scholarly journals Organisational Skills in Academic Writing: A Study on Coherence and Cohesion in Pakistani Research Abstracts

Languages ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
Ahmad ◽  
Mahmood ◽  
Siddique

Writing requires a suitable and strategic use of language with communicative potential and structural correctness. The use of coherence and cohesion helps create communicative potential and structural correctness in texts. This study aims to investigate the use of cohesive items in the abstracts of Pakistani research articles and thereby determine what type of cohesive items are frequently used by writers. In addition, the study aims to know what functions the said writers achieve through the most frequently used cohesive items. For this purpose, 50 abstracts were retrieved from two famous Pakistani research journals (25 articles per journal), which were developed into a corpus for the study and analysed through AntConc. 3.4.4.0. The results revealed that Pakistani research writers used reference items the most frequently to achieve “directive” as well as “referential” functions. On the basis of these findings, the study concluded that Pakistani research article writers organised information in abstracts using reference items the most frequently and they were mainly concerned with directive as well as referential functions of meaning. The results also showed that the said writers organised texts on a syntactic level only, which implied that they should organise texts on a semantic level also. This would be possible with the use of repetition devices.

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Anis Firdatul Rochma ◽  
Sulis Triyono

<em>As an effort to give contribution to the existing knowledge, it is expected for the undergraduate students to compose an engaging research article in order to convince the readers about the importance of the research article. However, there is only a little attention given to the articles written by the undergraduate students although it is considered very critical to examine whether the exposure of English academic writing has significantly enhances the writing competence of the students. Furthermore, as it is also very crucial to build a meaningful semantic meaning among the sentences in order to disclose the worthiness of the research article, it is essential to analyze the cohesion of the research article written by the undergraduate students. Henceforth, the present research is projected to investigate the cohesion of the research articles written by the undergraduate students of English Language Teaching. As the introduction section of research article is likely to be an area to portray the logical explanation of the research, the present research solely focuses on examining the cohesion of the introduction section of research article. By adopting a qualitative design and involving several steps to analyze the introduction section, it is revealed that the grammatical cohesion is considered to be the most utilized type of cohesion in writing the introduction section. Still, the lexical cohesion is also necessary to build an eloquent semantic meaning about the topic as well the importance of the research article.</em>


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-293
Author(s):  
Isaac Nuokyaa-Ire Mwinlaaru

Abstract This study explores the benefits of a synergy between ESP research on genre and theoretical dimensions of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). It models genre on SFL dimensions and employs this model to analyse 200 biodata written by Applied Linguistics scholars, 100 each from research articles and seminar posters. Data were analysed from contextual, logico-semantic and lexicogrammatical perspectives. The findings reveal five generic stages in biodata. The frequency distribution of these stages and the phases that realise them shows variation between research article bios and seminar bios. The most frequent logico-semantic (or rhetorical) relations identified among stages and phases are of the expansion type, namely addition and elaboration, Further, collocational frameworks are used in organising some generic phases into waves of meaning and in construing different identities. Finally, evaluative resources, in the form of lexical bundles, modification and circumstantial elements in the clause, are employed by writers to boost their professional achievements and promote themselves. These findings contribute to theoretical discussions on genre and the scholarship on the interface between identity construction and academic writing, and also motivate further research.


2020 ◽  
Vol 83 ◽  
pp. 191-204
Author(s):  
Muhammed Parviz ◽  
Alireza Jalilifar ◽  
Alexanne Don

The present study aimed at exploring how research article writers from two academic disciplines exploit phrasal complexity features (PCFs) to verbalize the results sections of research articles with the eventual aim of assisting advanced EFL writers with their composition strategies. To this end, following a manual search, 200 empirical research articles in the fields of Applied Linguistics and Physics were comparatively examined. Due to the low rate of success of tagging programs in identifying the occurrences of PCFs, the datasets were also manually analyzed. The results revealed that the research article writers drew upon three high-frequency phrasal complexity features, namely, pre-modifying adjectives, post-modifying prepositional phrases, and nominalizations. The study also revealed that the results sections of research articles included different amounts of exceedingly complex patterns of pre-modification, a hybrid of novel appositive structures, and great reliance on hyphenated adjectives. Overall, we believe that these findings can be used to heighten the awareness of academic writers and instructors regarding the linguistic characteristics of academic writing and of the variations of how such phrasal features of compression are constructed in different academic subjects.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-264
Author(s):  
Tomoyuki Kawase

Abstract Constructing a coherent text and achieving genre-specific communicative purposes are crucial aspects of academic writing. However, to date, it remains unclear how coherence and genre are related to each other conceptually. This paper seeks to extend previous research on the influence of genre on coherence relations by examining how writers of applied linguistics research articles (RAs) organise sentences in the discussion section to achieve communicative purposes of the RA discussion genre. The analyses suggest that the writers of the selected discussions might have related sentences to each other differently depending on the purposes they sought to achieve. Possible reasons for relational features are considered in light of the nature of the RA discussion genre and/or the applied linguistics discipline.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Safari

In the field of academic writing, it is important to create a structurally and communicatively well-organized and coherent text. Metadiscourse is the way in which writers interact through their use of language in the form of writing with readers– is a widely used term in the field of pragmatics and language teaching. This research article aims to investigate using code glosses as a sub-category of metadiscourse in the introduction section of two different disciplines, politics and applied linguistics. The corpus consists of twenty research articles from the politics and twenty from applied linguistics. The model suggested by Hyland (2005) is used for analizing the selected corpus. These articles were investigated and the number of code-glosses in each group was counted and analyzed. The result of data analysis revealed that there is significant difference between the frequency count of using code glosses used by applied linguistics and politics authors. Politics authors used more code glosses in comparison with applied linguistics and both applied linguistics and politics writers used reformulations more than exemplifications. This study can have pedagogical implications for EAP course designers as well as academic writing instructors and students.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Mimoun Melliti

The present paper explores aspects of similarity and difference between the generic structure of research letters&rsquo; abstracts (henceforth RLsA) and research articles&rsquo; abstracts (henceforth RAsA). It aims at investigating and documenting the different rhetorical patterns of 19 RLsA and 19 RAsA in order to identify if there is any unique shared way to write them, determine the most publishable way of writing this genre, and detect any possibility of generic overlap between the two genres. Melliti (2016, 2017) CARL model has been adopted to identify the kind, frequency, and overlap of moves in RLsA and RAsA of the Journal Nature. The results indicate that although the RAs are longer than the RLs, the number of sentences in the RLsA is more than the RAsA. Results show also that there are fundamental as well as expendable sets of keys in both genres. The study succeeded also in identifying the number of sentences required to write a publishable research letter abstract and research article abstract in the field of biology. These findings have interesting implication on teaching academic writing and teaching English for publication purposes.


2016 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Huemer

Similar structures in research articles of different disciplines indicate that the research article can be qualified as a genre across disciplinary borders. In spite of these structural similarities, which are constitutive for a genre, there are linguistic varieties that can be found in research articles of several disciplines relevant to be pointed out when teaching academic writing at the university. Little research has been conducted so far on linguistic varieties within subcategories of a discipline, because it is assumed that linguistic varieties within the genre research article are discipline-specific and therefore can only be found across disciplines. This article will present the results of a pilot study in which linguistic varieties within the discipline German linguistics have been researched. 14 introductions to research articles within this field have been selected in order to analyse their macro structure in detail. The data has been taken from a high rated journal in the field of German linguistics called Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik (ZGL 2014) in which the most important articles that have been published in the year before are promoted. The study shows that the macro structure of the research articles’ introductions are essentially determined by the research question and the research method, which vary within this discipline. This result is particularly relevant for the teaching of academic writing, because it offers an alternative approach to support the writing process oriented towards the core of every research: which is to formulate a research question and to choose an appropriate method rather than to strictly follow assumed disciplinary writing norms.


2016 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Wetschanow

Since Swales’ groundbreaking article (1990) on the rhetorical structure of research article introductions, a growing number of studies have explored the move structure of introductions. There is an enormous body of work analyzing citation practices in academic writing. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has been paid to the analysis of citation practices within different moves. This exploratory study of five German research articles investigates the relation of amount and types of citations within the different moves of research article introductions. The description and discussion of the five sample papers results in the following hypotheses: German research article introductions (1) can be divided in a territory-, a niche-, and a project-driven type, (2) prefer non-integral citations, (3) use indirect citations to establish a territory and (4) link the announced research to disciplinary fields using the instrument of direct terminology quotations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chen-Li Kuo

Negation can be conveyed through various forms in a language. In Chinese, bù is the most common negative form, and it can also be a morpheme of a compound word which expresses negation and/or concepts closely associated with negation, e.g. modality and contrast. In order to capture most types of Chinese words carrying these concepts, we investigate Chinese words containing bù. This study first classifies bù-related words into seven categories according to the word structure and the negative connotation of bù as a morpheme retained in the word. The categorisation is then applied to the wordlists of a research article corpus and a conversational corpus. The results show that there are many fewer occurrences of bù as a negator in research articles than in conversation, and that there is greater use of four-syllable Chinese idioms (chéngyǔ) in research articles than in conversation. In addition, different sets of bù-related words are used to express contrast and modality.


2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-124
Author(s):  
Thao Quoc Tran ◽  
Thiep Ba Tang

Hedging in academic writing in general and in research article (RA) in specific has a vital role in enabling writers to minimize their opposing claims and negotiate the meaning. Nevertheless, hedging can be different from one discipline to another and from culture to another. This study, therefore, aims at examining the deployment of hedges in the Results and Discussion (R-D) section of English Applied Linguistics (AL) RAs by Vietnamese writers and their foreign counterparts. Two corpora consisting of 30 RAs written by Vietnamese writers and the other 30 ones by foreign writers were collected. The results revealed that both Vietnamese and foreign writers deployed hedges in the R-D section of English AL RAs at a similar frequency. Moreover, they shared common senses of utilizing the hedges’ types and functions in the R-D section of English AL RAs. This study has confirmed that the norms and practices of the AL, a soft science, were common among non-native English writers regardless of their culture-bound.


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