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 authors provide a map of current genre theories and teaching applications in three research areas where genre scholarship has taken significantly different paths: English for specific purposes (ESP), North American New Rhetoric studies, and Australian systemic functional linguistics.
Abstract: Within the last two decades, a number of researchers have been interested in genre as a tool for developing L1 and L2 instruction Both genre and genre-based pedagogy, however, have been conceived of in distinct ways by researchers in different scholarly traditions and in different parts of the world, making the genre literature a complicated body of scholarship to understand The purpose of this article is to provide a map of current genre theories and teaching applications in three research areas where genre scholarship has taken significantly different paths: (a) English for specific purposes (ESP), (b) North American New Rhetoric studies, and (c) Australian systemic functional linguistics The article compares definitions and analyses of genres within these three traditions and examines their contexts, goals, and instructional frameworks for genre-based pedagogy The investigation reveals that ESP and Australian genre research provides ESL instructors with insights into the linguistic features of written texts as well as useful guidelines for presenting these features in classrooms New Rhetoric scholarship, on the other hand, offers language teachers fuller perspectives on the institutional contexts around academic and professional genres and the functions genres serve within these settings
675 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the academic discourse socialization experiences of L2 learners in a Canadian university and found that students faced a major challenge in negotiating competence, identities, and power relations, which was necessary for them to participate and be recognized as legitimate and competent members of their classroom communities.
Abstract: This article reports on a qualitative multiple case study that explored the academic discourse socialization experiences of L2 learners in a Canadian university. Grounded in the notion of “community of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 89), the study examined how L2 learners negotiated their participation and membership in their new L2 classroom communities, particularly in open-ended class discussions. The participants included 6 female graduate students from Japan and 10 of their course instructors. Student self-reports, interviews, and classroom observations were collected over an entire academic year to provide an in-depth, longitudinal analysis of the students' perspectives about their class participation across the curriculum. Three case studies illustrate that students faced a major challenge in negotiating competence, identities, and power relations, which was necessary for them to participate and be recognized as legitimate and competent members of their classroom communities. The students also attempted to shape their own learning and participation by exercising their personal agency and actively negotiating their positionalities, which were locally constructed in a given classroom. Implications for classroom practices and future research are also discussed.
657 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a taxonomy of metadiscourse functions is presented, and a textual analysis of 28 research articles in four academic disciplines is conducted to show how the appropriate use of metdiscourse crucially depends on rhetorical context.
640 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: This article provides a gold standard for summaries of this kind consisting of a substantial corpus of conference articles in computational linguistics annotated with human judgments of the rhetorical status and relevance of each sentence in the articles.
Abstract: In this article we propose a strategy for the summarization of scientific articles that concentrates on the rhetorical status of statements in an article: Material for summaries is selected in such a way that summaries can highlight the new contribution of the source article and situate it with respect to earlier work. We provide a gold standard for summaries of this kind consisting of a substantial corpus of conference articles in computational linguistic annotated with human judgments of the rhetorical status and relevance of each sentence in the articles. We present several experiments measuring our judges' agreement on theses annotations. We also present an algorithm that, on the basis of the annoted training material, selects content from unseen articles and classifies it into a fixed set of seven rhetorical categories. The output of this extraction and classification system can be viewed as a single-document summary in its own right; alternatively, it provides starting material for the generation of task-oriented and user-tailored summaries designed to give users an overview of a scientific field.
630 citations
TL;DR: The Academic Formulas List (AFL) as discussed by the authors is an empirically derived, pedagogically useful list of formulaic sequences for academic speech and writing, comparable with the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000), called the AFL.
Abstract: This research creates an empirically derived, pedagogically useful list of formulaic sequences for academic speech and writing, comparable with the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000), called the Academic Formulas List (AFL). The AFL includes formulaic sequences identified as (i) frequent recurrent patterns in corpora of written and spoken language, which (ii) occur significantly more often in academic than in non-academic discourse, and (iii) inhabit a wide range of academic genres. It separately lists formulas that are common in academic spoken and academic written language, as well as those that are special to academic written language alone and academic spoken language alone. The AFL further prioritizes these formulas using an empirically derived measure of utility that is educationally and psychologically valid and operationalizable with corpus linguistic metrics. The formulas are classified according to their predominant pragmatic function for descriptive analysis and in order to marshal the AFL for inclusion in English for Academic Purposes instruction.
563 citations