Journal of English for Academic Purposes最新文献

This study explored the manifestation of multifaceted emotions, sources of emotions, and emotion regulation strategies of college EFL learners participating in digital collaborative academic reading projects. Data were collected through a vignette-based survey that was comprised of 19 episodes of authentic emotion-inducing scenarios among 72 Chinese EFL learners, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with 16 participants. While the results showed a relatively balanced distribution of positive and negative emotions, anxiety, nervousness, and happiness were found to be the top three most commonly experienced emotions. The study identified three sources of positive emotions including topic interest, experiencing mastery and achievement, and recognition from other groups. The findings also revealed factors inducing negative emotions in digital collaborative academic reading: reading difficulties, challenges in interacting with group members, low-quality feedback from external groups, online learning environment and technology issues, and time pressure. Furthermore, the study extended the literature on emotion regulation by developing a comprehensive taxonomy of six categories of strategies (i.e., co-regulation, cognitive change, response regulation, attention deployment, task-related regulation, and situation modification) tailored to the context of digital collaborative academic reading. These findings can offer practical guidance for enhancing social-emotional interactions in technology-enhanced collaborative academic reading.

This paper focuses on tertiary English as an additional language (EAL) students' ethical choices, and the factors impacting on them, when deciding whether to engage with artificially-intelligent (AI) machine translation (MT) tools for the writing of university assignments. It also investigates how student responses align with either deficit-oriented or translanguaging theoretical perspectives. Via semi-structured interviews, the voices of 23 EAL nursing and midwifery students indicate an array of ethical positions which are based on three key areas of consideration: 1) ownership of language and ideas; 2) fairness and respect; and 3) personal growth. The study highlights the scalar, strategic and dynamic nature of students’ ethical decisions and shows that questions of ethicality tap into individual, social and institutional constructs of fairness and respect, skills recognition, lifelong learning and language dominion. The findings also indicate that discussions of fairness should focus not only on differences between non-EAL and EAL students, but also inequalities within EAL cohorts. Student responses provide evidence of both deficit-oriented and translanguaging perspectives. The researchers call for universities to create clear policies concerning use of MT that recognise the levels of reflection that students engage in when writing their assignments and value the full linguistic repertoires that students bring to global educational settings.

Researchers agree that informal professional learning is crucial for developing new EAP teachers' expertise, but there exist few teacher-centred accounts of how context-specific projects and practices create favourable conditions for such learning. Through presenting and analysing a collaborative action research (CAR) project, this paper illustrates how CAR can facilitate informal learning among new EAP teachers. The project was conducted in the context of a large-scale EAP course at a Singaporean university, where three teachers, each possessing under three years’ experience teaching EAP, co-created an 11-page analytic rubric and reflected on their collaboration. Drawing on the written reflections of these three teachers, this paper examines how collaborative rubric development created a “backstage” setting where teachers engaged in trusting and stimulating dialogue, aimed at addressing shared concerns surrounding performance expectations and scoring practices. Through the process of drafting, revising, disseminating, and using the rubric, the three teachers clarified and adjusted their own assessment-related beliefs and practices, reflected on the limits of using rubrics to align assessment standards, and experimented with different methods of sharing their findings with other teachers. In the process, the rubric was reinvented as a dialogical tool that enabled teachers to scaffold professional learning for each other.

Although the impact of English as a language of science on other languages and communities has been discussed from various perspectives, it has less often been explored in Slavic contexts. This paper analyses the attitudes of Polish linguists towards English for research publication, with special attention to its perceived impact on the discipline, language, and academic careers as well as perceived risks and benefits it entails in these areas. The analysis follows a mixed method design based on data from a survey at Polish universities and interviews. The results show that in comparison to other cultural contexts, more participants perceived the status of English as a threat to locally relevant research and as an unfair advantage to L1 English scholars. The main risk areas include academic practices, locally relevant research agendas, and cooperation with regions where English is not a commonly known language; the main benefits, access to recent findings, broader research perspective, and wider audience. Respondents identified the source of the problems with policies that seal the status of English as the language of science, affecting locally relevant research and disciplinary practices and contributing to the sense of disadvantage associated primarily with manifold costs incurred by publishing in English.

This study explores the possibility of integrating pattern grammar and local grammar into construction grammar research and the value of such research for EAP writing pedagogy. Using data taken from a corpus compiled from Linguistics research articles, our study shows that local grammar analyses of grammar patterns help to identify ‘pattern-meaning’ combinations. We further describe the functions of such combinations in academic contexts and argue that they can be interpreted as constructions at the mid-level of specificity. We also demonstrate the organisation of these constructions into a constructicon for pedagogical purposes. The implications and applications are subsequently discussed, highlighting in particular that the constructicon not only offers an inventory of pattern-meaning pairings available to express meanings, but also provides quantitative information about the association between verbs and constructions. Overall, our study indicates that the integration of pattern grammar, local grammar and construction grammar could be of immense potential value for EAP writing research and pedagogy.

This paper delves into the overall use, grammatical patterns, and discourse-pragmatic functions of Prepositional Phrase-frames (PP-frames) utilized by Chinese EFL learners across Bachelor's theses, Master's theses, and Doctoral dissertations, in comparison with research articles (RAs) of Applied Linguistics. The analysis of these discontinuous formulaic language used in cross-sectional learner corpora and the RA corpus is pivotal for understanding the connection between academic literacy level and formulaic expressions in academic writing and for appreciating the development of phraseological competence among L1 Chinese writers as they navigate their way into the complexity of academic English. The findings unravel a growing tendency in the overall frequencies of use and a developmental trend in lexico-grammatical diversity and more genre- and discipline-specific functional characteristics, as Chinese EFL student writers advance through their academic journey from the undergraduate level to the doctoral level. A thorough analysis of functional dimensions of PP-frames in theses and dissertation writing reveals an increased level of functional complexity in the use of PP-frames for referential and discourse organizing functions. This study contributes to academic English instructions of PP-frames.

This study, drawing upon Halliday’s (1994) concept of the dual property of saying verbs, examines four types of reporting patterns of saying verbs in English research articles (RAs) within applied linguistics: (i) Sayer + V + reported clause, (ii) Sayer + V + noun phrase (NP), (iii) ‘Sayer’ (non-human) + V + reported clause, and (iv) Token + V + NP. It aims to analyze their frequency, distribution, and evaluative functions. An analysis of 50 RAs reveals the following: firstly, pattern (iii) is the most prevalent, while pattern (ii) is the least utilized. Secondly, the semantic function of each pattern is primarily subject-dependent. Patterns with non-human subjects (patterns (iii) and (iv)) tend to attract boosting verbs, indicating a higher assurance of the truth value of propositions. Conversely, pattern (i), featuring human subjects, is inclined toward hedging verbs, offering a less certain indication of the factual state of the writer’s interpretation. No distinct preference is observed in pattern (ii). These findings inform future research on the use of saying verbs in reporting patterns in academic writing and provide strategic instructions for teaching saying verbs in EAP classes.

Lexical bundles use in academic discourse has been explored across numerous dimensions including discipline, genre, register, student proficiency, and language, among others. These studies have resulted in claims about the nature of these different discourses or their authors, and they have been used in EAP instructional practices. Recent studies on methodological considerations in frequency-based lexical bundles research have pointed to variability in results that stem from changes in criteria used in lexical bundle extraction and corpus composition. Following this, the current study explores the impact of methodological variation in lexical bundle extraction from sets of research articles in Linguistics and Biology, with a focus on the extent of disciplinary variation uncovered in lexical bundles use and function. Experiments with varying frequency thresholds and range specifications as well as corpus composition show that results about lexical bundles use in different disciplinary discourses could be more sharply differentiated when certain variables are used, underscoring the variableness in results and the need for caution in interpreting the findings of lexical bundles research. This paper also evaluates claims made in previous lexical bundles studies using the findings from this study. Finally, previous pedagogical applications of lexical bundles research in academic discourse are discussed.