of the Appraisal Framework nine Discussion sections were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively using the UAM corpus tool. The analysis revealed that the Discussion sections were highly heteroglossic, and had contractive resources twice as much as expansive ones, suggesting that marketing academics are more concerned with establishing their credibility as knowers in the field than construing a reader-friendly text. It is also observed that academics in the marketing field tend to focus more on proclaiming their findings in the Discussion section while at the same time mitigating the communicative force of their argument by using tentative language, creating a subtle balance between claim-making and acceptance of potentially differing views. The findings of the present study can offer insights for academic writing materials' developers, novice researchers, and academic writing instructors.

Connecting Lexical Bundles and Moves by Korean EAP Students at Different Academic Levels

This corpus-based study explores a group of lexical bundles identified in a corpus of research article (RA) introductions written by first language (L1) English expert writers and two corpora of those of term papers written by same second language (L2) Korean English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students across two different academic levels. In order to examine whether Korean EAP students are developing rhetorical acquisition in connecting these lexical bundles and moves, the identified 4+-word bundles in the three corpora were classified into three functional categories. Adopting the revised model based on Swales’ (1990, 2004) Create A Research Space (CARS) model for the L1 corpus and a corpus-driven approach for the two L2 corpora, the moves/steps of the three corpora that achieve corresponding communicative functions were identified. Using a bottom-up manner, the identified bundles were matched to the moves/steps which fulfill communicative functions of RA introductions. Findings indicate that L1-English writers and two groups of EAP students have different priorities for selecting lexical bundles in terms of function in each move/step and that EAP students use significantly more stance bundles than L1 writers. This study provides pedagogical implications of acquisition in bundle-move connection from a developmental perspective by comparing two groups of L2 student writing with L1 writing as a yardstick.

Syntactic complexity across registers: Investigating (in)formality in second-language writing

Syntactic complexity (i.e. the grammatical sophistication exhibited in language production) has been found to be positively correlated with formality. In viewing formality as a cline rather than as a dichotomy, the present study revisits previous claims about (in)formality in learner writing in relation to syntactic complexity. The use of commonly utilized measures of syntactic complexity is explored in learner writing and across four registers from the British National Corpus (academic prose, popular science, news and fiction). The results show that while the learners generally exhibited appropriate register awareness, there were some differences noted between their writing and that of the published writers, in particular with regard to the measure of complex nominals. A detailed analysis of this measure in the academic register showed that the learners make less frequent use of adjectival and prepositional modifiers than the expert writers. Our results thus confirm previous claims about the importance of phrase-level complexity measures as a predictor of formality. It would seem that learners would benefit from some targeted instruction of such structures for increased register awareness.

Exploring the ‘black box’: What happens in a dialogic classroom?

The present study analysed the teaching-learning strategies taking place in classrooms where an educational innovation was implemented. This study is a sequel to a broader, quantitative year-long study by Rojas-Drummond et al. (2016). The latter, original study, included 120 sixth-graders from two (experimental and control) state schools. Both groups solved an individual and group pre- and post-intervention Test of Textual Production. Between tests, children from the experimental group participated in a program called ’Learning Together’, which promoted scaffolding, collaborative problem-solving and dialogic interactions. Five lessons from experimental and control groups were video-recorded throughout the year. Macro-analyses carried out as part of the original study revealed that the experimental group (in comparison with the control), learned to compose higher quality written articles when working in small-groups and independently. In the present study, we carried out fine-grained analyses of selected lessons from each group to understand how the achievements of ’Learning Together’ children might have come about. Results showed that the teaching-learning strategies of the control group tended to be directive and transmissional and literacy was addressed in a somewhat fragmented and decontextualised way. In contrast, the ’Learning Together’ classroom practices showed an orientation towards the joint construction of knowledge among teachers and students through dialogic interactions and co-regulatory processes, as well as the promotion of literacy as an articulated, situated social practice. W. hypothesise that these contrasting teaching-learning styles partly account for why ’Learning Together’ participants became more expert writers by the end of the academic year, in contrast with their control peers.

Authorial voice in academic writing

Academic writers represent themselves in their texts in different ways, notably through use of first person pronouns to construct an authorial voice and enhance arguments. This study examines how expert writers in the disciplines of Literature and Computer Science use first person pronouns. The hypothesis is that in the absence of objective fact, Literature writers resort to frequent use of first person pronouns backed by stronger authorial roles to build credibility and convince readers, while Computer Science writers avoid first person pronouns in line with conventional wisdom in the hard sciences. The findings suggest that the general dichotomy between hard and soft sciences regarding first person pronouns usage may not apply in all cases. Our study discusses the similarities and differences in the disciplinary conventions in Literature and Computer Science, thus making contributions towards pedagogy and scholarship of the role of first person pronouns in voice construction in academic texts

The rhetorical functions of syntactically complex sentences in social science research article introductions

There have been increasing calls for research attention to the linguistic realizations of rhetorical functions in academic writing. Research in this area has so far focused primarily on lexical and phraseological features. While numerous studies have investigated the relationship of syntactic complexity to language proficiency, development, and writing quality, research examining the rhetorical functions of complex syntactic structures is scant. This study analyzes the rhetorical functions of syntactically complex sentences in the Corpus of Social Science Research Article Introductions, which contains the introduction sections of 600 published research articles in six social science disciplines. All samples were annotated for rhetorical moves and steps using an adapted version of Swales’ (2004) revised Create a Research Space model, and all sentences were assessed for syntactic complexity using multiple measures of global complexity, finite subordination, clausal elaboration, and phrasal complexity. Results revealed significant variation in syntactic complexity among sentences realizing different rhetorical functions and expert writers’ employment of complex structures to realize different rhetorical goals. The implications of our findings for academic writing research, pedagogy and assessment are discussed.

The use of genitive citations in academic writing

Citation, an indispensable feature of academic English writing, is often regarded as an indication of the degree of sophistication in academic writing. Building on previous studies that have shown the importance of integral citation in academic writing, this study investigates one of the subcategories of integral citation: “genitive citation” (e.g., Smith's study, where ’s denotes a possessive relationship: the study is in Smith's possession, so Smith is the possessor, study is the possessee). Based on a corpus of 82 articles collected from the discipline of applied linguistics, with 41 from six leading international journals written by experts and 41 from the MICUSP linguistics sub-corpus written by college students, this study renders a cognitive semantic analysis of (a) the possessee nominals in genitive constructions and (b) the evaluative functions of genitive citations. Based on the specificity of cue validity, possessee nominals are classified into three types: 1) research-as-a-whole; 2) ideological; and 3) methodological. The analysis yields the following results. First, genitive citations are commonly used by both experts and students, with the use of s-genitive citations significantly outnumbering that of the of-genitives. Second, expert writers prefer possessee nominals with specific meanings while student writers tend to use words with less specificity, especially in terms of methodological possessee nominals. Third, in terms of evaluative function, the expert writers’ s-genitive citations include much more sophisticated employment of engagement and attitude resources than those used by student writers, though both groups make extensive use of this structure. Based on the analysis, the study proposes a semantic framework for classifying possessee nominals in s-genitive citations. Limitations of the study and implications for future research are also discussed.

Dialogic interactions, co-regulation and the appropriation of text composition abilities in primary school children

Abstract This qualitative study analyses the interplay between dialogic interactions, co-regulation and the appropriation of text composition abilities in Mexican primary school children. The report is a sequel to a broader, quantitative year-long study by Rojas-Drummond et al. (2016). The latter included 120 sixth-graders from two (experimental and control) schools. Both groups solved an individual and group pre- and post-intervention Test of Textual Production. Between tests, experimental children participated in a programme called ‘Learning Together’, which emphasises dialogic interactions and collaborative learning. Macro-analyses revealed that the experimental group (in comparison with the control), learned to compose higher quality written articles, not only when working in small-groups but also independently. To understand how these achievements might have come about, in the present paper we report fine-grained micro-analyses of the dialogic interactions and co-regulatory processes of four ‘focal triads’ while working in collaborative writing activities at the start and end of the academic year. Results showed that the experimental focal triads (in comparison with their control peers) gradually learned to interact in a more collaborative, dialogic, strategic and reflexive way, co-regulating their actions. We hypothesise that these changes might be key in the evolving process of Learning Together participants becoming more expert writers.