Journal of English for Academic Purposes最新文献

This study reports on a diachronic investigation into the under-explored practice of using a rhetorical part – an unconventional, informationally non-compulsory part involving the use of rhetorical device(s) – in compound titles of published pragmatics research articles (RAs). By analyzing 2263 compound RA titles drawn from two high-profile international journals in pragmatics published during three periods of time (i.e., 1993–2002, 2003–2012, 2013–2022), we show that (a) the overall distribution of compound RA titles involving a rhetorical part has shown a statistically significant increase across the periods concerned, and that (b) rhetorical devices used in the rhetorical part mainly include quotations, rhetorical questions, metaphors, parodies, alliterations, and repetition, with quotations being the only type whose occurrence frequency has been steadily increasing across the three periods studied. The increasing use of a rhetorical part is attributed to the competitive context of international academic publication and the inherent characteristic of the pragmatics discipline. Hopefully, this study could provide new evidence for the transition to post-academic writing style as well as the documented rhetorical marketization of the academic genres, and inform academic title writing in practice.

While the grammatical marking of stance in academic writing is dynamic and susceptible to change over time, relatively few studies have tracked the changing patterns of stance expressions in contemporary medical academic writing. Based on 480 medical research articles published in top medical journals between 1970 and 2020, this study investigated the use of three major types of stance devices (modals, stance adverbials, and that-complement clauses) from a diachronic perspective. Results showed that the three types of stance devices and their functional/syntactic categories displayed a clear downward trend. In terms of stance markers within functional/syntactic categories, results demonstrated that stance markers indicating certainty declined in use, whereas stance markers conveying uncertainty increased. The results indicate that medical academic writing tends to become less interpersonal and more informational over time. In addition, medical writers are inclined to make more cautious and tentative knowledge claims across the years. These changes may be related to the development of medical science and have important pedagogical implications.

Gesture has been recognized as an important aspect of second language (L2) acquisition, playing a vital role in L2 communication. Previous research has shown that L2 learners' communicative efficacy can be facilitated through gesture mediation. In particular, L2 learners may find gesture a useful tool to deliver their subject-related academic presentations. However, whether classroom gesture instruction could boost L2 learners' gesture use in academic speaking context and their overall presentation performance has rarely been explored. Drawing on activity theory, this study aims to investigate the potential role of gesture instruction in intermediate L2 English learners' gesture use and their academic presentation performance. Our study found that L2 learners who received classroom gesture instructions showed significant improvement in their use of gestures, and outperformed the control group in a post-test presentation session, showing improvement in all gesture types among which beats were significantly increased. These findings confirm the teachability of gesture to enhance Chinese L2 English learners' academic presentation skills, proving gesture as an indispensable instructional component in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom.

As multimodal texts become ubiquitous in the digital age, analyzing how writers interact with readers via the multimodal genre is getting increasingly important. Enlightened by Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) work on visual design, D'Angelo (2016) extended the metadiscourse model (Hyland, 2004) and proposed a new framework of visual metadiscourse to analyze academic posters. In this study, we adopted the well-recognized metadiscourse model (Hyland, 2004; Hyland & Tse, 2004) and developed D'Angelo's (2016) visual metadiscourse framework to evaluate the comprehensibility and engagement of medical students' infographics completed in an EAP class. A total of 127 Visme infographics on how to prevent hypertension were collected and analyzed. We focused on how the students used diverse metadiscourse resources to inform and engage the audience in their infographics. We coded interactive and interactional features regarding both textual metadiscourse and visual metadiscourse for each poster and identified the overall patterns of the EAP students' metadiscourse use. We also zoomed in on illustrative posters to depict the students' use of various metadiscourse resources. This study adds to the metadiscourse model by extending it to the multimodal genre and sheds new light on multimodal pedagogy.

This study explores how English as a Second Language (ESL) students make reference to outside sources and incorporate textual repetition using multimodal resources in a video project. ESL students’ source use and citation practices have been studied extensively in the context of traditional text-based writing. However, little attention is paid to the issue of making citations in multimodal writing, despite the fact that multimodal writing has been a popular topic in recent decades. The current study bridges this gap by analyzing the cases of multimodal citation in 14 videos created by ESL students in a first-year composition course, accompanied by insights from two students. The analysis yields three patterns of incorporating sources—concurrently afforded, verbally afforded, and visually afforded citations—that employ different combinations of visual and audio resources. Direct quotations are incorporated as part of the narration as well as the visual representation. These multimodal citations and quotations fulfill three broad rhetorical functions: attribution, exemplification, and establishing links between sources. There is also evidence of knowledge transfer across genre and cultural boundaries. This study provides insights into how modal affordances could be leveraged to acknowledge propositional content in creative and rhetorically effective ways. It provides pedagogical ideas for designing multimodal assignments to engage students in the critical discussion of audience, intertextuality, and discourse community.

The purpose of this study is to profile the genre of reply, response, and rejoinder articles (3R) on a corpus of 480 texts sourced from the disciplines of History, Linguistics, Biology, Psychology, Chemistry, Physics, Politics, and Economics. A novel multi-dimensional model based on 124 linguistic features was developed on five functional dimensions: i. Literate vs. oral production, ii. Non-technical stance vs. specialized informational density, iii. Ethos-oriented non-narrative vs. logos-oriented narrative concerns, iv. Elaborated persuasion, and v. Overt expression of evaluation. The findings concerning disciplinary and diachronic variations across dimensions suggest: i. provided that 3R articles are heavily stance-loaded, relatively informative, and eloquently persuasive forms of academic discourse in nature, the genre of 3R in soft disciplines is literal, non-technical attitudinal, ethos-oriented non-narrative, elaborately persuasive and overtly evaluative, whereas it is oral, specialized information-dense narrative, logos-oriented persuasive and evaluative in hard disciplines; ii. the dimensions of evaluation, informativeness, and persuasiveness are the functional constants of the 3R genre across disciplines and time, despite significant discrepancies detected in the functional representation of oral/literate style and elaborated persuasion. These findings are relevant to the study of disciplinary rhetoric and may contribute to advanced genre pedagogy in EAP, ESP and EPP studies.

Chinese higher education internationalization demands effective English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing support to help Chinese college students engage in academic study and scholarly exchange. Writing centers, a globally prevailing form of U.S.-rooted writing support, have become a promising approach to innovating College English instruction in China. Recognizing the lack of empirical research on writing centers as part of EAP instruction, this study examines the missions and practices of glocal writing centers in China, i.e., indigenous writing centers with Chinese characteristics, by conducting photo elicitation-facilitated, in-depth interviews with writing center directors/founders from eleven Chinese universities. This study reveals two types of Chinese glocal writing centers, namely English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) writing centers and English for Academic Purposes-English for General Purposes (EAP-EGP) hybrid writing centers, which are guided by indigenous missions of serving as innovation sites for the EGP-EAP/ESP reform of College English and responding to Chinese higher education internationalization. Additionally, Chinese writing centers distinguish themselves through a range of key practices, for example, the overwhelming preference for faculty tutors, acceptance of proofreading, and expanded writing activities. Implications are offered for implementing and researching writing centers as a glocal practice of EAP writing support in China and beyond.