Approaching academic language in context

Paul Thompsonfor the University of Reading

By way of introduction

The relationship between text and context

Variation in academic discourse

Academic discourse

‘primarily expository writing with the intent to demonstrate knowledge within an academic setting’

‘I struggle with how to balance the personal and the “academic” in my class. I used to ask for more personal experience papers, but realized that there is an academic discourse that students need to learn in order to succeed in college.’ [http://tinyurl.com/ykts24k]

A corpus of assessed student writing at university level

Texts collected at Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes University

Funded by Economic and Social Research Council of England (ESRC)

6,506,995 words 2,896 texts2,761 assignments1,039 contributors30+ disciplines 13 genre families4 levels of study

Distribution of Genre Families

194

322

93

35

1238

114

214

35

362

75

40

76

61 case study

critique

design specification

empathy writing

essay

exercise

explanation

literature survey

methodology recount

narrative recount

problem question

proposal

research report

Engineering Case study (14%)Critique (12%)Design specification (13%)Methodology (34%)

History Essay (98%)

Different genres for Engineering students,

different audiences

Self constructed in different ways – self as actor, self

as reflecter, self as researcher/professional

Year Engineering

1 I will use, I have decided, I obtained

2 I was, I have begun, I found, I believe

3 I propose, I believe, I recommend

Year History

1 I have V+ed, I would argue

2 I will argue, I have suggested/mentioned

3 I will explore, I would argueWriter as arguer

Writer as actorWriter as reflecter

Writer as professional

BASE Corpus

160 lectures, 40 seminarsArts and Humanities; Life Sciences;

Physical Sciences; Social Scienceswww.sketchengine.co.uk/open

Distinctive of spoken academic discourse

thing, word, point, question, number, fact, example nouns from the ‘common stock’ (Swales 2004)

BASE corpus list also contains ‘sort’, ‘kind’ and ‘lot’,

Frequent use of labelling nouns (Francis 1994) points to the high level of reflexivity

Use of sort, kind, thing and lot suggest a high degree of use of ‘vague language’ (Channell 1994)

Lectures are characterised by high use of vague language, and of words that organise the discourse and the events themselves.

Top 4-grams in the BASE lectures

i m going to we re going to i don t know you re going to it s it s you ve got a s going to be the end of the is going to be you ve got to

it s going to to be able to at the end of if you want to i think it s if you look at if you ve got in the U K the way in which re going to be

Subject lectures

Economics:13 lectures in Economics (or Agricultural

Economics) categoryFall into both Physical Sciences and

Social Sciences domains (8:5)Philosophy:

7 undergraduate lecturesDifferent modules

Key words [Economics]

Predominantly nouns (‘the’ = key):capital, choice, commodity, constraint, cost,

curve, debt, demand, elasticity, market, profit, supply, trade, variable

Verbs: let, represent, maximize, consume

Mathematical symbols lambda, x, delta

Pronouns: we, they, their

Key words [Philosophy]

Names: Kant, Hume, Frege Adjectives: moral, human, secondary,

essential, primary Nouns: duty, ideas, sense, action, motives,

nature, cognitivism, perception, empiricism Pronouns: he, his Verbs: say, mean, does, think, resemble,

explain, know, claim [verbal, mental]

Verbs

Economics Infinitive forms of be and do, -ing form of

lexical verbswant/need to be, going to be, might be

Philosophy3rd person present tense forms of lexical

verbs, be and doresembles, believes, thinks, says

Variation

Between disciplinesBetween genresBetween levels

Corpus used as evidence of discourse practices

Research in the 60s and 70s

Exhaustive descriptions of the register of academic text (primarily scientific, expert production and written). Focus on texts, rather than on the people and activities that produced them

Specification of the structures and items to be learned Academic text as exposition Late 70s, the emergence of interest in

Oral discourse Discourse analysis Rhetorical models Rules of use

Source: Swales 2001

Research (Lynne Flowerdew 2002)

Moving from:

Studies of academic register (eg Barber 1962, Halliday

et al 1964, Huddleston 1971), at the lexicogrammatical level, chiefly statistically driven

To:

Studies at a discoursal or genre level, that focus more on patterning, moves, functions and phraseology

Focus

“Focus on texts, rather than on the people and activities that produced them”

In the analysis of academic discourse in the last decade, the focus has still been primarily on texts, but more attention is given to the people and activities that produced them than was previously the case

New approaches

The growth of genre theories and models since the eighties

The increased use of corpus analysis and the development of academic corpora Corpus as collection of texts? Corpus as balanced, representative sampling? Evidence of what actually goes on

Genre

First use of term in 1981: Tarone et al, Swales

Swales (1990)CARS modelRA introductionsConcepts of discourse community, and

communicative purposeTexts as socially situated – writers employing rhetorical strategies, the audience as projected

Move 1: Establishing a territory Move 2: Establishing a niche Move 3: Occupying the niche

Variation in genre

Genre analysis involves the study of texts within context, with communicative

purpose(s) as a privileged criterion.

Texts serve purposes within communities and communities adapt forms to suit

purposes.

Coe (1987)

Form and content cannot be separatedForms adapt to contentContent becomes defined through form

Genres can change and vary according to the content to be expressed and the rhetorical aims of the writer, within the bounds of the expectations and rules of the community.

Two approaches to genre

Grounded in the textualGrounded in the contextual

Textual ------------------------ContextualAustralian Systemic

Functional Approach

Swales and Dudley-Evans move analysis with reference

to specialist informants

North American New Rhetoric

Hyon 2001

Synergy

“Quantitative, correlational work serves two functions alongside ethnographic work to identify not only phenomena general to many genres, but also significant patterns of meaning-making that might not emerge from ethnography alone” (Yunick 1997:326)

Yunick suggests that a quantitative approach identifies recurrent language patterning across texts within a genre and also between genres. This can indicate to what extent phenomena are genre-specific and to what extent they are more widespread. A quantitative approach can be combined with qualitative methods of data analysis to produce a rich description of situated textual practices.

What degree of situatedness?

Swales’s alternatives

Should we privilege the views of the writers … as to the meaning and function of particular texts but also as to the definitions of the genres themselves?

Should we focus our interpretive spotlight on the … readers?

Does the primary interpretive responsibility fall to the expert?

Does a corpus of texts … permit us to … exclude … most of the human informants?

Disciplinary variation (Thompson 2005)

Looked at how PhD writers in three disciplines use citations (Agricultural Botany, Agricultural Economics and Psychology)

Citations distinguished firstly on formal grounds (is it integral or non-integral?) then on limited functional grounds (does it identify who did something, or who is the source of the proposition? Do they refer the reader to another text for further information? Etc)

The corpus

8 Agricultural Botany theses (average 31,000 words)

8 Agricultural Economics theses (average 63,500 words)

4 Psychology theses (average 50,000 words)

All native speaker writers, Reading University, 1989-1998

Results of analysis: 1

Agricultural Botany writers use non-integral citations more than integral (a ratio of 2:1)

Hardly any quotation (6 per 100,000 words) – cf Ag Econ (45 per 100,000 words) and

Psychology (34 per 100,000 words) mainly use the Source (3.4 per 1,000 words), Verb-controlling (2.0 per 1,000 words) and Ident (1.7 per 1,000 words) types of citation

Results of analysis: 2

Agricultural Economics writers use integral citations more (6:4). They tend to foreground the researchers and the models that they have developed

use Verb-controlling (1.9 per 1,000 words), Source (1.25 per 1,000 words) and Naming (0.95 per 1,000 words)

Higher density (9 per 1,000 words) Cf, AB 5.25, and Psychology 8.5 [lower than Hyland 2000]

Results of analysis: 3

Psychology writers use integral citations more than non-integral (12:5). They tend to foreground the researchers and the models that they have developed

Mainly Verb controlling (21%) and Ident (11%); Non-cit = 28%; many extended citations [explaining model or study]

Reporting verbs: Top 10 as percentages

AB AE PS

report 13 use/employ 7 find 11find 12 find 7 report 10show 10 suggest 5 suggest 7suggest 5 describe 4 use 6describe 5 note 4 show 5use 4 estimate 3 propose 4demonstrate 4 provide 3 argue 3review 3 propose 3 note 2propose 3 report 3 point out 2discuss 2 refer 2 conclude 2

60 42 52

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c6 c7

TAE-001 TAE-002 TAE-003 TAE-004 TAE-005 TAE-006 TAE-007 TAE-008

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c6

TAB-001 TAB-002 TAB-003 TAB-004 TAB-005 TAB-007 TAB-008 TAB-009

0.0

50.0

100.0

150.0

200.0

250.0

TPS-001 TPS-002 TPS-005 TPS-006

Citation density by discipline

Ag Econ

Psychology

Ag Botany

Petric (2007)

A corpus of 16 master’s theses written in English at an English-medium university in Central Europe, written by second language writers from 12 countries in Central and Eastern Europe

Gender studies 8 high grade; 8 low grade Categories based on Thompson (2001) but

adapted to perceived functions

Findings

mainly attribution in both high and lowrange of rhetorically more complex

citation types requiring analytical skills in the high-rated theses

in low-rated theses knowledge display is overemphasised – knowledge telling rather than knowledge-transforming

Harwood (2008): Interviews

Starts with interviews with subject lecturers (Sociology and Computer Science) to identify the functions of citations (an emic approach)

Categories derived:

Results

Quantification from the writers’ comments (tho’ researcher applies his categorisation)

The specialist analyst

The subject specialists in this case are the writers of the articles and they are seen to be the ones who can explain the functions of the citations. What is the role of the researcher?

Fløttum et al 2007

Contrasts on two planes 3 disciplines:

medicine, linguistics and economics

3 languages: English, French and Norwegian

Cultural identities in academic discourse

Corpus: 450 articles (3 million words) 1992-2003.

Focus on manifestation of the authors in the text, and the presence of the voices of othersFirst person and indefinite subject pronounsVerbs combined with these pronounsMarkers of epistemic modalityArgumentative connectivesMetatextual expressionsBibliographical references

Four settings

1. A national or native language-based writing culture setting, developed within the general education system *

2. The academic world in general, reflecting values that transcend national boundaries

3. The discipline

4. Genre and discourse community

Disciplinary differences

Author present?

Argumentation?Research status?

Author persona?

Medicine No Implicit Completed Researcher

Economics Yes Implicit On-lineResearcher and text guide

Linguistics YesExplicit, polemical

On-line

Researcher, arguer and text guide

Authors of research articles tend to write more like their disciplinary colleagues

writing in other languages than like their language-community co-members writing

in other disciplines

Language differences (tendencies)

Author present

Reader Polemical Pronoun

English Overtly Reader-friendly Relatively I

Norwegian Overtly Reader-friendly Strongly we

FrenchRelatively absent

Little guidance offered

Covertlyon

Fløttum et al (2006:48)

The interpretation of the observed (cross-linguistic, cross-disciplinary and individual) variation in the corpus is without doubt the most difficult part of the analysis. Explanations can be sought in terms of the language systems, national or linguistic writing cultures, disciplinary writing traditions, text types, objects of study etc ...

We do not contend to be in possession of full explan-ations of the data (or anything close to such a thing). We do, however, consider the large number of new empirical findings to contribute in valuable ways to the larger picture of academic discourse and varieties thereof.

A corpus-driven approach

Heuboeck investigating Masters dissertations in English, French and German

3 disciplines: Philosophy, History and Literature

Interviews with staffExploration of communicative

responsibility

Textual investigations

What is possible given the large quantities of dataSyntactical complexityLexical diversityUses of metadiscourse

Identifying the markers by reading the texts, and then looking to see what lexical environments these markers appear in when they perform the given function

Interviews

What are the expectations of lecturers in the different educational traditions?

What constitutes good writing in the discipline?

Data collection/selection: how much?The status of text / contextThe researcher and the participantThe problems of interpretation