29.4002, Review: Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis: Hyland (2018)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4002. Mon Oct 15 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4002, Review: Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis: Hyland (2018)

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Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2018 15:12:57
From: Terese Thonus [tthonus at ubalt.edu]
Subject: The Essential Hyland

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-434.html

AUTHOR: Ken  Hyland
TITLE: The Essential Hyland
SUBTITLE: Studies in Applied Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Terese Thonus, University of Baltimore

SUMMARY

Ken Hyland serves as Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education in the
Centre for Applied English Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Per his
professional website, Hyland’s opus now extends to 27 books and 222 journal
articles and book chapters, spanning a variety of academic discourse
communities and disciplines. Among these are Applied Linguistics (AL),
Discourse Analysis (DA), Corpus Linguistics (CL), English for Academic
Purposes (EAP), English for Specific Purposes (ESP), Second Language Writing
(SLW), and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). 

The Essential Hyland contains 18 of his most significant and most cited
papers, published as chapters in his own individual or co-authored books
(Hyland, 2004, 2012, 2015) and articles in Applied Linguistics, Discourse
Studies, English for Specific Purposes, Journal of English for Academic
Purposes, Journal of Second Language Writing, Language Teaching, System, TESOL
Quarterly, and Written Communication. Additionally, it begins with a
heretofore unpublished article. The book’s back cover obliquely identifies its
audience as those who have read and used Hyland’s publications, books and
articles that have had “considerable influence in shaping the direction of the
field and generating papers and PhD theses from researchers around the world.”

In his introduction to the volume, Hyland credits Johns Swales and Charles
Bazerman for convincing him that academic texts are a worthy object of study
and analysis. Hyland explains how he has engaged with academic writing, “one
of the twenty-first century’s most fascinating and contentious concepts”:
Here, in the apparently frozen surface of scholarly texts, we find evidence of
interaction, interpersonal engagement, community, identity, power and cultural
variation. At the same time, these texts reveal the workings of theoretical
constructs such as legitimate peripheral participation, genre, agency and the
social construction of knowledge (viii). 
Corpora texts, which he often uses as primary sources, are “cultural
artefacts” of disciplines that have “real epistemological characteristics.”
Hyland completes the introduction by renewing his commitment to the concept of
disciplines as discourse communities that are “not only intellectual but also
social” (ix).
 
The volume is divided into five sections, each with an introduction by Hyland.
Part One, Writing, Participation, and Identity, includes four papers with a
commentary by Charles (Chuck) Bazerman, Distinguished Professor in the
Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA).
Part Two, Interaction, Stance, and Metadiscourse, features four papers with
commentary by Brian Paltridge, Professor of TESOL at the University of Sydney
(Australia) School of Education and Social Work. Part Three, Interactions in
Peripheral Genres, contains three papers with commentary by Vijay Bhatia,
retired from the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong in
2011. Part Four, Features of Academic Writing, consists of four papers with
commentary by Diane Belcher, Professor of Applied Linguistics and ESL at
Georgia State University (USA). Part Five, Pedagogy and EAP, presents four
chapters with commentary by Ann Johns, Professor in the Department of
Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages and Rhetorical and Writing
Studies at the San Diego State University (California, USA). 

Part One begins with “Writing in the University: Education, Knowledge and
Reputation,” which Hyland developed from a 2006 lecture he delivered at the
Institute of Education, University of London. Hyland’s audience “comprised
academics from across the educational spectrum” (3) and is therefore a fitting
introduction not only to the volume but to Hyland’s entire oeuvre. (I detail
the contents of this chapter since it is the only one that has not been
previously published.) “Education” refers to the need for students to
understand the “social practices of the academy” in texts (9), with literacy
presented and understood as a set of practices rather than rules. “Knowledge”
refers to the rhetorical construction of “truth” across disciplines (15), and
“reputation” the ways that academics “wield influence in their field” (23).
For each of these concepts, Hyland produces data and analysis to support his
claims. For education, Hyland draws upon differences between the ways Hong
Kong and British students mitigate or boost claims in their GCE A level
high-school exit exam papers. For knowledge, he explores variations across
disciplinary texts in lexical meanings and bundles, and directives as explicit
textual interventions by authors. For reputation, Hyland cites the growing
influence of English as a lingua franca in academic publishing, which, if not
problematized, blocks scholars for whom English is an additional language from
publishing writing that “is both the stick and the carrot that propel [them]
on the academic treadmill” (24). In other words, academic writing is the
window into the university and its literate practices.

The remaining three chapters in Part One address the concepts of discipline,
participation, and community and individuality. Hyland acknowledges the
controversial status of the term “discipline” in the academy, yet he offers
strong support for disciplines as both individually identifying and socially
constructed as worked out in “writer-reader dialogue” (47). The chapter on
participation fixes on discourse communities as sites of global, local, and
personal interaction through and around academic texts, with examples from
students, faculty, and publication editors and reviewers. The chapter on
community and individuality, subtitled “Performing Identity in Applied
Linguistics,” analyzes a corpus of texts published by Deborah Cameron and John
Swales for “the discursive production of identity” (95), that is, the
expansion of their academic personae through writing within their collective
discourse community. In his commentary on Part One, Bazerman argues that
Hyland’s work has spurred applied linguists to look, yes, at the language of
academic texts but also to examine the complex social and individual contexts
in which they are produced. 

In Part Two, Hyland introduces chapters about what he terms his “main
contribution to the field of academic writing,” interaction (109). Thus,
Hyland positions himself as a prime advocate of the social constructivist
approach to academic writing: “Texts embody the social negotiations of
disciplinary inquiry, revealing how knowledge is constructed, negotiated and
made persuasive” (115). “Disciplinary Cultures, Texts, and Interactions”
expounds Hyland’s argument that individual authors and their writing are
shaped by disciplinary cultures, not the other way round. Based on a corpus of
research articles and interviews with their authors, “Stance and Engagement: A
Model of Interaction in Academic Discourse” (Ch. 5) examines how academic
rhetors position themselves in interactions with their readers, through
hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mention (stance), and reader
pronouns, directives, questions, shared knowledge, and personal asides
(engagement). “Metadiscourse in Academic Writing: A Reappraisal,” co-authored
by Hyland and Polly Tse, immediately attacks the definition of metadiscourse
as “discourse about discourse.” The authors present metadiscourse as embodying
reader-writer interactions that distinguish between internal and external
relations to texts (159), drawing upon data from dissertations across six
disciplines. The last chapter in Part Two, “Change of Attitude? A Diachronic
Study of Stance,” co-authored by Hyland and Feng (Kevin) Jiang, expands the
examination of stance in Chapter 5 by analyzing a corpus of 2.2 million words
from texts published between 1965 and 2015 spanning four disciplines. They
found “an inexorable growth in formality and authorial withdrawal” (199), a
result that surprised them and readers alike. Commentator Paltridge notes that
Hyland’s work encourages academic researchers to focus on their audiences, to
“establish solidarity with their readers and represent their credibility in
terms of what they are saying” (203).  

Part Three also treats academic writing as interaction but addresses genres on
what Hyland terms “the periphery” of academic texts: professional journal
articles vs. popular science journalism, dissertation acknowledgements, and
personal academic homepages. In “Constructing Proximity: Relating to Readers
in Popular and Professional Science,” Hyland draws upon the
conversation-analytic model of Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) to
stress a reader-oriented approach to writing. He demonstrates that the manner
in which scientists construct proximity with academic and general audiences
differs by organization, argument structure, credibility, stance, and
engagement. In the next chapter, Hyland calls “Dissertation Acknowledgments” a
“Cinderella genre” because “like the heroine in a children’s fairy tale,
[they] are a taken-for-granted part of the background, a practice of
unrecognized and disregarded value deserving of greater attention” (231). Like
other peripheral academic genres, Hyland argues, acknowledgments are
“intimations of the shared ways of understanding experience” (252); they
convey gratitude through authors’ constructions of professional and personal
identities within disciplinary contexts. Chapter 11 reports Hyland’s analysis
of 100 academic homepages from 50 physicists and 50 philosophers. He explains
that rather than being “trivial, amateurish and superfluous products of
narcissism and exhibitionism” (274), homepages represent co-constructions by
scholars and their universities (= “branding”). In his commentary on Part
Three, Vijay Bhatia touches on the “multidimensional framework” Hyland employs
in his research: genre analysis, corpus analysis, and ethnography, among
others (279).

Part Four, broadly titled Features of Academic Writing, comprises chapters
that focus on citation, self-mention, and vocabulary (including lexical
bundles). It collects Hyland’s most cited articles published in EAP, ESP, and
TESOL journals. In these chapters, the themes of the previous three
(discipline, community, genre, and interaction) are further explored in a
series of corpora studies. The first, “Academic Attribution: Citation and the
Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge,” investigates intertextuality in 80
research articles across eight disciplines. Looking at reporting verbs, for
example, Hyland finds that articles in the humanities and social sciences
(which he calls “soft disciplines”) contain more and more varied verbs than
“hard science” texts because authors have “a greater need to elaborate a
shared context” with their readers (307). In “Humble Servants of the
Discipline? Self-Mention in Research Articles,” he reveals the reason for the
question mark: first-person pronouns and self-citation create a “competent
scholarly identity” that increases authors’ credibility (334). With co-author
Polly Tse, Hyland asks, “Is There an ‘Academic Vocabulary’?” in Chapter 14.
Again, the question mark is rhetorical, since the authors’ main argument is
that a core academic vocabulary in English doesn’t exist; rather, academic
vocabularies (including lexical bundles) vary by discipline, genre, and text-
vs. reader-orientation. The authors argue that their findings have clear
pedagogical implications. Describing Hyland’s approaches as “theoretically and
methodologically complex, contextualized, and technologically cutting-edge”
(382), commentator Diane Belcher applauds him for problematizing the notion of
“academic discourse,” which she believes also has important pedagogical value.

And it is to Hyland’s writings on pedagogy that Part Five turns. In his
introduction, Hyland states that these collected papers are “some of the work
that I am most satisfied with” (389). I venture that the four chapters may
also be the most satisfying of the volume to teacher-practitioners.
“Genre-Based Pedagogies: A Social Response to Process” touts the importance of
teaching genre in process-oriented writing instruction, particularly in SLW
classrooms. Genre pedagogies, Hyland argues, provide “a social informed theory
of language offering an authoritative pedagogy grounded in research on texts
and contexts, strongly committed to empowering students to participate
effectively in target situations” (402). Chapter 17, “Nurturing Hedges in the
ESP Curriculum,” drawn from Hyland’s dissertation, represents his attempt to
rescue hedging from “buri[al] under the concept of modality” and to showcase
it as a primary means by which scientists “construct facts and a stance as
knowledgeable insiders” (390). Even in this very early publication (1996),
Hyland demonstrates the critical use of authentic texts rather than anecdote
or intuition as the data that make generalizations possible. Co-authored with
Fiona Hyland, “Sugaring the Pill: Praise and Criticism in Written Feedback”
examines two teachers’ summary comments at the end of student assignments.
Definitely the most qualitative investigation in the book, this chapter
explains the authors’ findings that praise-criticism, criticism-suggestion,
and praise-criticism-suggestion are the common patterns in summary comments.
Teachers are more likely to mitigate criticisms and suggestions, they suggest,
since these are the very comments upon which students will (or should) base
their revisions. Chapter 19, the last in the volume, investigates the
“specificity” in ESP—English for Specific Purposes. First published in 2002,
it lauds ESP as a developing and proving ground for teaching English as a
second/other language. In practice, though, Hyland notes that universities
“shunt off” ESP to “special units” and thus dilute its impact (449). He
proposes “a wide angle perspective” to save ESP from oblivion. First, efforts
to identify a “common core of academic writing” have proven impossible. And
second, although subject specialists propose that the features of specialized
academic texts are “self-evident” (450), the variation among texts by
discipline is too great to ignore. To put the “S” back into ESP, one must
accept that labels such as “academic” or “scientific” when applied to English
writing are merely “a convenient shorthand,” as they “conceal a wealth of
discursive complexity” (456). In her commentary on Part 5, Ann Johns reveals
that Hyland’s research articles have found a pedagogical home in her
classrooms, since they are both evidence-based and accessible.

EVALUATION

The Essential Hyland turns the Festschrift genre on its head: the author of
the collected articles is the contributor and his esteemed colleagues the
commentators. In this way, Hyland achieves both his purpose of creating “a
book of some of my collected papers” and of presenting “one person’s
experience” of “a growing sub-discipline” he terms academic writing (vi).
Hyland allows his work to stand on its own merits; he exudes authority while
letting others toot his horn. His choice of commentators could not be better.
Such is the breadth of Hyland’s research and writing that he called on a
colleague outside of applied linguistics—Chuck Bazerman-—to contribute to the
volume. This is one of The Essential Hyland’s greatest strengths.

I concur with Ann Johns: while some applied linguists make their work
difficult to access (I will not name names), Hyland does just the opposite.
His organized, crisp prose, liberally interlarded with data extracts, is
evident not only in each of the chapters but also in his section
introductions. For instance, Hyland elegantly argues in the introduction to
Part 1 that “Corpora allow us to focus on community practices in negotiating
meaning and in so doing they also tell us something of how writers understand
their communities—what their readers are likely to find convincing and
persuasive” (4). In 36 words, he touches upon discourse communities,
rhetorical analysis, genres, reader-writer interaction, and research methods.
I also enjoyed this self-effacing comment from one of Hyland’s introductions:
reflecting on his dissertation on the topic of hedging, he notes, “A
photocopied collection of sixteen research articles was my corpus and regarded
as perfectly adequate to discuss hedging—even for a PhD” (391). That’s how far
academic writing research and teaching have come given his participation and
leadership.

So who should read this book? The Essential Hyland is an excellent resource
for faculty and graduate students alike because of its topical organization:
Sections and chapters can easily be referenced in lectures and in literature
reviews. And given its relatively low cost ($30.56 paperback and $15.28 eBook
on the Bloomsbury site; a bit more on Amazon.com), it could also serve as an
introductory core text for undergraduate and graduate students in English
composition, professional writing, DA, CL, EAP, ESP, SLW, and TESOL courses.
Because chapters sufficiently reiterate key concepts, terminology, and
arguments, one can read the text closely or can skim through it depending on
one’s purpose.

The Essential Hyland is a brilliant idea given the variety of Hyland’s topics
and their original publication venues. Collecting these writings at this point
in his career allows him and his readers a pause to reflect on his
achievements as a scholar and teacher before he ventures into uncharted
territories. I’m eagerly awaiting, for example, his collaboration with V.
Zhang, “Student Engagement with Teacher and Automated Feedback in L2 Writing,”
forthcoming in “Assessing Writing” (2018). 

REFERENCES

Hyland, Ken. 2004. Disciplinary discourses: social interaction in academic
writing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Hyland, Ken. 2012. Disciplinary identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Hyland, Ken. 2015. Academic publishing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Professor Ken Hyland. Journal articles and book chapters.
http://www2.caes.hku.hk/kenhyland/publications-2/journal-articles-book-chapter
s-2-201/ (7 May 2018)

Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff & Gail Jefferson. 1974. A simplest
systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language,
50(4), 697-735.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Terese Thonus is Professor and Director of the University Writing Program in
the Klein Family School of Communications Design at the University of
Baltimore. Previously, she directed the Writing Center at the University of
Kansas. Her research interests are academic writing, second language writing,
and writing center studies. She has published articles in the Writing Center
Journal, Assessing Writing, the Journal of College Reading and Learning, and
the Journal of Second Language Writing, among others. The second edition of
Researching the Writing Center: Towards an Evidence-Based Practice,
co-authored with Rebecca Day Babcock, appeared in January 2018 from Peter
Lang.





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