This study investigates how genre knowledge and metacognition can be scaffolded in a genrebased course for doctoral students engaged in writing research articles. We argue that current definitions of genre knowledge development encompass the development of metacognition, and thus adopt an inter-disciplinary approach to illustrate how metacognition-specifically metacognitive knowledge-can be scaffolded in the genre classroom. We developed two tasks for this purpose. In the first, students were asked to describe their writing context and genres. For the second task, at the end of the course, students submitted a visual conceptualization of the research genres in their specific scientific community. This visualization was accompanied by an account of students' observations about genre, and a reflection on how these insights could be applied to their ongoing writing situation. Students were also interviewed two to six months after the course to explore how they reported using genre knowledge in their writing. Results showed that the metacognitive tasks elicited an integrated view of genre and encouraged students' conceptualization of this knowledge as a tool for writing. In interviews, students reported using facets of genre knowledge metacognitively in their writing, by describing how they engage with reader expectations, conventions, variation, and the possibility of strategic deliberate choices.
We investigate the current position of English in the language ecology of Swedish academia, with a special focus on the humanities. Semi-structured interviews with 15 informants from the fields of Anthropology, General Linguistics and History were carried out to explore how non-native speakers of English experience using academic English in their research. In contrast to other recent findings, our study shows that while some differences along disciplinary lines emerged, on the whole, English does not pose a significant challenge for scholars when writing for publication. Furthermore, our informants do not perceive themselves to be disadvantaged by their non-native status. The study casts some doubt on Swales’ well-known dinosaur metaphor; while English does indeed dominate in the sphere of international publication in terms of production, multilingual research practices are evident within the research and publication process.
Recent years have seen an interest in the generic structure of empirical research articles across a variety of disciplines. However, significantly less attention has been given to theoretical articles. This study aims to begin to address this imbalance by presenting the results of an investigation into the organizational and rhetorical structure of theoretical pure mathematics research articles. The data set combines a close analysis of 22 peer-reviewed articles and semi-structured interviews with their authors. While there is considerable variation in terms of the major section headings and content, the results reveal an overall structure that differs from a typical empirical research article. We argue that this alternative structure is produced by the dual argumentationmathematical and meta-mathematicalwhich runs throughout the text. Moreover, triangulation with the interview data indicates that the structural patterns of the theoretical pure mathematics research article can be viewed as a reflection of the research practices and epistemology of the discipline.
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