Examining the “applied aspirations” in the ESP genre analysis of published journal articles

Abstract

Abstract The accumulating genre analysis studies in the ESP tradition on journal articles (JAs) and their part-genres raise some pressing questions about the pedagogical needs for, and the pedagogical implications of, these studies. This systematic review of 36 such studies uncovered several patterns of describing the needs behind these studies: to analyze JAs or their part-genres in an under-explored (sub) discipline or language, to study the effects of (sub)disciplinary specificity on JAs, or to re-examine Swales CaRS models. Pedagogical needs are described, but often with insufficient details. When offering pedagogical implications, these studies tend to affirm such well-accepted principles as understanding how the expectations of discourse communities affect JAs, raising rhetorical consciousness, or emphasizing (sub)disciplinary variations in research writing instruction. Concrete pedagogical suggestions, when offered, often lack sufficient details about pedagogical realities, thus raising questions about the implementability of these suggestions. While acknowledging the value of exploring research genres, I argue that, to (re)energize the ESP genre analysis research agenda, ESP genre scholars should consider the needs to describe pedagogical settings and the expected uptakes of one s genre analysis studies extensively, possibly through several suggestions offered in this article.