Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings / John M. Swales
01 Jan 1991-Vol. 1991, Iss: 1991, pp 1-99
About: The article was published on 1991-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 5640 citations till now.
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TL;DR: The case genre system provides highly conventionalized conductor-choreographer roles for instructors and blunt, detached consultant roles for student writers/speakers who repeatedly enact decisive, adversarial personae affirming practices and values of the business school as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Focusing on the case write-up within the Harvard case method of instruction, this study provides historical and empirical evidence for the theory of genre systems. The Harvard case literature and interviews at a case-based business school in the Harvard tradition show that the purpose of this largely ignored written genre is to prepare students to participate in the primary genre, oral classroom discussion of the case. The case genre system provides highly conventionalized conductor-choreographer roles for instructors and blunt, detached consultant roles for student writers/speakers who repeatedly enact decisive, adversarial personae affirming practices and values of the business school.
45 citations
03 Jan 2011
TL;DR: In this article, Tannacito et al. this article presented a paper by Bennett A Rafoth, EdD, and Thomas Farrell, PhD, which was the first work of TANNACITO.
Abstract: Dissertation Chair: Dan J Tannacito, PhD
Dissertation Committee Members: Bennett A Rafoth, EdD and Thomas Farrell, PhD
45 citations
TL;DR: The interview data indicate that the applied linguistics doctoral students adopted specific strategies in tackling difficulties that arose in their publication efforts, which included selecting areas of study which they were familiar with for their research, reading articles in past issues of targeted journals, and seeking assistance from their dissertation supervisors.
45 citations
01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: It is demonstrated how EAP would gain significantly from the design of a productively oriented academic wordlist and important methodological issues for the development of such a list are addressed.
Abstract: Most studies of vocabulary in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) (Nation 2001:187-216) have emphasized the importance of a 'sub-technical' or 'academic' vocabulary alongside core words and technical terms in academic discourse. A variety of word lists have been compiled to meet the specific vocabulary needs of students in higher education settings. The 'Academic Word List' (AWL) (Coxhead 1998) is the most widely used today in language teaching, testing and materials development. It consists of 570 word families that are not in the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words of English as described in the 'General Service List of English Words' (GSL) (West 1953) but which have wide range and reasonable frequency of occurrence in a 3,500,000 word corpus of academic texts. Taken together, words of the GSL and the AWL and domain-specific items should approach the critical 95% coverage threshold needed for reasonable reading comprehension (Nation 2001:197). While the AWL is certainly a good supplement to the GSL for receptive purposes, it is however questionable whether all words in the list should be the focus of productive activities in EAP classes. Learners' needs for academic writing are clearly not the same as for academic reading. In this presentation, we will demonstrate how EAP would gain significantly from the design of a productively oriented academic wordlist and we will address important methodological issues for the development of such a list. We will first discuss the notions of frequency, keyness and range and question the widely used criterion of non-appearance in the GSL for the selection of EAP vocabulary. We will then show that a productively oriented academic word list should also be developed on the basis of a careful analysis of learners' needs: it should give the necessary lexical means for learners to do the things that academic writers do, e.g. stating a topic, hypothesizing, contrasting, exemplifying, explaining, evaluating, etc. In addition, recent corpus-based studies of recurrent word combinations (Biber 2004), lexical phrases (Oakey 2002) and abstract nouns (Flowerdew 2003) in native academic writing have pointed to the existence of an EAP-specific phraseology. It is therefore particularly important that a productively oriented academic word list should introduce new words together with information on how to use them, especially their collocational and colligational environment. One of the most innovative EAP textbooks to date, 'Exploring Academic English' (Thurstun & Candlin 1997), uses concordance lines to introduce new words in context and to familiarise learners with the phraseology of these words. However, the value of such pedagogical tools for non-native speakers of English would be greatly increased if findings from learner corpus data were also used to select which words and word sequences to teach (Flowerdew 1998; Granger 2004). By way of illustration, we will analyse the lexical means used by English speakers and non-native learners of English to give examples and show how learner corpora can provide useful information on learners' difficulties in terms of underuse, overuse and misuse of target words or multi-word sequences and use of learner idiosyncratic sequences (De Cock 2003).
45 citations
TL;DR: The authors carried out a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic analysis of text-and participant-oriented metadiscourse in two rhetorically forceful research article sections (Introductions and Discussions).
Abstract: Taking the non-integrative approach to metadiscourse (Adel 2006; 2008), this paper carries out a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic analysis of text- and participant-oriented metadiscourse in two rhetorically forceful research article sections (Introductions and Discussions). Results show that, across cultures, the average frequencies of the two types of metadiscourse are relatively similar in the two article sections. Findings also show that the micro-level discourse functions of these metadiscourse types seem to concentrate in specific information moves in these sections, suggestive of shared uniform conventions for academic writing across cultures and languages. The exploration of metadiscourse further reveals several culture- and language-specific traits regarding preferred lexicogrammatical realisations of metadiscourse units, different preferences for personal/impersonal metadiscourse types as well as different textual developments for constructing arguments.
44 citations