This study involved a corpus-based textual analysis of authorial presence markers in the argumentative essays of Turkish and American students. Utilising Hyland's interactional metadiscourse model (2005a) as the analysis framework, it aimed to compare the features of stance in L1 and L2 essays by Turkish learners of English with those in essays by monolingual American students. Also, discourse-based interviews with ten students contributed to an understanding of the use of markers in their L1 and L2 writing. The results indicate that the use of authorial presence markers in English essays by Turkish students was more similar to the use of these markers in writing by novice native English-speaking students than to the use of markers in the Turkish students' own writing in Turkish. The textual and interview data are discussed in relation to writing instruction, L1 writing conventions, and the institutional context.
The abstracts are essential components of the research articles since scholars are highly likely to read the abstract first and decide to continue or stop reading the research article according to the content of the abstract. Therefore, writing an effective abstract is crucial in order to produce acceptable research articles in the international discourse community of specific disciplines. This study examines the rhetorical variations between Turkish and English research abstracts by adopting Swales' framework of move analysis (Swales, 2004). The results indicate that there are similarities between Turkish and English research abstracts in terms of the employment of moves and steps though there is a significant difference in the frequency of Move 2 where writers justify their work in their research field as a way of creating a niche. The rhetorical and lexicogrammatical divergences may be explained by both the characteristics of cultures and different expectations of the scientific communities, which results from situatedness of writing, but further research is required with a larger corpus. The study has both theoretical and pedagogical implications in that knowledge of these conventions will allow language educators to identify anomalies and enable MA and PHD students to internalise the accepted styles in international academic discourse.
This study examined the trajectories of the multi-word constructions (MWCs) in 98 advanced second language (L2) learners during their first-year at an English-medium university in a non-English-speaking country, using linear mixed-effects modelling, over one academic year. In addition, this study traced the academic reading input that L2 learners received at university, and it was investigated whether the frequency and dispersion of the MWCs in the input corpus would predict the frequencies of MWCs in L2 writers’ essays. The findings revealed variations in the frequencies of different functional and structural categories of MWCs over time. This study provides empirical evidence for the effects of both frequency and dispersion of MWCs in the input corpus on the frequency of MWCs in L2 writers’ essays, underscoring the importance of both frequency and dispersion in learning MWCs and the reciprocity of academic reading and writing. The findings have significant implications for usage-based approaches to language learning, modelling MWCs in L2 academic writing, and L2 materials design for teaching academic writing.
Lexical bundles are pervasive in English academic writing; however, little scholarly attention has been paid to how quantitative and qualitative research paradigms influence the use of lexical bundles in research articles. In order to investigate this, we created two equal-size corpora of research articles in the discipline of education. We examined four-word lexical bundles in terms of their structural characteristics and discourse functions in the quantitative and qualitative research articles published in international English-medium journals. We attribute intra-disciplinary variations in the use of lexical bundles to the knowledge-making practices that are specific to quantitative and qualitative research articles. This paper provides further evidence that the research article is not a unitary construct. The results have implications for academic writing, and corpus building and design in academic discourse. One of the key implications of this study is that L2 novice writers need to take into account the influences of research paradigms on the use of lexical bundles when writing research articles for English-medium journals in the discipline of education.
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