Journal of English for Academic Purposes最新文献

Previous research has found that L2 student writers use inquiry and monitoring to elicit feedback, but few studies have investigated the impact of feedback seeking behaviours (FSB) on student feedback literacy and their learning contexts. To address these issues, the current study drew on an ecological perspective to explore two international master's students' self-initiated FSB in the UK academic environment. Qualitative data analysis of interview transcripts revealed that both students proactively sought feedback, albeit from distinct sources (i.e., peer feedback vs. teacher feedback). As they chose to seek feedback from their preferred sources, they created greater learning opportunities, which in turn enhanced their dispositions to seek and use feedback, capabilities of eliciting, evaluating feedback and judging their own work, and knowledge about feedback and assessment. The process of seeking feedback also enabled them to construct connections with a wider range of feedback interactants, access more artefacts, and therefore cultivate a more supportive feedback ecology with richer affordances. The uncovered incremental but unbalanced development of student feedback literacy facilitated by FSB, as well as the changes of feedback contexts induced by FSB, provides new insights into the close relationship between FSB, student feedback literacy, and feedback ecology.

As one of the fundamental skills of the 21st century, critical thinking (CT) is a topic of considerable interest within the domain of assessing English for academic purposes (EAP). Recent literature on EAP instruction and assessment indicates that EAP has evolved beyond a strict focus on language improvement to encompass discourse competence and broader academic literacy development, with CT playing an important role in academic communication. A fundamental consideration in educational assessment is the construct that defines the knowledge, skills, or abilities to be assessed. However, CT has not received due attention in the research literature on EAP speaking assessment, thus raising a legitimate concern about its underrepresentation in the academic speaking construct. This study draws on Macqueen's (2022) distinction between theoretical, stated, perceived, and operationalized assessment constructs, with an aim to describe the EAP speaking assessment construct by including the concept of CT. By establishing alignment between what the literature indicates (theoretical), what assessment requires (stated), and how people understand assessment (perceived), a CT assessment framework is proposed to reflect how test takers experience it (operationalized). Our study contributes to a more nuanced conceptualization of CT in the context of EAP speaking, with implications for EAP speaking test development.

Precarious employment is a well-established feature in academia, with many lecturers, tutors and professional services staff on forms of fixed-term contract. It is especially a feature of academic development spaces, such as English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programmes, and academic staff and student development programmes. Precarity results in high staff turnover and undermines staff credibility and capacity; these issues may impact student success. Further, for lecturers and tutors themselves, there are implications for their professional identity and sense of legitimacy within their role, department, and university. Using data from qualitative surveys and interviews with academic literacy practitioners in South Africa, this article explores how being precariously employed affects agency and the development of a professional practitioner identity for those on fixed-term contracts. Using aspects of Archer's social realist framework to theorise agency, we show how precarity impacts a sense of purpose and professional self within the university in relation to other academics and students.

This research is based on a survey of recently published presentation guidebooks designed for both general academic readership as well as scientific and technical communities. The primary objectives were 1) to examine how Anglophone academic culture views effectiveness of academic presentations and, respectively, determine the shared core principles which contribute to it; 2) to identify additional explicitly stated aspects of effective presentations, both general and/or area-specific; 3) to get a better sense of the generalizability of the language recommendations in the guidebooks by looking into whether they were derived from large language data sources or were based primarily on the authors’ subjective language observations.

Overall, the survey revealed that Anglophone academic culture has a consistent view of several core principles on which effective and successful academic presentations should be built. The guidebooks also offered a shared set of additional characteristics, associated with both the preparation and delivery stage of effective presentations. However, the majority of the surveyed guidebooks lacked in the depth and breadth of their treatment of the language use in presentations. The findings of the survey can be beneficial to instructors and novice presenters alike.

This study explores the experiences and perceptions of transnational graduates from English medium instruction (EMI) programs at a Turkish higher education institution. A mixed-methods approach employing descriptive statistics and content analysis investigates how graduates perceive the impact of EMI on their content knowledge, English proficiency, career advancement, international exposure, and academic participation. Drawing on self-reported data, the study found that EMI programs contributed to professional development, facilitated career opportunities, and improved English language proficiency, particularly in technical vocabulary. Participants also reported feeling confident in their field-specific competencies and had better engagement with international communities and developments. Qualitative findings highlighted communication challenges experienced by transnational graduates when engaging with residents of their host communities. The study indicates the long-term outcomes of EMI programs for transnational graduates in today's interconnected and diverse professional landscape.

Rhetorical move-step analysis has wielded considerable influence in the fields of English for Academic/Specific Purposes. To explore the potential of using ChatGPT for automated move-step analysis, this study examines the impact of few-shot learning, prompt refinement, and base model fine-tuning on its accuracy in move-step annotation. Our dataset consisted of the introduction sections of 100 research articles in the field of applied linguistics that have been manually annotated for move-steps based on a modified version of Swales’ (1990) Create-a-Research-Space model, with 80 for training, 10 for validation, and 10 for testing. We formulated an initial prompt that instructed the base model to perform move-step annotation, evaluated it in a zero-shot setting on the validation set, and subsequently refined it with greater specificity. We also fine-tuned the base model on the training set. Evaluation results on the test set showed that few-shot learning and prompt refinement both led to significant albeit relatively small performance improvements, while fine-tuning the base model achieved substantially higher accuracies (92.3% for move and 80.2% for step annotation). Our results highlight the potential of using ChatGPT for discourse-level annotation tasks and have useful implications for EAP pedagogy. They also provide key recommendations for employing ChatGPT in research.

Riding the waves of media technologies, academia is leveraging various multimedia platforms to publicize research and bolster public prestige, of which the Nature Podcast stands as a paragon of this paradigm shift. The auditory medium, produced by a world-leading scientific journal, allows researchers to disseminate findings in their own voices, popularize scientific knowledge, and enhance interactivity and immediacy with broad audiences. To investigate how this podcast democratizes science and persuades its heterogeneous listenership of research validity and novelty, this article analyses the rhetorical moves and stance and engagement markers of 40 episodes published from 2018 to 2023. The analysis identifies four moves and ten steps that are obligatory for podcasters to restructure and recontextualize scientific discourse for auditory delivery and public listenership. Further analysis reveals that, unlike the rigidity of academic publishing, “podcasting science” engenders a different scientist persona and a dynamic form of audience engagement. Arguing that the Nature Podcast represents a synergistic blend of technical accuracy and public accessibility, we demonstrate the dynamic interaction between podcast hosts and scientists and how their specific roles shape the interactions with audiences. Pedagogical implications of these findings are also discussed.

Exemplification and reformulation are key elaborative strategies that empower clarity and argumentation in academic writing. Most research investigating their use in academic writing argues that writers’ choices in terms of frequency and marker type are conditioned by disciplinary variations and the level of expertise of the writers. This has led to an understanding of discourse communities as being homogeneous groups of novice versus expert writers and of separate soft versus hard disciplines. Through the analysis of 90 research articles and book chapters single-authored by six leading linguists, this study shows that these successful authors deviate from the common practices in linguistics and their choices deviate from each other significantly. However, the data does not reveal any steady increasing or decreasing frequencies in the use of exemplification and reformulation throughout their career stages, which makes it hard to claim that the frequency of using the two discourse functions evolves with experience. The study argues that individuality and style preferences within the same discourse community should be acknowledged as an additional variable affecting discursive choices and calls for a more nuanced understanding of disciplinarity and writing expertise.

Writing book reviews provides novice scholars with the valuable experience of critical engagement with their field and the development of academic writing skills, but it also confronts them with rhetorical and publishing challenges. Given the enduring value of the genre and its potential importance in English for Research and Publication Purposes courses, we investigate how academics view their experience of publishing this genre. Based on in-depth interviews with fifteen Chinese scholars of varied professional status, we find that authors participate in writing book reviews early in their careers and appreciate the opportunities it offers to develop their academic writing, gain an appreciation of reader needs, become familiar with publication practices, and advance their careers. Concerns were raised, however, about the extent to which institutions value book reviews for advancement. Despite varying opinions, the respondents saw book reviews as affording them tangible gains, especially early in their careers, in writing for publication and learning disciplinary norms of communication. Thus the genre merits respect from institutions and a more central place in ERPP training programmes and postgraduate writing courses.