Genre Analysis Research Articles

Selection of a Topic of a Research Proposal of Emerging Academic Writers in a Blended Linked EAP Course: An Interactional Ethnographic Perspective

AbstractRecent years have witnessed the ethnographic turn in academic writing research and the multimodal turn in classroom discourse studies. Most research proposal genre studies have only provided generic guidelines, and most EAP intervention studies have only provided pre‐ and post‐intervention learning outcomes but have not examined actual in‐depth classroom teaching and after‐class consultative processes of proposal development. This paper fills these gaps by following the view of genre as contextualized social practices and adopting interactional ethnography (IE) logic‐of‐inquiry to analyze video‐recorded linked EAP classroom interactions and WeChat‐mediated individual consultations focusing on postgraduate students' topic selection. IE‐guided reasoning and analysis may make the invisible research topic developmental processes transparent by utilizing IE analytic tools to visualize these dynamic and complex processes, identify cultural patterns of academic literacy practices, and (re)theorize educational phenomena. The IE approach may complement the well‐established three approaches to student writing (i.e., study skills, academic socialization, academic literacies) as the fourth approach for its deep theorizing, micro‐ethnographic discourse‐based analysis, and video‐enabled IE‐guided analytic tools. This study may make a methodological contribution to the EAP field through the IE as an epistemology with analytical tools and propose a tri‐level four‐step IE analytic model for teacher‐researchers' self‐reflexive professional development.

THE ISSUE OF MODERN KAZAKH POSTMODERNISM AND NEO-MYTHOLOGISM IS IN THE ASPECT OF NATIONAL KNOWLEDGE (BASED ON THE STORIES OF A. KEMELBAYEVA)

The article considers the development of the postmodernism in Kazakh, Russian, and French literature. The research is based on M. Epstein’s theory about the formation of the direction of post-Soviet postmodernism. The theoretical basis of the study was considered in the light of the opinions of such researchers as N. Kuchina, S. Sheyanova, Ye. Zinurova, M. Gontar, A. Maulenov, S. Takirov, S. Altybayeva, N.Syzdykbayev, D. Kaliakbar, B. Syzdykova, A. Kairbekova, B. Orazova. The practical significance of the article is determined within the framework of studying the direction of postmodernism in modern Kazakh literature. The means of the direction of postmodernism which have social, philosophical significance, were considered through the phenomenon of intertext. The main means of the phenomenon of intertextuality are the transfer of methods of simulacrum, reminiscence and postmodernism through mythical plots. The stories “Konyrkaz (Grey goose)”, “Tyrnak (Claw)”, “Yesim (Name)”, “Kosmos (Space)” by A. Kemelbayeva, who contributed to the development of postmodernism in Kazakh literature, are analyzed. The techniques of flexible postmodernism dictate the writer's ability to portray society. The paper describes the role as a national code and highlights the ethnographic character while examining issues with folk understanding, national knowledge, and legendary beliefs in the stories of A. Kemelbayeva from the perspective of intertextuality. The author’s use of mythological knowledge in her novels is examined within the context of contemporary postmodern literature and the neomiphologism dilemma. Postmodernism’s foundational concepts of mythical cognition and understanding are portrayed in a nostalgic, retrospective light, taking into account the unique characteristics of the narrative form. The article’s fundamental thesis is that the theory of the hybrid genre in the contemporary narrative system, transformation, is based on the field of neomyphologism.

Design of music recommendation system based on EDA and K-means cluster analysis

This paper describes the construction and analysis of a music recommendation system, through visual and exploratory analysis of the open source dataset of music recommendation system in the UCL database, exploring the relationship between music popularity and music acoustic properties, using the K-means clustering algorithm for clustering analysis of genres and songs, and finally building a music recommendation system that can, based on the user input of music data, to match the ten music songs that best meet the listener's taste. The analyses in this paper show that there is a certain correlation between music popularity and the indicators of sound, danceability, energy, instrumentality, liveliness, loudness, language, rhythm, mood, duration and tone. The indicators of energy, liveliness, loudness and tempo are positively correlated with the popularity of music, while the indicators of mood and duration are negatively correlated with the popularity of music. In addition, this paper uses K-means clustering algorithm to cluster analysis of genres and songs, and shows the similarity and difference between different genres and songs through visualisation, which provides important data support for the construction of music recommendation system. Finally, this paper establishes a music recommendation system based on K-means clustering algorithm, which can match the ten music songs that best meet the listener's taste according to the music data input by the user. The system is intelligent and personalised, and can recommend music works that are more in line with the user's taste based on the user's preferences and historical listening records. The results of this paper provide useful reference and support for the algorithms and models of the music recommendation system, which can be further researched in depth in the future to improve its intelligence and personalisation level and provide users with better music services.

Genre analysis of introduction section in electrical engineering undergraduate laboratory reports.

This study examines the genre of Engineering Laboratory Reports (ELR) introduction section written by Electrical Engineering Undergraduates in a higher learning institution. The aims of this study are to identify the rhetorical moves and combinations of move patterns used by electrical engineering (EE) students to write introduction section. A genre analysis was conducted to identify writing patterns and convention practices of engineering undergraduate students thus a corpus of N = 35 was selected from electrical engineering students in their final year of study. This study adopted Genre Theory as its theoretical framework, Ngowu 1997 analytical framework and BCU approach for analysis procedure. A pilot test was conducted to determine the model that fits the best to describe moves and steps of ELR. Coding scheme was developed and intercoder reliability showed a significance of 0.91 The study benchmarks a move or step to be present in at least 60% of the reports. The finding shows the introduction consists of one main move which is providing background information of the experiment and followed by four subsequent steps which are reference to research purposes, reference to theoretical knowledge in the field, providing an overview of the study and identification of main research apparatus. The move 1 and all four steps identified above are viewed as obligatory, conventional and optional move and steps in introduction section among undergraduates in academic context. The exemplification of finding shows lack of compliance among undergraduates to produce EELR based on university's guideline in discussing previous literature and underpinning theories, lack of referencing and citation, absence in describing apparatus used and non-sequential moves steps. This study posits the importance of collaboration between English for Academic (EAP) practitioners such as English-writing instructors and discipline specific specialist from engineering field to further improve on genre-based writing instruction, and to identify student learning needs. The method employed in this study may be replicated to analyse other sections of scientific and technical reports such as method, result, discussion and conclusion (MRDC) that may pave ways to address grey areas for improvement in this genre.

A Genre-Based Analysis of Political Speeches of Selected Pakistani Prime Ministers in The UN General Assembly

This study consists of gender-based exploration of two political speeches that have been delivered by Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan at the UN General Assembly. This research aims to investigate the cognitive structure of political speeches and uncover the typical strategies employed by selected politicians to achieve their communicative goals. Bhatia's (1993) genre analysis model is taken as theoretical framework. This research is qualitative in nature and it argues that political addresses at the UN Assembly are followed by certain protocols, which distinguish them as a political subcategory. The findings demonstrate that selected prime ministers conform to this genre's structure to advance their political agendas. Additionally, it reveals that both chosen speakers employ similar strategies for the argumentative aspect of their speeches, choosing strategies based on their respective communicative objectives. It is anticipated that this research will pave a road for upcoming scholars by providing novel insights about usefulness of genre analysis in multiple contexts and it also helps them to get a lucid understanding of the political goals and the projected perception of Pakistan on the global stage.

The Textual Organisation of CJEU Judgments

AbstractThis research paper focuses on the comprehensive description and analysis of the structure of judgments from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Despite the growing interest in examining the rhetorical and linguistic aspects of legal texts, the genre structure of judgments has remained a little-explored area. While headings and paragraph enumeration provide a systematic reference system for citation and cross-referencing they do not reveal the dynamic relations between individual text chunks in judgments. The current analysis combines Swales and Bhatia's genre theory with Hoey's approach to patterning in discourse and corpus linguistics analyses. The findings show that the complexity of CJEU judgments extends beyond surface-level information with linguistic expressions playing a crucial role in highlighting dynamic relations and discourse patterning. The results reveal how the structure of CJEU judgments has changed over time and point to the intratextual relations between different sections. Additionally, the study provides a detailed description of the textual organisation of CJEU judgments in terms of move structures and conventionalised discourse patterns.

English for Business Communication: An in Depth Analysis

The English language has a more significant role in our daily contacts in both national and international contexts. The English language has been deeply ingrained in every part of our life due to its global qualities. Outstanding chances for an individual are associated with proficiency in the English language. The productive and effective operation of business and communication is greatly dependent on the English language. Due to the English language, multinational firms are able to conduct business all over the world. In order to thrive as a businessman with a global profile, one needs to improve their communication skills in English. English communication abilities that are both effective in spoken and written form are essential for business. The idea of Business English has changed significantly in recent years due to a number of developments, such as improvements in genre theory and the amalgamation of English for Business Purposes and Business Communication that have been motivated by the realization that there is a gap to be filled between the academic world and the global business world. This pioneering review, which draws on developments in the analysis of business discourses, particularly in applied genre analysis, revisits the frameworks now implemented in English for Business Purposes and Business Communication (or, more broadly, Professional Communication). The design of English for Business Communication (EBC) programs is thus suggested to be based on the combination of the two techniques. The research report includes an in-depth evaluation of numerous relevant published works.

A Comparative Lexical Analysis of Kazakh, Russian and English Children’s Folklore

Occupying a special position in the oral folk art of any nation, children’s folklore is a complex field, which interrelates two areas: folklore for children and folklore created by children, learned from adults, and passed on from some children to other children. Human world and values are reflected in folklore - thus the ethnographic study of children’s folklore contributes to the understanding of the specifics of various cultures, and children’s participation in them. The purpose of the study is to describe children’s folklore in the Kazakh, Russian, and English languages from the linguistic and cultural comparative perspectives. The importance of identifying the lexical and phraseological features of different genres of children’s folklore and describing their common and culturally marked characteristics lies in the fact that despite the availability of ethnographic studies of children’s folklore in some cultures, there doesn’t exist a single research on cross-cultural comparative perspectives of various genres of children’s folklore. The study employed analytical descriptive, and comparative methods. The research data were collected through the online sociolinguistic surveys parallelly conducted in the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation. Texts of children’s folklore in English were taken from the collections Nursery Rhymes and Mother Goose’s Songs . The amount of research data made nearly 2000 Kazakh, Russian and English children’s folklore texts. The study revealed that the genre variety of children’s folklore leaves an imprint on the language of each genre. The lexical and phraseological analysis of various genres of children’s folklore demonstrated an active use of neologisms, transrational language and personal names. Children’s folklore is characterized not only by genre and intragenre dynamics, but also by historical changes.

A Pragmatic Analysis of Deliberation in Legal Setting

Deliberation is an increasingly used concept in Argumentation Theory and Linguistic Analysis. But only recently research combined empirical and conceptual tool-boxes from these disciplines for the study of deliberative discourse. The aim of this article is to present a discursive analysis of deliberation as a genre using the relational pragmatic analysis of texts. In particular, we want to see whether different features of deliberation genre map onto relational pragmatic dimension of texts. To do so, authors analyze, in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), the relational discourse structure of legal speeches of argumentative micro-texts written by citizens participating in a series of deliberative mini-publics. Results suggest that genre affects the relational to pragmatic analysis of texts and that we could analyze this effect in RST. Finally, we present, to our knowledge, the first annotated corpus-based genre analysis of the relational pragmatic dimension of argumentative micro texts.

Exploring the Trends and Development of News Genres and Fiction Formats: A Rhetorical Genre Theory Perspective

Exploring the Trends and Development of News Genres and Fiction Formats: A Rhetorical Genre Theory Perspective

Foreclosed futurity and genres of care in Barbara Peabody’s The Screaming Room

ABSTRACT Medical humanities scholars such as Arthur Frank have long argued that subjects being able to tell the story of their lives within a coherent, linear temporal framework is beneficial to the patient’s wellbeing. These models for understanding patient identity, however, often provide a binary model of identity where a subject either has a coherent, linear life narrative, or is a “narrative wreck.” This article argues against the supposition that a comprehensible life trajectory is necessary for narrative self-articulation. It does this through theorizing a concept of foreclosed futurity to describe when a narrative is written without the sense of a clear and foreseeable future. Through engaging with John Frow’s formalist analysis of genre, and the affect theory of Lauren Berlant and Brian Massumi, this article provides a reading of Barbara Peabody’s The Screaming Room that demonstrates how narrative identity can be maintained within the “crisis ordinariness” of a foreclosed future.

Writers' communicative resources for comparing present and past research findings: A pedagogically motivated inquiry into scientists' rhetorical practices

Despite the pivotal role of ‘comparing present and past research findings' (CPPRF) in both softer and harder sciences, scant attention has been directed to how linguistic resources are used in such comparisons in certain applied sciences, particularly Material Science (MS) and Agricultural Science (AS). Based on a genre analysis and interviews with specialist informants, we examined the prevalence of CPPRF, the circumstances involved, and the salient linguistic resources employed by expert writers in the two disciplines. It was found that CPPRF is markedly more prevalent in the ‘Results and Discussion’ sections of the research articles in AS than those in MS. Agricultural scientists use more author prominent citations, especially after alignment verbs, to accentuate the roles of previous researchers while making new knowledge claims. Experts in both fields, however, employ ‘copula-complex preposition’ and ‘copula-adjective-preposition’ structures expressing commonality to explicitly support previous research findings. In cases of divergences, writers draw on comparative adjectives to tacitly avoid direct conflicts with previous researchers' findings in the process of knowledge creation. It is recommended that specific word combinations be highlighted in relation to writers' attempts to generate knowledge via comparisons of present and previous research outcomes, thus implicitly signalling additional contributions of their studies.

Genre Analysis of Minutes of Academic Meetings

Genre analysis has received much attention in the recent few decades, in which different genres have been analyzed for their rhetorical features for academic and pedagogical purposes. One genre that has received very little attention in Ghanaian scholarship is meeting minutes. Meeting minutes are a cross-disciplinary genre and play crucial roles in organizations such as academic institutions, including serving as official records of all formal meeting proceedings and resolutions. From the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) tradition, this study explores the communicative events described in minutes of meetings. Using Swales' (1990) moves and steps genre analysis framework, a corpus of twenty-four minutes of meetings was collected from Sunyani Technical University and analyzed for their rhetorical structures as well as grammatical features that characterize these rhetorical events. The results show that the communicative events of the minutes are composed of a six-move structure: heading (Move 1), auxiliary information (Move 2), opening (Move 3), reference to previous minutes (Move 4), the content of the meeting (Move 5), and closing (Move 6). The prominent grammatical features that characterize these moves are tense (89.3% past and 10.7% present), voice (67.9% active and 32.1% passive), and sentence structure (48.8% simple, 29.8% complex, and 21.4% compound). These results have implications for the existing scholarship on meeting minutes, professional development (i.e. developing courses for secretarial students), and further research. It is expected that the knowledge of moves and grammatical features can help the students and novice secretaries practice writing minutes of meetings effectively.

Making a Case for New Directions in English Language Research at University of Cape Coast (UCC)

Drawing insights from existing studies on research synthesize (e.g. Farsani & Babaii, 2018/2020; Plonsky & Oswald, 2015), this study engages in a meta-analysis of MPhil theses from the Department of English, University of Cape Coast (UCC), in order to make a case for new directions for language research in the department. A critical content analytical approach was adopted to analyse eighteen (18) theses purposively sampled from the University of Cape Coast Institutional Theses Repository. The analysis focused on the research topics/domains, theoretical frameworks adopted, and research methods used. The study revealed following: (a) most of the studies were conducted in the domain of the media; (b) while most of the studies employed the qualitative research paradigm, very few adopted the mixed method approach and no study employed the quantitative approach; and (c) most of the studies were underpinned by the Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory while few employed the Theory of Nativization and Genre Theory. The study contends that there should be a shift in the focus of MPhil thesis to make it possible for the adoption of the mixed method and quantitative approaches as well as theories such as pragmatics, language variation, generative linguistics and corpus stylistics.

Проблема включенности фактора коммуникативной ситуации в модель жанрового источника.

This article is made in line with the discussion of the problems of speech genre studies. The main problem that the author is trying to solve is the development of a model for describing the source of the genre. At the same time, the concepts are introduced: the source of the genre. The relevance of the research is connected with the development of a methodology for carrying out procedures for describing the source of the genre according to a communicative model. The article proves the idea of correlation between the phenomena of the external communicative environment and the internal content of the source. Consequently, there is a need to reflect the external (extra-verbal, relational information) characteristics of the source in the communicative model of the speech product. So, the addressee factor (age, gender) or the time factor (date) can mark the information of the internal content of the source. Fixation and conceptual elaboration of the methodology for including certain signs of the external situation during certification allows us to construct an objective model of a typical speech work. The identification of conditionalities between external (communicative) and internal (linguistic) features of an utterance allows us to formulate hypotheses of speech genre studies and to identify problematic areas of functioning of the speech genre, which is the purpose of the source description. The article traces the relationship and interdependence of non-verbal (situational) phenomena and internal components of the utterance. The methods of identifying information about the non-verbal component of an utterance, which plays a communicative role in the model of a typical utterance, are considered.

Speech and Genre Characteristics of Express Consultation as a New Phenomenon of Medical Discourse

Introduction. The aim of the article is to analyze an extramural express consultation as a genre of oral medical discourse. New telemedicine technologies expand the forms of communication, it results in transformation of the dialogue between a doctor and a patient when communicating online, which requires linguistic research.Methodology and sources. The article is based on the main theses of the theory of speech genres formulated by M.M. Bakhtin, T.A. Van Dijk, O.B. Sirotinina, T.V. Shmeleva and others. The author has taken the scientific works on the study of speech genres of oral medical discourse as the methodological basis of the analysis. This includes the works of V.V. Zhura, E.A. Ponomarenko, M.I. Barsukova and others. The study applies methods of linguistic analysis of recorded online consultations for speech-genre characteristics of express consultations.Results and discussion. The article gives a description of an express consultation, including the following parameters: communicative goal, utterance content, speech roles of communicators, linguistic embodiment of the genre. The author pays special attention to doctor's communicative style and gives its assessment in terms of achieving communicative and consequently professional success. The author also describes a speech-genre scenario of a medical online consultation and a chain of communicative moves in a doctor's speech.Conclusion. The study shows that doctor's every speech act is specified by a complex system of communicative targets, primarily related to informative goals (requesting information from the patient and providing information in the form of an explanation and recommendation) and therapy goals to maintain a patient's psychological and emotional well-being. Communicators' speech behavior is regulated by the institutional roles of «an agent» and «a client» of an institution, native speakers having their own invariants. The utterance content is specified by a patient's specific complaint and is organized in accordance with the stages of a medical consultation. The study concludes that genre competence as a part of communicative competence in the form of online communication is the most important professional tool of a consulting specialist.

Prolepsis and Rendering Futures in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Reports.

Rhetorical figures of speech provide important analytical frames to chart how arguments operate within genres and within genre ecologies. Varieties of the figure prolepsis allow for the rendering of future time or fact in the present, which can be a powerful rhetorical inducement toward social and political action. In this article, we examine how anticipatory arguments drawn from complex data shape a key genre for public and policy-facing work on the climate crisis-the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Synthesis Report's (SYR) Statement for Policy Makers (SPM). We examine how the rhetorical figure of prolepsis operates within this genre to understand the anticipatory arguments and logics emerging from the synthesis of scientific findings and their reporting. Pairing figural studies and Rhetorical Genre Studies, we further offer an approach to investigate how these patterned operations of language might intersect in their rhetorical workings.

Toward Genre Access: A Micro-level Analytical Approach

Many genre scholars have focused on how individuals might build genre knowledge, generally understood as the enculturation processes, gradual stages, or ingredients that lead to one’s facility with a genre in context. While genre knowledge describes whether people can engage genres, it does not describe the various factors that shape how people may engage genres. By consolidating scholarship across Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), this article characterizes genre access as the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genre. Furthermore, this article integrates Network Gatekeeping Theory to develop a micro-level analytical approach for explicitly describing genre access. The author demonstrates and develops genre access as a concept and analytical approach with an illustrative example from a larger ethnographic project. Specifically, this illustrative example explores genre access for the Staff Report, a common genre in local government that proposes recommendations from individual departments to their elected City Commissioners for voted approval. Overall, the purpose of this article is (1) to consolidate and extend RGS’s exploration of the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genres; (2) to identify and name genre access as a fundamental aspect of how genres work; and (3) to provide a micro-level analytical language for researchers to tease out the various factors the shape genre access.

К проблеме интегрального описания речевых жанров

The article formulates the subject and tasks of the future speech-genre discipline – the integral description of speech genres – which, in the author’s opinion, claims to be central to the general theory of speech genres. The main sources of the theory of speech genres integrality include the high level of a speech genre as a speech and language unit, the complex, multidimensional and multicomponent nature of the theory of speech genres, the multidisciplinarity of the theory of speech genres (it draws on data from almost all the humanities and partly non-humanities). The integral description of speech genres will include the following parameters: the cultural and historical context of the speech genre; typological characteristics of speech genre (including their place in various typologies); speech-genre variantology and recurrence, including new technogenic and Internet derivatives from primary, traditional genres; representation in the corps. The integral description of speech genres and its parameters are discussed in connection with the division of linguistics (partly – other sciences, for example, literary criticism). It is shown that the majority of divisions of linguistics that are significant for the integral description of speech genres go back to Saussure’s idea of opposing internal and external linguistics, and the main tasks of the theory of speech genres correspond to those three “eternal” problems of linguistics formulated by V. M. Alpatov: “How is language structured?”, “How does language function?” and “How does language develop?” The author discusses directions of the most important genre studies, from which the integral description of speech genres should be “composed”, and the criteria used for their selection: 1) the model is already integral (multi-component and interdisciplinary); 2) universal (applicable to many languages and national cultures, in different historical periods); 3) based on this model, the largest number of studies was carried out. The first criterion is met by the model of T. V. Shmeleva, the second – by the universalist model of A. Wierzbicka, the third – by traditional speech-genre models: lexical, syntactic and pragmatic. In conclusion, the author discusses the unresolved problems of speech genres, which can be logically solved on the basis of the integral description of speech genres: typology (integral bases for the classification of speech genres claim to be more reliable), variantology, applied and experimental aspects (vocabulary representation of speech genres and corpus aspect, including the analysis of key phrases of speech genres).

Литературный жанр в сознании читателя: эмпирический подход

From a cognitive point of view, literary genres do not exist regardless of their perception; they should be embodied in the reader’s mind. The purpose of cognitive genre study is to consider genre as a form of mental representation. According to our hypothesis, this representation combines figurative and propositional ways of encoding information. There is no doubt that the reconstruction of the mental representation of the genre in the mind of the reader requires an experimental study. This article publishes the results of a pilot experiment conducted among university students of pedagogical specialties of the Faculty of Psychological, Pedagogical and Special Education of Saratov University and school students of Saratov. The experimental data show that the representation of the genre in the mind of the reader can be based on the cluster model which suggests that the readers define a number of features by which they identify the genre. The prototype model of the genre is no less relevant: belonging of a particular work to a particular genre is determined in the mind of the reader by its similarity with the best genre model – a standard (or a prototype). The number of such standards is not very large. As a rule, this status is acquired by works that are included in the school literary canon. In the reader’s mind, genre classes are not formations with clear boundaries; rather, they are more likely to be built on the principle of “family resemblance”. The cognitive model of a genre in the mind of the reader has certain features of a field. Conducting cognitive genre research, i.e. identifying ways of representing the genre in the mind of a reader requires the development of a special questionnaire that takes into account the level of the ordinary (naive) reader who is not a philologist.