John M. Swales

THE WRITING OF RESEARCH ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS

Introductions to research articles (RAs) have become an important site for the analysis of academic writing. However, analysts have apparently not considered whether RA introductions typically include statements of principal findings. In contrast, this issue is often addressed in the manuals and style guides surveyed, most advocating the desirability of announcing principal findings (APFs) in RA introductions. Therefore, a study of actual practice in two leading journals from two different fields (physics and educational psychology) was undertaken. In the Physical Review 45% of the introductions sampled contained APFs (with some increase in percentage over the last 40 years), while in the Journal of Educational Psychology the percentage fell to under 7%. These figures are at variance with the general trend of recommendations in primary and secondary sources. Thus preliminary evidence points to (a) a mismatch between descriptive practice and prescriptive advice and (b) diversity in this rhetorical feature between the two fields.

LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

Thirty-five years ago, three leading British linguists published a landmark volume entitled The linguistic sciences and language teaching (Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens 1964). The careful wording of the title of this book was something of a clarion call; in effect, the authors promised to usher in a Brave New World of a stronger descriptive base for pedagogical materials.

Utilizing the Literatures in Teaching the Research Paper

Teaching research English, particularly the writing of papers, to nonnative speakers (NNS) has not been given the attention it needs. Available evidence points both to the overwhelming role of English as a medium of communication in the international research literature and to the low level of NNS contributions to that literature. This article outlines and illustrates an approach to the teaching of research English (on a group rather than an individual basis) which derives from four bodies of literature: (a) the sociology of science, (b) citation analysis, (c) technical writing, and (d) English for academic purposes. It is argued that this approach gives the ESL instructor insight into research writing processes and products, increases instructor confidence, provides accessible content, and produces texts from the literatures that can be used directly in class .The discussion reviews present knowledge of the research paper; considers the issues of genre, schema, and rhetorical structure; and relates the orientation taken in this article to the current debate about “process” and “product” approaches to ESL writing.

TEACHING AND LEARNING BY DOING CORPUS ANALYSIS

TEACHING AND LEARNING BY DOING CORPUS ANALYSIS. Bernard Ketteman and Georg Marko (Eds.) . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Pp. vii + 390.

The Role of the textbook in EAP writing research

148.00 cloth. This substantial volume contains 23 papers selected from the Fourth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (TALC) held in Graz, Austria in the summer of 2000. Like many edited conference proceedings, the chapters in this book vary quite widely in both the quality and quantity of the work presented. Further, the substance of some of the stronger contributions—such as Coxhead on academic vocabulary and Lee on a genre-specific index for the British National Corpus (BNC)—had already appeared in journals at the time of this volumes publication (Coxhead in TESOL Quarterly and Lee in Language Learning and Technology ). In his opening remarks, McEnery salutes the widening range of topics in this volume, but I am less sanguine about the value of adding breadth. Certainly, the new emphasis on the role of corpora in translation studies and the teaching of translation in the final section is well motivated, but it is less clear whether Renoufs discussion of short-dimension diachronic change or Flowerdews use of language learning diaries has much to do with the central issues in TALC.

Between critique and accommodation: reflections on an EAP course for Masters of Architecture students

Abstract This paper reviews the potential role of writing textbooks in increasing our understanding of academic writing. It argues that this role is under-appreciated for several reasons. These include the dampening effects of existing discoursal and social-constructionist accounts of introductory college textbooks, a reluctance to look beyond the ostensible student audience, and a diffidence in recognizing textbook author motives other than the “commercial” or the “ideological.” The paper then discusses a recently completed textbook as a means of showing how a complex set of motives can result in some contribution to research and scholarship. The paper concludes by arguing that textbooks should not be automatically excluded from the set of research-process genres since they may consolidate and apply recent scholarship, incorporate new research findings, and generate interesting new topics worth further study. In effect, advanced textbooks are important hybrid genres.

“It’s really fascinating work”: Differences in Evaluative Adjectives across Academic Registers

Abstract As the title suggests, this paper explores the competing pressures toward ESP accommodation to institutional exigencies and to a critical response to those exigencies. The locus of the discussion is the design and implementation of an EAP course for Masters of Architecture students in a major US university. Architectural professional education has been largely neglected in the expanding ESP literature, although the types of discourse that orchestrate professional training in this area have some interesting and unique features. We outline our attempts over 4 years to respond to these challenges and complexities, considering along the way both the practical constraints and the role of a critical pedagogy in EAP. Materials development was based in part on discoursal analysis of student presentations of their design studio work and on corpus linguistic analysis of the same material. The paper closes with some reflections on the lessons learnt.

Metatalk in American Academic Talk The Cases of point and thing

The properties of academic speech are much less well known than those of academic writing. As part of an attempt to redress this imbalance, this paper investigates evaluative adjectives and their intensifiers in a portion of the MICASE corpus and compares these findings with those from a corpus of academic writing. Results suggest that adjectival evaluation in this spoken register is much more prevalent, but not quite as polarized, as originally envisaged. The study also confirms that even in academic speech really (at least in positive contexts) has become delexicalized, being largely reduced to an alternate for very.

ESP: The textbook problem

Thereisasmall-scalebuthealthytraditionofresearchintoacademicspokendis-courseinbothitsBritishandNorthAmericanvariants.Someofthisresearchcomesfrom communication studies (e.g., Tracy 1997) and some from sociology (e.g.,Grimshaw 1989), but the greater part, at least in quantity, has emanated from ap-plied linguists eager to provide better services for students in English-medium in-stitutions who are themselves not native speakers of the language (e.g., Flowerdew1994). As might be expected, a primary focus has been on the lecture (Flowerdew1994) because of its central educational role in many university settings. However,EricksonandSchultz(1982)andBardovi-HarligandHartford(1993)haveinvesti-gated advising sessions, Furneaux et al. (1991) and Tracy (1997) colloquia andseminars, Grimshaw (1989) and Grimshaw and Burke (1994) a dissertation de-fense, Axelson (1999) a graduate student study group, and Dubois (1980), Shalom(1993), and Rowley-Jolivet (1999) speech at academic conferences.Inthisbodyofwork,approachesandfociofinteresthavevariedwidelyfromthegeneral structure of lectures (Coulthard and Montgomery 1981) and the signalingof main points (Olsen and Huckin 1991) to more specific investigations such asFlowerdew (1992) on definitions, Dubois (1987) on “rounded” and “unrounded”numbers, and Strodt-Lopez (1991) on personal anecdotes and asides in universityclasses.Throughoutthisdiverserangeofstudies,severaltrendsemerge.First,thereis widespread recognition that the samples studied are very small when set againstthe plethora of academic speech-events that occur on a standard campus on a stan-dard workday in a standard semester. This problem of representation is furthercompounded by the considerable evidence available (Dudley-Evans and Johns1981; Johns 1997) that academic speech is much more variable in structure, func-

English as the International Language of Research

Abstract Although ESP textbooks have been purchased in considerable quantities, they have been surprisingly little used. Thus, the ESP textbook problem is seen as being essentially one of educational failure. The major cause of this failure could lie either in the product (the textbook) or in the primary user (the ESP practitioner). The problem as posed thus raises at least two inter-related issues: what should be the purpose and role of ESP textbooks, and what is properly involved in being an ESP professional? However, our approach to these issues is obscured by some of the facts of ESP history, such as market forces in publishing, the status of the ESP practitioner, textbook analysis and trends in research and development, all of which have contributed to the abuse and disuse of textbooks. However, it is claimed that a reconsideration of the role and structure of ESP textbooks would allow them a restricted but legitimate place in ESP work. This proposal is then illustrated with an example from English for Academic Legal Purposes.