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The present paper presents the results of a needs analysis conducted among Czech students involved in a Master’s degree programme English Language Teacher Education. The aim was to identify their academic writing needs on the basis of a needs analysis questionnaire and a linguistic analysis of their written discourse in order to find out whether there are divergences between their ‘wants’ and ‘lacks’ (Hutchinson & Waters 1987). The results indicate that the students’ previous tuition at Bachelor’s level focused primarily on lexico-grammatical features of academic style such as text organizing devices, academic vocabulary, grammatical structures and citation styles. However, other areas essential to writing a successful Master’s thesis, such as evaluation and interpretation of results, conveying personal viewpoints and communicating with the reader or acknowledging research limitations, were ascribed a somewhat lower importance by the students, suggesting the existence of a divergence between the students’ ‘wants’ and ‘lacks’. The findings concerning the students’ perception of the writing process also concur with the finding of the authors’ previous research (Dontcheva et al. 2020) into the Theme zone in Czech students’ Master’s theses, which has indicated that Czech Master’s students tend tooveruse textual Themes expressed by linkers and underuse interpersonal Themes realised by stance devices.

This paper explores the form and function of the initial part of a sentence, the “Theme zone” (Hannay, 1994; Fetzer, 2008), in the genre of research articles, with a threefold purpose. First, it deals with a comparative analysis of Theme zone patterns (i.e. employment of simple and multiple Themes – the latter being several different configurations of topical, interpersonal and textual Themes) in a corpus of research articles written by English authors and Czech EAL writers. The aim is to determine to what extent these writers differ in thematization and trace possible reasons for the differences. Second, the study offers an intercultural comparison of the realizations of topical, interpersonal and textual Themes, and finally, it looks into thematic progression in two excerpts from the corpus and how the Theme zone contributes to the construal of textual, interpersonal and topical coherence. In all three parts, intercultural variation can be observed, be it Czech authors’ preference for the [textual Theme] [topical Theme] configuration, their more frequent use of exclusive we and abstract rhetors in topical Themes and higher employment of textual Themes in the Theme zone, or their inclination to build coherence on a local rather than a more global level.

This paper explores crime reports on verdicts and sentences in child/teenager murder cases in the British press with a view to demonstrating that 'simplifi cation' is one of the signifi cant values of crime reporting, regardless of the type of newspaper (Jewkes 2004). The analysis illustrates how both quality and popular British newspapers employ 'binary oppositions' (i.e. a typical feature of simplifi cation), such as good vs. evil, in order to communicate to their audiences the social status of victims and killers and at the same time traditional social values and norms. The employment of 'binary oppositions' in noun phrases that introduce and/or classify victims and killers thus enables newspapers to appeal to the public and act, or at least try to act, as moral guardians.