27.3212, Review: Applied Ling; Discourse; Corpus Ling: Diani, Thompson (2015)

[The LINGUIST List via LINGUIST]

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3212. Mon Aug 08 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3212, Review: Applied Ling; Discourse; Corpus Ling: Diani, Thompson (2015)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry,
                                   Robert Coté, Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
                   25 years of LINGUIST List!
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Michael Czerniakowski <mike at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2016 11:40:05
From: Ileana Chersan [ileana_chersan at yahoo.com]
Subject: English for Academic Purposes: Approaches and Implications

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36160077


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-5670.html

EDITOR: Paul  Thompson
EDITOR: Giuliana  Diani
TITLE: English for Academic Purposes: Approaches and Implications
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Ileana Maria Chersan,  

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

INTRODUCTION

“English for Academic Purposes: Approaches and Implications,” edited by Paul
Thompson and Giuliana Diani, was written in line with the increasing scholarly
activity in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in the last few
decades. It consists of 13 chapters, an introduction, a brief description of
the authors and an index, all in 351 pages. As its title indicates, the book
investigates EAP considering two complementary linguistic strands - genre
analysis and corpus linguistics - and their pedagogical repercussions. The
contributions are distributed in four parts: the first addresses corpus-based
research into EAP, the second focuses on intercultural EAP research, the third
on English as a Lingua Franca in academic communication, whilst the fourth
presents the relationship between corpus, genre and pedagogy in EAP. 

SUMMARY 

The first input, called Introduction, written by editors Paul Thompson and
Giuliana Diani, provides an overview of current research on genre analysis and
corpus linguistics in EAP and their integration in the classroom context, and
offers a presentation of the chapters contained in the book.

The first chapter, ''On the Phraseology of Grammatical Items in
Lexico-grammatical Patterns and Science Writing'' by Christopher Gledhill, is
the first of six contributions in “Part I: Corpus, Genre and Disciplinary
Discourses”. The chapter examines the role of grammatical items in
lexico-grammatical (LG) patterns and, moving a step further from his previous
research, argues that discontinuous stretches of text are found in variations
of pre-established, predictable sequences in specialized discourse, such as
‘to be on the N of V-ing’ expressing PHASE in a verbal group. These regular,
as well as hybrid, patterns of lexis are singled out from a corpus of research
articles, which consistently prove that there is both stability and variation
in morphology and determiner use, sensitive to text cohesion. One extension of
this conclusion is that such fixed complex LG patterns are indicative of the
text type they belong to.

The second chapter, “The Role of ‘Lexical Paving’ in Building a Text According
to the Requirements of a Target Genre”, by Geneviève Bordet, also treats
lexical variations as instrumental in the study of genre and text analysis.
Analyzing science PhD abstracts, the author finds evidence that the identified
cohesive lexical chains feature recurrent “pivot terms”, which contribute to
the creation of a textual dynamic. One such pivot term is “ethnomathematics”,
which appears both in the title, but also in the research statement move:
consequently, the author considers only lexemes that are directly
syntactically linked with this term and establishes the frequency and
distribution of the terms in the corpora. Following a bottom-up research
technique, the author identifies cohesive lexical chains, or “lexical paving”,
which show variation not only in individual strategies, but also exhibit
typicality for the generic structure of scientific abstracts.

In Chapter Three, “Research Articles in Sociology: Variation within the
Discipline”, Šarlota Godnič Vičič and Mojca Jarc look at the flexibility in
the structure of moves pertaining to the genre of the research articles (RA)
using six small corpora from one particular discipline, sociology. As
sociologists often conduct research navigating on related fields
(anthropology, political science, economics etc.) and in particular regions,
their writing practice is bound to be influenced by such conditions. However,
‘among’ and mostly ‘between’ are found to be the most representative
prepositions in all academic corpora, as opposed to general English, where the
same prepositions are the least frequent. Semantic patterns such as SOCIAL
PHENOMENON + ‘among’ + SOCIAL GROUP or ‘between’ + LIMIT + ‘and’ + LIMIT 
allow authors to identify, select and highlight the object of research and
present them as phenomena or objects. The two prepositions, even if
significantly less used in theoretical journals, also participate in patterns
related to methodology, topical orientation and are conceptually related to
the core of sociology.

Michele Sala’s Chapter Four “Knowledge Construction and Knowledge Promotion in
Academic Communication: The Case of Research Article Abstracts – A
Corpus-based Study” explores standardized linguistic strategies which
introduce and explain contents, methods, procedures and results in 200
research article abstracts. Abstracts are considered to be representative of
the associated articles as they anticipate and promote content; therefore,
adherence to standard organization and use of metadiscursive references
indicate how ‘competent’ a writer is. Several verbs, phraseological
expressions and lexical items are found indicative for the strategies of
observation, interpretation and argumentation. The author concludes that
‘research’, ‘cognition’ and ‘discourse acts’ are used predominantly and
consistently in the four disciplinary areas under investigation (Applied
Linguistics, Economics, Law and Medicine), fulfilling three simultaneous
functions: they are informative, ‘conformative’ (that is, reflective of the
epistemology of the various domains) and ‘dynamic’. 

In Chapter Five, “<If MSM are Frequent Testers There are More Opportunities to
Test Them>: Conditionals in Medical Posters – A Corpus-based Approach”,
Stefania M. Maci analyses the employment of conditional constructions in the
discourse of fifty medical posters presented at international conferences. The
concrete message, evidence and titles are sometimes expressed across medical
genres by elements introducing protasis (‘if’, ‘whether’, ‘given’, ‘in case’,
‘except’, ‘save’, ‘unless’, ‘suppose’ etc.), of which the most frequently used
is unsurprisingly ‘if’, while ‘suppose/supposing’ is absent; this shows that
in posters information is inductive rather than deductive, and more concise
and condensed than in research articles. Conditionals are thus shown to
express the hard sciences reasoning process by rendering either ‘facticity’
(when ‘if’ expresses an event conditional) or ‘refocusing’ (Carter-Thomas and
Rowley-Jolivet 2008); in medical (or any) posters, the persuasive force of
conditionals is also backed up by self-explanatory visual data. 

The last chapter in Part I is Chapter Six “Text Reflexivity in Academic
Writing: A Cross-disciplinary and Cross-generic Analysis” by Giuliana Diani.
The author shows that academic discourse is strained with meta-argumentative
and meta-textual elements which exhibit cross-disciplinary variation in
research articles (RA) in the field of business and economics, as well as
cross-generic variation in RA and book review articles. These elements are
used to introduce assumptions, claims, conclusions, research and textual
structure, and when compared show that economics employ more metatextual
expressions, while business prefers expressions reflecting empirical research
and theory testing. The statistically-determined lexical tools of reflexivity
(e.g. ‘on the basis of the’, ‘there was no significant #’, ‘as shown in table
#’, ‘if and only if’) are viewed to play a central role in academic discourse
marking formal reasoning in research papers, and praise and criticism in book
reviewing. 

Part II: “Contrastive EAP Rhetoric” is represented by Chapter Seven,
“Interculturality in EAP research: Proposals, Experiences, Applications and
Limitations” by Rosa Loréz Sanz. While English assures knowledge
dissemination, (non-)proficiency in English limits the participation of some
valid contributors in the international academic world. Addressing the issue
of interculturality within EAP, the comparable (English as L1 and L2 and
Spanish) SERAC corpus in four different academic divisions (12 disciplines)
reveals cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary results: stronger authorial
position in English L2, adjustment between languages according to disciplines,
gradual standardization of writing processes in academic English (Mauranen et
al. 2010). This research has also been disseminated in courses and workshops
to fellow Spanish scholars to improve their academic writing skills in
English.

Part III: “English as Lingua Franca in Academic Settings” features three
chapters. Chapter Eight, the first in this part, is Laurie Anderson’s
“’Internationality’ as a Metapragmatic Resource in Research Presentations
Addressed to ‘English as a Lingua Franca’ Audiences”. The author examines 183
presentations in English made by early-career scholars of the international
community using English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Particular interest lies in
the pragmatics of academic communication, revealed in some descriptions of
self to other scholars in peer-to-peer interaction. The presenters’
self-categorisations use various modes and related discourse: geopolitical and
institutional terms show local identity, narrative descriptions show
trans-nationality, national stereotypes assigned to the audience aim at
positioning self as intercultural. Thus, young international scholars prove
context-sensitive (as to globalized academia), despite their different
linguistic backgrounds.

In Chapter Nine, “Institutional Academic English and its Phraseology: Native
and Lingua Franca Perspectives”, Adriano Ferraresi and Silvia Bernardini
address genres situated between disciplinary specific genres and the ones used
for everyday institutional academic communication. They describe the academic
Web-as-Corpus in Europe (a 90-million word corpus of institutional academic
web texts produced by European universities) and the phraseology of the native
and lingua franca varieties found in it. The analysis of single syntactic
patterns (adjective-noun, noun-noun combinations) according to frequency and
salience revealed that non-native speakers generally use lexicalized phrases
less than natives, as shown by their underuse of strong collocations, and
produce more non-standard sequences. This is in opposition with previous
research (Durrant and Schmitt 2009), which concluded that non-native speakers
“over-rely on forms which are […} common in the language” (ibid. 147).

In the final chapter of this section, Giuseppe Palumbo examines the
characteristics of comparable sets of texts from university websites in
European, British and North-American varieties of English at a
morpho-syntactic level. His contribution, “ Studying ELF Institutional
Web-based Communication by Universities: Comparison and Contrast with English
Native Texts” considers the distribution of part-of-speech categories,
distribution of verb tenses, ratio of modal verbs and the use of pronouns;
with the exception of verbs, especially their progressive form, which tend to
be more frequent in the native varieties, the other language components
present striking homogeneity across the native and non-native varieties of
English. Importantly, this convergence relies on rhetorical models, and is
more obvious than the one exhibited by spoken native English and EFL.

Part IV: “Pedagogical Implications in EAP” debuts with Chapter Eleven “Genre,
Corpus and Discourse: Enriching EAP Pedagogy” by Maggie Charles. Despite
criticism of the teaching of genres in classroom, the author proposes four
highly engaging pedagogical tasks showing how genre and discourse can be
addressed via corpus-based methods, using thesis and chapter introductions and
students’ self-compiled personal corpora of RA. The first two tasks highlight
the variation within the part-genre and compare the studied part-genre
(introduction to the whole thesis) with others (introductions to individual
chapters). The last two tasks provably help students investigate two main
discourse functions in RA: ‘indicate a gap in research’ (showing a high
occurrence of the term ‘research’) and ‘defend your research against
criticism’ (by using the semantic sequence ‘although/though/while/whilst +
POSITIVE EVALUATION + NEGATIVE EVALUATION + REASON (optional)’).

Chapter Twelve is called “Text and Corpus: Mixing Paradigms in EAP Syllabus
and Course Design”, by Maria Freddi. The author starts from her course ‘Skills
in English for the Humanities’ but provides a wider analytical model that can
be applied to other settings. She presents the syllabus and course design
process step by step, considering students’ feedback and evaluation. The need
to improve listening comprehension and note taking was revealed by the
students’ need analysis questionnaire, along with genre conventions and
rhetorical functions. These and other findings helped create a content-based
syllabus, where communication, lexis, grammar and language functions foster
the acquisition of academic reading skills. Next, the specific ‘disciplinary
textuality’ (Fuller 1998, 47) (i.e. content and its language) is investigated
in corpora via concordancing; thus, internal variation is found in noun
phrases, which can be tackled by specific reading skills, such as unpacking
information and understanding key terms or hedging.

Finally, in Chapter Thirteen “Changing the Bases for Academic Word Lists”,
Paul Thompson starts by describing the background, constitution, data used and
methods behind four sets of baseword lists. The BNC 1K and 2K lists show the
highly frequent vocabulary used in EAP teaching contexts. The author also
includes a list of the ‘most frequent 2000 word families’ to the above in his
‘Vocabulary for Academic Lecture Listening’. This list was made using
frequency and range types and tokens drawn from the four disciplinary domains
in the BASE corpus lecture transcripts, cross-referenced against the BNC and
trialled on MICASE lectures. Finally, it was shown that this tool, despite
being compiled from limited resources, provides a broad lexical knowledge for
comprehension of academic spoken discourse, which is useful for teachers,
learners and materials developers alike.

EVALUATION

The chapters in this book can be of great use to both practitioners of and
researchers in the field of EAP, as they approach English in the context of
academic study and scholarly exchange. A wide range of linguistic, applied
linguistic and educational topics are treated from the perspective of EAP,
including academic style, genre and discourse analysis, teaching methodology,
research writing and speaking at academic levels, ELF in academic contexts and
others. In addition to general EAP, the authors also consider subject-specific
language (selected from a vast number of disciplines: sociology, medicine,
economics, law, mathematics, politics, materials science) and the production
of teaching materials (textbooks, university syllabi, word lists).

The book comes at a time when EAP has attracted great interest due to the
poignant need for academic English of both students and researchers in an
increasingly globalized world. Two productive approaches have been highly
acclaimed: the study of academic research genres and the investigation of
language corpora, seen “as constituting a continuum from top-down to
bottom-up” (Charles, Pecorari and Hunston 2009, 3), rather than as conflicting
ideas. Taking a step further, this collective volume proposes the integration
of the mentioned approaches with the overt aim of supporting academic
learners.

EAP is addressed in this book in unity and diversity together. The common core
is represented by the role of genre analysis and corpus linguistics in EAP,
and their pedagogical applications, which is further narrowed by grouping
chapters into four parts; these help the reader focus on the area of interest
more effectively, be it corpus-based research into EAP, contrastive EAP
rhetoric, ELF in academic settings, or pedagogical implications in EAP. Part
II features only one chapter, and this imbalance does not seem unavoidable:
interculturality in EAP research is a compelling trend which should deserve
equal attention. Unity is also displayed at a formal level: the layout and
organization of the book are symbiotic, from the cohesion of each chapter, to
references and appendixes. 

Diversity is displayed mostly in four areas: the methods chosen, the selection
of corpora, the contexts where the authors did their previous research, and
the amount of research material available: while some admit to the limitations
imposed by the difficulty of covering a large spectrum of academic discourse
elements (i.e. M. Sala’s expressions of observation, interpretation and
argumentation in a corpus of  200 articles in four disciplines), others
willingly narrow down the investigation to a few lexico-grammatical units or
niche corpora (i.e. conditional constructions in medical posters - Chapter
Five; the prepositions ‘among’ and ‘between’ – Chapter Three); as most authors
profess even from the introduction, their research is not exhaustive, and the
results are far from an unchallengeable generalization. 

In connection to this, all contributors suggest further directions of study to
reconfirm (or confirm) and expand their findings. For example, G. Bordet
suggests that the absence of pivotal terms can have some repercussions for the
discursive strategy, which should be investigated. Likewise, Šarlota Godnič
Vičič and Mojca Jarc claim that the complex interplay of factors behind
intradisciplinary variation needs to be extended from the study of sociology
to other domains, while Stefania Maci agrees that 50 medical posters may not
make a sizable corpus; however, in relation to the chapter mentioned last, the
author is proud to inaugurate a new research path into the linguistic
specificities of such a ‘neglected’ genre: posters.

Diversity is also allowed and encouraged in the nominalization of the key
terminology; for example, Gledhills’ ‘lexico-grammatical patterns’ are also
addressed as ‘patterns of lexis’, ‘collocational networks / frameworks’,
‘lexical bundles / chains’, ‘semantic sequences’, ‘recurrent word
combinations’ and ‘fixed expressions’, with the main purpose being to connect
with previous work in the field of EAP phraseology. While acknowledgement of
the theoretical background is motivating for the reader and also mandatory for
any piece of research, the indiscriminate use of quasi-synonymic expressions
as key terms in one’s work may seed some confusion. Researchers may rightfully
believe they have found new metalanguage which better mirrors the concept
previously named in other ways; but the question here would be: is consistency
to be expected throughout a piece of academic writing for the sake of
cohesion, or should variety and inclusion prevail?

One particular merit of the book is the compilation and analysis of very large
corpora of authentic academic materials: recordings, transcripts, articles,
book reviews, needs analysis forms, PhD abstracts and theses, posters and
university websites to obtain full-proof results in each linguistic
investigation. Special attention goes to recordings (of the oral presentations
analysed in Chapter eight) and posters (already mentioned) as genres
insufficiently addressed so far by EAP researchers. The consistent use of word
lists for cross-reference, and concordancers to detect frequency and salience
of words and phrases adds reliability to the outcome of the investigations.
One extension of this might be to find ways to account for linguistic
variation in EAP in time, as the increasing use of electronic media in
academic environments may trigger significant corpus changes.

One other important side of the volume is professed in the title: pedagogical
implications. Applications in teaching are addressed not only in Part  IV,
whose overt focus is on such practical implications, but throughout the book.
In Chapter Seven, Rosa Loréz Sanz explicitly signals the applications of
intercultural research in EAP teaching, citing Spanish universities. Maggie
Charles discusses both pros and cons of teaching genre and discourse issues in
the classroom by analyzing four tasks from two separate courses, where the
focus lies on the students’ own writings. A highly applicative side is evident
in Chapter 12, where the author presents her text-corpus approach to academic
English by reflecting on the needs analysis questionnaire and syllabus of the
36-hour course called ‘Reading Skills in English for the Humanities’, as shown
in detail in the appendix. This is followed by an evaluation of the course
from the part of the students, and the use of such feedback to amend the
course. Involving students in the creation and evaluation of one’s course acts
as a fair and handy quality control procedure, and sets a model which exceeds
the realm of teaching EAP.

As a conclusion, I would like to say that most authors incorporate the work of
Swales (especially 1990) as a starting point in their investigation. This is
highly predictable, as Swales set a clear path to the study of specialist
varieties of language in relation to research genres and language learning.
The contributions in this book pay significant tribute to the concepts clearly
defined by Swales, but also proceed to fine-tuning individual manifestations
of genre in the chosen linguistic context. Here it is particularly useful to
notice the great extent to which the authors develop their positions into
free-standing research.

REFERENCES

Carter-Thomas, Shirley and Rowley-Jolivet Elizabeth. 2008. If-conditionals in
medical discourse: From theory to disciplinary practice. Journal of English
for Academic Purposes 7:191-205.

Charles, Maggie, Diane Pecorari, and Susan Hunston. 2009. Academic writing: At
the interface of corpus and discourse. London: Continuum.

Durrant, Philip, and Norbert Schmitt. 2009. To what extent do native and
non-native writers make use of collocations? International Review of Applied
Linguistics in Language Teaching 47(2):157-177.

Fuller, Gillian. 1998. Cultivating science. In Reading science. Critical and
functional perspectives on discourses of science, ed. Jim R. Martin and Robert
Veel. 35-62. London: Routledge.

Mauranen, Anna, Carmen Pérez-Llantada, and John M. Swales. 2010. Academic
Englishes: A standardized knowledge? The world Englishes handbook, ed. Andy
Kirkpatrick. 634-652. London, New York: Routledge.

Swales, John. 1990. Genre analysis. English in academic and research settings.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ileana Chersan is Assistant Professor in English for Law Enforcement at the
Police Academy in Bucharest. She has published on EAP and ESP testing and
material design, and English linguistics. She is also co-author of English for
Law Enforcement, Macmillan.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

        Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3212	
----------------------------------------------------------