Rhetorical strategies in engineering research articles and research theses: Advanced academic literacy and relations of power

Koutsantoni, Dimitra

doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2005.11.002

Cited by 112 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…They have to offer some background information on the topic, find the niche of the study within the research area and finally introduce the study undertaken (Hashim, 2008). These are all globally recognisable strategies that help to realise the ratification of knowledge (Koutsantoni, 2006). This globally recognised purpose of the introductory chapter operates within its own peculiar, socially constructed conventions and norms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextual Layers in the Establishment of Research Niche in Doctoral Thesis Introductions by Malaysian Writers

Zainuddin

Shaari

2017

GEMA

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One of the key moves in thesis introductions in terms of Swales's CARS is Move 2: Establishing the Niche. It is where researchers provide the justifications of the study after introducing the general area of the research. However, research findings of prior work have focused on thesis introductions which relates to how texts are constructed and organised in systematic ways in terms of Swales's (1990) CARS moves and steps, and how these two organisational elements assist in achieving the overall purpose of the genre. These move analysis studies of Introductions do not examine and explain why each move and step are written the way they are through the lens of various contextual layers. The current study views genre through the Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) lens in looking at context as multilayered. The study examines how different levels of context influence how eight ESL Malaysian writers establish their research niche. Adopting the functional-semantic approach to analysis, it can be concluded that apart from the multi-layered discourse community of their academic setting, the socio-cultural and socio-political contexts have a significant effect on the establishments of the writers' research niche.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextual Layers in the Establishment of Research Niche in Doctoral Thesis Introductions by Malaysian Writers

Zainuddin

Shaari

2017

GEMA

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“…Bitchener & Basturkmen, 2006, Chatterjee, 2008 has shown that the discussion section of the doctoral thesis is a challenging part-genre (Dudley Evans, 1998) to write. The doctoral thesis as a whole is a high-stakes genre, in which writers must negotiate a dual identity: simultaneously as a student presenting him/herself for examination, and as an expert demonstrating his/her credentials for membership of a disciplinary elite (Carter, 2011;Carter & Blumenstein, 2011;Koutsantoni, 2006;Paltridge & Starfield, 2007;Swales, 2004). The discussion section is arguably the part of the thesis in which these two identities come into conflict most acutely, since it is here that a writer is required to comment evaluatively on his/her own work and also set it in the context of other work in the same field, with the overall goal of showing the reader why the contribution of the doctoral research is significant.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluative language in discussion sections of doctoral theses: Similarities and differences between L1 Chinese and L1 English writers

Geng

Wharton

2016

Journal of English for Academic Purposes

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“…6 These criteria do not ensure that the language used in the articles is native indeed but following previous research (Fløttum, Dahl & Kinn 2006;Yang et al 2015), an assumption was made that even if English was not the writers' mother tongue, such cases were estimated not to be high in number to skew the corpus data (Varga 2016). Against this background, we adopt the term English writer to refer to the American, British, and Canadian scholars, affiliated to the University departments from the given countries and the term Anglo-American community to refer to the academic writing originated in them (Koutsantoni 2006;Varga 2016) …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

English and Croatian citation practices in research articles in applied linguistics: a corpus-based study

Varga¹,

Gradečak-Erdeljić²

2017

KLB

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As a mandatory constituent of academic writing, citation allows writers to acknowledge other scholarsʼ work and to position their research against it, showing thus both contribution to previous knowledge and research novelty (Hyland 2004). Previous research has documented not only cross-disciplinary (Hyland 2004) but also crosscultural variations, with a general tendency of Anglo-American writers to use more citations than writers of some other cultural backgrounds (Hyland 2005;Mur Dueñas 2009). By exploring the frequency, preferred types, and reporting structures of citations in two comparable sub-corpora of research articles in applied linguistics in English and Croatian, the present study aimed to provide an insight into the patterns of cross-cultural similarities and differences in the use of academic citation. The corpus comprised 32 research articles that were sampled from the representative English-and Croatianmedium publications in applied linguistics and analyzed manually. The extracted instances of citations were categorized according to the pre-established taxonomies of the citation types (Swales, 1990) and reporting structures in academic writing (Thomson & Tribble 2001). The frequency analysis showed that the English writers used more citations as opposed to the Croatian writers, which is in line with previous cross-cultural research on the use of citations (Fløttum, Dahl & Kinn 2006;Mur Dueñas 2009). In both sub-corpora writers used more non-integral than integral citations, with the highest 154 frequencies reported in the Introduction section of research articles. The overall findings point to the saliency of the congruent types of reporting structures in both citation formats across the two sub-corpora, with the human subjects being most frequently used in integral citations and non-reporting being the most frequent reporting structure in nonintegral citations. However, in non-integral citations English writers used non-human subjects at a significantly higher frequency than Croatian writers, which suggests that in the English citations investigated more importance is placed on research activities than human agents. Whereas similarities in the use of citations between English and Croatian writers may be accounted for by the congruent disciplinary variable, the differences seem to be related to the specifics of a wider socio-cultural background in which academic writing is embedded.

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Rhetorical strategies in engineering research articles and research theses: Advanced academic literacy and relations of power

Cited by 112 publications

References 40 publications

Contextual Layers in the Establishment of Research Niche in Doctoral Thesis Introductions by Malaysian Writers

Contextual Layers in the Establishment of Research Niche in Doctoral Thesis Introductions by Malaysian Writers

Evaluative language in discussion sections of doctoral theses: Similarities and differences between L1 Chinese and L1 English writers

English and Croatian citation practices in research articles in applied linguistics: a corpus-based study

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