scholarly journals Non-native writers and the use of appraisal resources in research article introductions

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 638 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sri Wuli Fitriati ◽  
Yuni Awalaturrohmah Solihah

Writing an introduction section of a research article usually requires the interpersonal voice and arguments for building up a sense of persuasiveness that will entice readers. A quality research article introduction can be achieved by using appraisal resources to represent the writers’ ideas and propositions effectively. Using twenty introduction sections of research articles written in English by Indonesian and Chinese writers as non-native writers, this study examines the use of appraisal resources and compares their distributions. By employing textual analysis and using Appraisal resources theory drawn from the work of Martin and White (2005), the findings reveal that there are both similarities and differences in the distribution of appraisal resources between Indonesian and Chinese writers in the introduction sections of research articles. In terms of similarities, both Indonesian and Chinese writers use attitude (appreciation), expand (engagement), and force (graduation) as the most used appraisal resources in their writing. What is different, however, is that the Indonesian writers seem more likely than Chinese writers to use appraisal resources overall, except for graduation resources, which were used more often by the Chinese writers. This article discusses some of the pedagogical implications for those who are teaching students of English as a foreign language and want to improve and strengthen their voice and arguments in the writing of research article introductions.

Author(s):  
Udi Samanhudi ◽  
Aisling O'Boyle

This paper examines the similarities and differences in the use of rhetorical citations in research articles in two journal publication contexts in the field of Applied Linguistics, namely Indonesian Journals aimed at a local audience, and International Journals aimed at a global audience. Fifty Discussion Sections from published research articles were taken from the two publication contexts.  Results of the analysis indicate a dominant use of integral citations especially verb-controlling type in the Indonesian local corpus. It is suggested that this citation type requires less demand on synthesising various sources cited while Discussion Sections in the International corpus make greater use of non-integral citations which indicates a succinct synthesis of various sources. In terms of function, referring to literature is the most salient function in Indonesian local corpus while attribution is the most dominant function found in the International corpus. Accompanying the textual analysis of citation practices in these journals, Indonesian academics as part of the community of the discipline were interviewed. Their perspectives indicate urgency for results of genre analysis studies to be transformed into teaching materials to assist especially novice writers in the field of Applied Linguistics in understanding English research article writing conventions better.


ExELL ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Kaja Mandić ◽  
Izabela Dankić

AbstractThe main objective of this corpus-based study is to research the most frequent two-word collocations in the corpus of nursing scientific articles and compare this newly assembled list of nursing collocations with the Academic Collocation List (ACL). The nursing scientific articles corpus (NSAC) used in this study comprises 1,119,441 words from 262 articles of 10 high-quality journals from the Medical Library Association list which nursing students can freely access. The focus is on noun-noun and noun-adjective collocations. The selected articles were converted into txt files using the ABBYY Fine Reader. WordSmith Tools 7.0 and TermeX were used for noun and collocation extraction. The newly assembled Nursing Collocation List (NCL) and the ACL were compared using Microsoft Excel 2016. A total of 488 collocations were identified in the NSAC and the NCL contains 234 (47.9%) noun + noun and 254 (52.1%) adjective + noun collocation combinations. The most frequent two-word collocation is health care and it appeared 618 times in the NSAC. The ACL (2,469) and the NCL (488) share 123 two-word collocations. Although there are some correspondences between collocations in the two corpora, key nursing collocations with notably higher frequencies are identified in the NSAC (365). Despite the fact that the ACL is the most extensive collocation list across different academic fields and it certainly plays an important role in teaching English as a foreign language, this study suggests that it does not provide key nursing collocations for improvement of nursing collocation competence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Sani Yantandu Uba

This paper investigates semantic categories of reporting verbs across four disciplines: Accounting, Applied Linguistics, Engineering and Medicine in research article genre. A general corpus of one million words and sub-corpus (for each discipline) were compiled from a total of 120 articles representing 30 articles from each discipline. In this study, two levels of analysis were conducted. Firstly, I randomly selected five articles from each discipline and read and reread each article identifying what reporting verbs are used, in what context are used and why such reporting verbs are used. This process enabled me to identify semantic categories of reporting verbs. Secondly, on the basis of the identified list of semantic categories of reporting verbs, I used the list in generating concordance output for quantitative textual analysis of each sub-corpus of the four disciplines, as well as the general corpus. The results of the study show that writers from both Accounting and Applied Linguistics are having a high frequency of reporting verbs than writers from Engineering and Medicine disciplines. It also shows that there are certain commonalities and differences between the disciplines. For example, all the disciplines are having frequency of the three semantic categories of reporting verbs but with certain degree of variations. The study recommends raising awareness of students on semantic categories of reporting verbs. The results could also help EAP/ESP teachers in designing course materials for discipline specific reporting verbs. It could also be helpful for textbook course designers in developing textbooks for teaching reporting verbs.


Author(s):  
Ivaylo Dagnev ◽  
Maria Saykova ◽  
Maya Yaneva

The medical research article (MRA) has been at the core of debate with reference to all its aspects for over thirty years now. Ever since scholars, such as Swales, Nwogo and more recently Fryer and Davies, have delved into the organization and discourse setup of this scientific genre, the argument for and against the importance of Rhetorical Moves has been heating up. The gravity the latter have on the informational, propositional and cognitive value cannot be overestimated. Little, though, has been done as far as the cross-linguistic side is concerned, since there are no comparative studies exploring potential similarities and differences from culture to culture. The presented article seeks to address this lacuna in an attempt to outline the major discourse and structural markers constructing the very essence of the Rhetorical Moves. Approximately 100 articles from both Bulgarian and English sources have been excerpted, constituting more than 250 000 words. Several areas of exploration have been highlighted - from vocabulary items such as factive reporting verbs, to discourse markers outlining coherence and stance, to thematic structure underpinnings referring to issues such as functional sentence perspective. The results from the contrastive study, though by no means conclusive, are indicative of major informational and discoursal imbalances between Bulgarian and English articles.


SAGE Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824401882238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wirada Amnuai

There has been a growing interest in the rhetorical move structure of research articles (RAs). Research studies reveal that articles written by native and nonnative English speakers show some similarities and differences in their rhetorical structure and linguistic features across disciplines. This study was therefore undertaken to investigate the rhetorical moves of English RA abstracts, which were written by authors from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Sixty RA abstracts from two corpora (international corpus and Thai corpus) in the field of accounting were analyzed using Hyland’s framework. The abstracts written by authors of different nationalities and published in internationally scholarly journals were collected for the international corpus, whereas the counterpart consisted of abstracts written by Thai authors and published in indexed Thailand-based journals. Both similarities and differences in terms of rhetorical move and linguistic realizations were found. The use of tenses and voices was quite different not only between the two corpora but also from the previous studies. The findings will provide practical and detailed description of the RA abstracts’ structures of the two corpora. This may lead to pedagogical implications for teaching students how to write accounting English RA abstracts effectively.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nguyen Tuan Anh

Hedging enables academic writers be able to mitigate claims and minimize the impositions that may be found in such claims (Hyland, 1996). Although the literature has had vast research on hedging in research articles, not much has been known about the difference or similarity among journals in one field in the use of hedging devices. Using the document analysis method, the present study aims to make a comparative analysis of hedging in two linguistics research journals, namely Reading in a Foreign Language (RFL) and English Language Teaching (ELT), in order to investigate what hedging forms and functions are most frequently used in RFL and ELT, and how hedging forms and functions are distributed in the Introduction, Results, Discussions and Conclusions sections in the two journals. Based on the data analyzed, it was found that RFL and ELT research article writers tend to have the same preference for the use of different hedging forms for different equivalent purposes and functions. This similar hedging pattern is believed to be of value to those who are trained as academic writers in the field of linguistics.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 973
Author(s):  
Mohammad Ghazanfari ◽  
Neda Hosseini Mohtasham ◽  
Morteza Amirsheibani

Since Swales’ CARS model (1981, 1990) work on the move structure of research article, studies on genre analysis have been carried out so far among which works on different parts of research article in various disciplines has gained a considerable literature. The present study aims to examine the move structure of research article conclusion sections in two fields of ELT and Nursing based on Yang and Allison’s (2003) model of move structure in conclusion sections. Each corpus of the current study contains 25 research articles related specifically to the field under study. The results of data analysis indicated that both corpora contained the moves proposed in Yang and Allison’s (2003) model and almost no significant differences were observed in the rhetorical structure of the afore-mentioned fields. Therefore, the authors of both ELT and Nursing had a great tendency to apply this model in the conclusion sections of their articles. The obtained findings of the current study can be useful for linguistic researchers in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) by providing them with a holistic and unitary pattern as an authentic language in use through enriching their understandings and knowledge about the true nature and structure of different disciplines.


EFL Journal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suhaily Abdullah

The main purpose of this study is to identify a standard structural pattern of introduction sections of two different disciplines, i.e. research articles from English Language Teaching (ELT) and Civil Engineering (CE) corpora. Twelve articles were randomly chosen from four established journals of both disciplines namely; Language Learning (LL), Foreign Language Annals (FLA), Transportation (T) and Structural Survey (SS). Content analysis was manually conducted by incorporating the modified CARS model of Anthony’s (1999) in identifying the introductions’ rhetorical moves in both disciplines. Besides move structures, the headings, length and paragraphing element were highlighted for the comparison purposes. As a result, the rhetorical move of the modified model is totally applicable in CE corpora but it slightly fit the presented structural patterns in ELT research articles. Thus, it is noticeable that relying on this modified model has only given the general guide for authors of both disciplines. The model could be further revised in allowing ‘emerging’ patterns of any discipline writing styles and these findings can also be added to existing literature of interdisciplinary RA introduction genre analyses.Keywords: modified CARS model; introductions; structural pattern; genre analysis


Author(s):  
Zhao Meijuan ◽  
◽  
Ang Lay Hoon ◽  
Florence Toh Haw Ching ◽  
Sabariah Md Rashid ◽  
...  

Translated children’s works from English to Chinese have flooded China unprecedentedly since the end of the 19PthP century. However, there is a discrepancy in the translation of Chinese children’s works into the English language. This is maybe because western scholars are still largely ignoring Asian texts for young readers. Therefore, the research aims to fill the gap in the scholarship by studying the translated Bronze and Sunflower, which is a renowned work written by the Chinese first Hans Christian Anderson winner Cao Wenxuan, from the aspect of narrative space. A qualitative approach is adopted to compare the similarities and differences of narrative space between the source text and the target text. The samples will be taken from Cao Wenxuan’s Bronze and Sunflower and its English translation. The textual analysis is illuminated through the narratological framework, which is based on three-layered space: The topographic level, the chronotopic level and the textual level. The study explores how narrative space is constructed in the process of translating Bronze and Sunflower. It is hoped that the findings of the study will show how space is created in a different languagea, and that the translator prefers to change the narrative space rather than keeping the same spatial structure in the target text.


PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (5) ◽  
pp. 1476-1480
Author(s):  
Logan J. Connors

Literary representations of emotions fascinate us as readers; they connect to us logically and naturally because we experience in our daily lives many of the emotional events depicted in novels, plays, and poems. Students are intrigued by the similarities and differences between their everyday feelings and the emotions represented in literature. Emotions are thus interesting processes to study, and in classroom discussions and activities most students have something to say about them. For this reason, I use emotion (broadly defined) as an important subject of inquiry in my literature and culture classes. In what follows, I share a structured journaling assignment based on emotion that helps students read with more detail, improves their foreign language skills, and boosts their engagement with difficult subject matter.


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