Teaching Research Writing to Chinese Graduate Students: A Guided Discovery Genre Approach

One of the biggest challenges graduate-level research writing instructors face is how to motivate students in large and multidisciplinary classes effectively. This article explores the influence of a guided inductive and discovery-based genre approach on improving students’ knowledge of research writing. A questionnaire survey was conducted, and some of the students’ written assignments were analyzed. The survey results show that the students were generally satisfied with this approach and affirmed its effectiveness in increasing their knowledge of the textual organization, format and documentation, and language style in research writing. Examining the students’ written analysis of the move structure of abstracts indicates that this approach has enhanced the students’ ability to identify moves and facilitated their acquisition of more appropriate genre knowledge. Further examination of the students’ written reflections reveals a more in-depth understanding of their learning experience. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Another Look at the Rhetorical Moves and Linguistic Realizations in International and Indonesian Journal Articles: A Case of Tourism Research

Although a significant number of studies have been conducted to explore the rhetorical structures of research article abstracts, there is a paucity of research specifically comparing the move patterns, and linguistic features of tourism research article abstracts published in international and national journals. Such a comparison is quintessential to address a notion that journal indexation may factor into the quality of textual organization in abstract writing. Employing Hyland’s (2000) analytical framework, the paper analyzed 120 tourism research article abstracts from international journals indexed by Scopus and Indonesian journals indexed by Sinta. Findings revealed more similarities than differences across the two corpora. All of Hyland’s five moves were generally found in the abstracts, with M2 (Purpose), M3 (Method), and M4 (Product) as the most occurring moves in both data sets. An exception was found in M1 (Introduction) and M5 (Conclusion), where M1 was favored and M5 was excluded in Sinta-indexed abstracts, yet the reverse was true of Scopus-indexed counterparts. In terms of the linguistic features, present tense and active voice were evidently dominant across both data groups, with a notable exception in Method move, where past tense and passive voice were more favorable. These findings appear to suggest that journal indexation does not profoundly influence abstract writing. Recommendations and implications for academic writing for publication purposes are also discussed.

Council Acts Gathered and Organized

The protocols of individual sessions are gathered into larger units by the council’s secretaries, bringing together the records of several sessions. A frequent (but not the only) form of textual organization is the gathering of case files. The case of Eutyches’ trial allows the reconstruction of the material shape of the relevant file and the cohesion of separate minutes in one physical document. Internal textual signals for cross-referencing and interlacing such units are uncovered that support and expand these observations. The case of Cyril of Alexandria at Ephesus I singularly shows directly the president’s own initiative to have a record combining physically the minutes of a number of sessions made.

Precedent Anthroponyms of Soviet Origin in English Polycode Advertising Text

The article analyzes precedent anthroponyms of the Soviet origin in multimodal texts of American and British advertising. The study aims at analyzing precedent anthroponyms of the Soviet origin in English multimodal texts from the linguoaxiological and linguopragmatic points of view and from the standpoint of textual organization. The following research methods have been used: description and synthesis, linguistic methods of structural-semantic, contextual and cognitive-discourse analysis. The paper examines the precedent names of the Soviet origin (for instance, Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Kalashnikov). It also establishes their uses in commercial texts and highlights the linguistic means of satirical effect creation as the main pragmatic goal of English commercial and social advertising. The name of a political leader acquires different connotations and in most cases it is “demoted” due to the transfer of the name from the political context to the everyday one: gastronomic, material, kitsch-cultural, glamorous-erotic, etc. Names of the Soviet politicians are found in advertisements of cigarettes, pizza, alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks, bags and other household items, including absorbent wipes. The article concludes that the image of the Soviet past in multimodal advertising texts in English acquires negative connotations. Besides, the analyzed texts emphasize that the communist ideology belongs to the system of anti-values.

Cultural and speech characteristics of the sounding word: A critical look at modern television speech

The article presents the results of a study of modern oral television speech in terms of its conformity / non-conformity with the norms of the literary language. The aim of the study was to establish the characteristics of the cultural-speech situation of television journalistic discourse. The objectives of the study are to identify and systematize the parameters of the violation of the language norm in the speech of educated people – T.V. journalists. The main methods of the undertaken research are observation, analysis, systematization, comparison, interpretation, generalization. The material of the study are the texts of the "News" and "Political talk show" genres, daily shown on the air of central Russian channels It has been established that violations of the norm of the literary language occur at all levels of the language system: phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic, as well as the level of textual organization of the utterance, which leads to the logical errors. As a result of the analysis, the authors come to the following conclusions: 1) modern television language comes into conflict with the canons of normative communication; 2) an avalanche-like violation of literary norms no longer testifies the democratization of the language, but its vulgarization, often a deliberate decrease in the cultural level of speech by journalists; 3) the turbulence of the norm in modern mass communication creates the conditions for the loss of the meaning- distinctive capabilities of linguistic units, for the weakening of the meaning of the sense-organizing rules for the combination of utterance components.

The Sounds of Coca-Cola

Based on an examination of the Coca-Cola commercial “Taste” (distributed the first time in 2015 as part of the “Open Happiness” campaign), this chapter explores how a commercial can “colonize” and “cultivate” generic territories of music, sound, and brand image. The chapter also examines how music and sound accomplish this in a brand’s pursuit of this emotional territory, whether or not this pursuit is successful or not, through a process of signification. The examination focuses on the textual organization of the commercial, including both transtextual and cotextual perspectives. The analysis also examines the relationship of music and other sound effects to the visual image in the commercial.

PRAYER AS A FORM OF MANIFESTATION OF A SPECIFIC SACRIFICE (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE TEXTS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT PRAYERS-BLESSINGS)

The article studies a prayer as a special form of interpersonal religious communication, the distinctive feature of which is the involvement of representatives of different worlds in the communicative process: the sacred and the profane. The philological analysis focuses on the Old Testament prayers - the blessings of God addressed to the first people Adam and Eve, as well as to the Old Testament saints Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The study shows that the texts belong to the genre of prayer, as we have the relevant structural-semantic and functional features that identify it as text in this genre (the presence of the addresser and the addressee, the communicative goal; particular situation of communication; mechanism of text formation, etc.). The prayer of blessing is a form of expression of the specific victim, an example of which is the perfect love of God that caused the creation of the Universe and return the feeling of a man. Analyzing the biblical material, the author of the article comes to the following conclusions: 1) the divine word, the blessing is a manifestation of perfect love, through which covered not only the process of creation, but the creation itself; 2) appellative text directs the addressee to commit post-communistic action, which is directly connected with the implementation of the divine will, a manifestation of humility - certificate of perfect love on the part of the person; 3) the instrument of text formation prayers-blessings mechanism is deployed variable repetition; 4) the Old Testament model of prayer becomes a model of the textual organization of spiritual communication between God and man, man and God...

Lexical Bundles across levels of Proficiency in Portuguese as a Second Language

Formulaic sequences are known for being measures of foreign language fluency for learners. Research in language processing suggests that native speakers as well as learners process these sequences as a single word (ELLIS, 1996). Nevertheless, little is known about the use of formulaic sequences in Portuguese and, even fewer studies have examined the use of formulaic sequences in learners of Portuguese. Therefore, in this study, we sought to investigate the textual function of lexical bundles extracted from a corpus of learners of Portuguese as a Second Language (PSL). Lexical bundles are sequences of three or more words that occur with larger than expected frequency in a specific corpus. In this study, we used corpus linguistics tools to extract lexical bundles that occur frequently at two levels of proficiency – beginner and intermediate – in Portuguese. These bundles were, then, classified according to their textual function. Results indicate that beginner level students use more bundles associated with concrete references, while intermediate learners use more bundles associated with textual organization and stance. This study contributes to the description of Portuguese acquisition at these two levels of proficiency. In addition, the results can foster classroom activities where the PSL teachers introduce new functions of lexical bundles to students. Finally, we hope that this study motivates more research describing the language used at different stages of Portuguese acquisition.

Mythographical topography, textual materiality and the (dis)ordering of myth: the case of Antoninus Liberalis

This article introduces a new analytical framework, ‘mythographic topography’. This approach recognizes the materiality of mythographic writing as preserved by the manuscript tradition and the significance of the spatial dynamics it produces. Mythographic topography encompasses both the formal properties of textual organization and how these shape the reader’s imaginative experience of space and narrative. As an analytical framework, it involves interrogating a text according to three categories (each an ancient meaning of topos): its arrangement of textual passages, its use of space and its activation of narrative tropes. Using the Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis as a case study, we demonstrate how this text requires the reader to consider issues of order, disorder and reordering within a culturally familiar narrative paradigm.