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This study examines the integration of social justice-oriented content into English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instruction at a four-year university on the East coast of the United States. In the context of an Academic Writing course taught to emergent bilingual (EB) students, this article identifies the challenges and prospects of utilizing material that addresses past and present racial inequities in the United States— particularly when it comes to equipping EBs with essential background knowledge to engage in meaningful dialogues and critical writing about social issues that are entrenched in white supremacist and settler colonialist histories. It makes suggestions for TESOL educators who seek to adopt more equitable and inclusive teaching practices by leaning into rather than away from challenging classroom conversations with EB students and embracing the intersecting challenges and opportunities for new learning that may arise.

Some linguistic features are proscribed in academic writing as they are considered too informal. However, from a descriptive perspective, the extent to which academic writers follow popular proscriptions is an empirical question. Although previous studies present important findings about the frequency of proscribed informality features in academic writing, they do not explore how many academic writers use these features because frequencies were typically not calculated per text (i.e., per article). Additionally, previous research may have included quotes in frequency counts. These methodological limitations are addressed in the current study, which examines (a) whether proscribed informality features are commonly used by a wide range of academic writers, (b) whether disciplines differ in their use of these features, and (c) whether the use of these features has changed over time. The findings show that academic writers tend to avoid many of the proscribed informality features, but some features such as initial conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs, first-person pronouns, and unattended references have higher frequency rates, which corroborates the findings of previous research. Unlike previous research, the current study shows that these high frequencies come from a few academic authors as most authors either use these features minimally or completely avoid them.

If-constructions, with functional versatility, are of great importance to academic writing. While considerable literature has been published on If-constructions in research articles and naturally occurring discourse, relatively limited attention has been paid to how If-constructions are used in L2 learners' academic writing. To address this gap, a comparative study on the use of If -constructions is reported in this paper with regard to the overall distribution and meaning negotiation in corpora of Chinese L2 learners' theses and published research articles in applied linguistics . We draw upon Warchal's (2010) typology of conditional clauses and Martin and White's (2005) notion on writer-reader meaning negotiation and examine propositional and pragmatic meanings, monoglossic and heteroglossic If-constructions used in the corpora. We also discuss the major reasons for the differences and similarities in the overall distribution and meaning negotiation. From this case study, we conclude that If-constructions are one of the key options from the academic writers' rhetorical toolkit, allowing them to make propositional and pragmatic meanings and to negotiate a dialogic space in academic discourse.

This Viewpoint calls attention to the pervasive wrongs related to knowledge production, use, and circulation in global health, many of which are taken for granted. We argue that common practices in academic global health (eg, authorship practices, research partnerships, academic writing, editorial practices, sensemaking practices, and the choice of audience or research framing, questions, and methods) are peppered with epistemic wrongs that lead to or exacerbate epistemic injustice. We describe two forms of epistemic wrongs, credibility deficit and interpretive marginalisation, which stem from structural exclusion of marginalised producers and recipients of knowledge. We then illustrate these forms of epistemic wrongs using examples of common practices in academic global health, and show how these wrongs are linked to the pose (or positionality) and the gaze (or audience) of producers of knowledge. The epistemic injustice framework shown in this Viewpoint can help to surface, detect, communicate, make sense of, avoid, and potentially undo unfair knowledge practices in global health that are inflicted upon people in their capacity as knowers, and as producers and recipients of knowledge, owing to structural prejudices in the processes involved in knowledge production, use, and circulation in global health.

This study explores the experiences of women academics while combining the challenging job of online teaching and familial responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic in Pakistan. The aim is to outline the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on women academics. We employed a qualitative research design and collected data through in-depth qualitative telephonic interviews with thirteen women academics in four public sector universities in Pakistan. The findings show that women academics remained overwhelmed by the workload; lacked support; and endured a tiring struggle to manage their official duties and familial responsibilities. They were stressed and stuck in their children and family care and online teaching and had hardly any time for academic writing. The participants expressed being burned out, depressed, exhausted, angry, and in desperate need of personal time. Since women experienced the lockdown differently than men we suggest that they may be compensated at the time of tenure/promotions.

With the rise of English as the language of global communication, English is increasingly being adopted as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) in countries where it is not the first language. When implementing EMI, a primary concern is students' lack of English proficiency and the impact this has on teaching content (Bradford, 2016; Hu & Lei, 2014 ; Kim, Kim & Kweon, 2018; Macaro et al., 2018). One country where EMI has been widely adopted across both secondary and higher education is Lebanon. While research has documented Lebanese EMI instructors' perceptions of their students' proficiency and their perceived role in the classroom, research into Lebanese EMI students' academic writing proficiency remains limited (Khachan & Bacha, 2012). The present study seeks to build on this research by examining the challenges Lebanese EMI students face when writing for academic purposes through an analyses of students' assignments in a discipline course and triangulating them with teachers' perceptions of students' writing challenges. This comparison revealed that the instructors' perceptions aligned with students' performance on two of the three perceived challenges noted in the interviews. These conclusions may serve to inform EMI policy and curriculum design by reconciling instructors' perceptions with the reality of their students’ linguistic proficiency and learning needs.

This paper investigates the academic writing challenges encountered by L2 postgraduate students in Engineering and the strategies they developed (or, from the perspective of faculty, should develop) to address these issues. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data gathered from 82 graduate students and 24 faculty in Engineering in three universities in Hong Kong, the study revealed similarities and differences related to topics previously identified in the literature. The study identified major differences between students and faculty regarding academic writing challenges. The primary concern of most L2 graduate students was challenges at the sentence level (i.e. local language features), whereas that of most faculty was challenges at the discourse level (i.e. global language features). The study also revealed that some student strategies for managing academic writing challenges (e.g. employing Google Translate) do not fully meet faculty expectations. These findings have significant pedagogical implications, for example, the need for providing appropriate writing models and writing interventions for L2 graduate students in Engineering.

This paper proposes a local grammar approach to investigating diachronically discourse acts in academic texts, aiming to offer an additional method for diachronic studies of academic discourse. Local grammars capture the patternings of the realizations of discourse acts at both the lexicogrammatical and discourse-semantic levels; as such they offer a way to explore how the realizations of a given discourse act may vary across time periods or contexts. The proposed local grammar approach is subsequently demonstrated with a study investigating the changing patterns of exemplification in Linguistics research articles, which shows that academic writers of Linguistics nowadays tend to exemplify in simpler and more explicit ways and by presenting subcategories. It is further argued that such investigations complement diachronic investigations of other linguistic features in academic texts, thereby enriching the toolbox of EAP and ESP studies.

© 2020 Elsevier Ltd Empirical research writing is one of the primary means of disseminating knowledge in academia. It is through this particular form of knowledge dissemination that a rich body of scientific knowledge about a given phenomenon is accumulated. This paper explores patterns of variation in the language of this specific sub-register of academic writing, as reflected in the use of words in different sections of empirical research articles from across ten disciplinary fields. An inductive approach was adopted through which patterns of specificity in vocabulary use were systematically identified, triangulated and verified using different methods of data analysis. The results presented in this study show that the lexical choices academics make in the process of composing their research papers are differentially affected by the standards and conventions of scholarly activities in their field. It was found that such conventions have the potential to govern the delineation of authors’ linguistic decisions at the most basic levels, such as the lexis.

Post-secondary students across the curriculum are commonly required to integrate source text material into their academic writing. While writing from multiple sources occurs frequently in higher education (Rosenfeld et al., 2001) and is a cognitively demanding task, few studies have investigated the types of source integration used by L1 and L2 writers entering post-secondary, first-year composition (Cumming et al., 2016). This study compares L1 and L2 in-class writing from multiple sources to quantitatively investigate similarities and differences in (1) use of various types of source integration (e.g., citations, paraphrases, direct quotes), and (2) use of ideational units. The writing was also analyzed qualitatively to follow up on select patterns from the quantitative findings. Results indicated that despite lower holistic writing quality scores, the L2 writing, in certain respects, demonstrated more responsible use of various types of source integration compared to L1 writing. The analysis also revealed very low frequencies of synthesis writing for both L1 and L2 writing. Finally, the findings are discussed as they relate to simplified versus elaborative integration of source material in student writing.

Even when the research is completed successfully, the authors' job is not done. They must craft the best possible manuscript for submission to a targeted journal, which will put the research into the best possible light and enhance the likelihood of eventual acceptance. This is the process of framing the manuscript, and for this editorial we sought the thoughts and opinions of experienced academic colleagues on how authors should optimally frame manuscripts for journal submission. Each contributor was asked to provide three to five pieces of advice for young scholars on this topic. Our objective is to provide some non-obvious recommendations to young scholars that would substantially improve the manuscript from the reviewers' viewpoint. Our contributors present guidance on framing each section of the typical academic manuscript, from introduction to conclusion, as well as some suggestions for overall improvement. We conclude with summary remarks on the importance of putting in the time and effort to frame the manuscript effectively.

Studies on author identity and relations in academic writing have mostly focused on research articles and relatively few studies have attended to the construction of identity in texts where there is a more obvious unequal relationship between author and reader. This paper reports on a study of interpersonal relationships constructed in an occluded genre, the manuscript review, and compares writer–reader relations across reviews with three different reviewer recommendations: ‘reject,’ ‘major revision,’ and ‘minor revision.’ An analysis of select lexicogrammatical features used in the construction of recommendations and the presence of author and reader in texts reveals the construction of a more unequal relationship between author and reader in ‘major revision’ and ‘reject’ reviews than in ‘minor revision’ reviews. This is due to the use of strong directives, the lack of author presence in mitigating negative evaluation and recommendations given, and the more direct reference to authors through the use of the second person pronoun, especially in negative comments. This study reveals that the polite and egalitarian relationship identified in public academic genres may not always be present in private academic genres and shows that author persona can vary in response to purpose, context, and readers of a genre.

This paper investigates the impact of language background and writing expertise on textual priming patterns with a focus on textual position and semantic association of the multi-word sequence according to… in English research papers. Comparisons were made on the usages of according to…in four corpora of English research papers, covering writing by Chinese-speaking learners of English (L2 learners), L1-English novice writers and two groups of L1-English experts who differed in their disciplinary membership. Results show that L2 learners and L1 experts tend to use according to… in different textual positions. Specifically, L2 learners exhibit a strong bias towards using the sequence at the very beginning of paragraph-initial sentences whereas L1 experts prefer to use it in the second half of non-initial sentences. In addition, L2 and L1 usages demonstrate differences in semantic categories associated with according to…. However, few differences were found between L1 novice and expert writers in either textual positions or corresponding semantic categories. We argue that establishing textual priming patterns of multi-word sequences could be challenging for L2 learners due to L1 transfer as well as insufficient L2 exposure. Pedagogical interventions are recommended to teach priming patterns of multi-word sequences in English for Academic Purposes.

This paper explores whether hedges and boosters are used differently in discussion sections of research articles adopting one of the two qualitative approaches: narrative inquiry and grounded theory. Based on 30 SSCI-indexed journal articles in the field of education, both similarities and variations between the two paradigms were identified regarding the ways propositions are modified. Generally, narrative inquiry researchers relied more on boosters than grounded theorists in their statements, while researchers following grounded approach were more tentative in building a theory or concept. Furthermore, while narrative and grounded-theory studies both used hedging and boosting, certain nuanced variations were observed, e.g., the former being more likely to boost their contributions to their research communities. Such similarities and differences can be rooted in and explained by the respective philosophical assumptions behind each paradigm, suggesting a paradigmatic influence on hedging and boosting in academic writing. This study contributes to the current understanding of metadiscourse by documenting paradigmatic variation and proposing four continua sensitive to hedge–booster interactions and to aspects of knowledge representation, thereby providing pedagogical implications for teaching and learning of metadiscourse in papers using one of the two qualitative approaches in particular and different qualitative approaches in general.

This editorial discusses what reviewers are looking for when they make comments and suggestions on the manuscripts they receive for review. Contributors responded to an open invitation to reflect on the review process: what do they look for in each part of a manuscript (from introduction to conclusions), what are the mistakes that authors sometimes make, and what advice do they have to authors preparing their manuscripts for submission. Contributors also provided several overall comments on writing style, on making a good first impression, and on the need to address reviewer comments thoroughly in a revision. The editorial complements earlier editorials about writing and revising manuscripts, as it presents the perspectives of several experienced and respected reviewers, and provides insights on specifically what satisfies or frustrates them when reviewing manuscripts.

This study investigates lexical bundles (LBs), a particular type of frequently occurring multiword sequence, in the academic writing of native and nonnative English-speaking first-year university students. The study extends the functional analysis of LBs in the literature by investigating the evaluative prosody and semantic preference of LBs in the same semantic domains that are employed by novice student writers from the two different language groups. The students wrote argumentative essays in response to identical writing prompts. The very specific functions of the LBs in the essays were examined and compared. The results indicate semantic traits specific to each language group. This outcome can contribute to instruction on argumentative essays, which are a common pedagogical writing genre assigned across disciplines at the undergraduate level as well as in language-focused courses in general.

This study explored the potential of integrating corpus-based and genre-based approaches to teaching rhetorical structures in a discipline-specific English as a Foreign Language (EFL) academic writing course at a university in China. The instructor and students first collaboratively compiled a specialized corpus consisting of the introduction sections of engineering research articles (RAs), which was subsequently annotated for rhetorical moves. A series of guided corpus-based genre analysis activities were then used to help the students understand the rhetorical structures of engineering RA introductions and the linguistic features associated with different rhetorical moves. The effectiveness of this pedagogical approach was evaluated with data triangulation across pre- and post-instruction questionnaires, interviews, students' reflective journals, and student-produced writing samples. Results showed that the integrated approach helped enhance the students’ genre knowledge and improve their genre-based writing skills. This study thus contributes evidence of the feasibility and effectiveness of corpus-based genre pedagogy in discipline-specific EFL contexts.

Introduction By acknowledging the range of emotions that accompany most writing projects, some relief can be offered from the unrealistic expectation that this process “should be easy.” In this commentary, we explore the emotional habits of writing as described by Dr. Helen Sword in her book Air & Light & Time & Space and offer strategies to smooth the path that can be hastened and/or challenged by the various “chutes and ladders” that writers can encounter along their journey. Commentary Using an emotional intelligence framework coupled with self - reflection questions, this commentary explores aspects of self-awareness, self-management, motivation, social awareness, and relationship management, as they relate to writing and the writing process. As each topic is teased apart and related to the writing process, strategies are offered to buoy authors successfully across the turbulence as a variety of “chutes and ladders” appear along the journey. Implications An author's response to the angle and/or length of the “chutes and ladders” encountered can positively or negatively impact current and future writing productivity. To mitigate a range of emotional hurdles, writers need a core set of strategies that can be derived from the emotional intelligence framework.

International audience; This study analyses the semantic values and informational role of the French discourse marker par ailleurs(literally "by elsewhere") in modern academic writing. The corpus compiled for the study consists of one hundred French PhD thesis abstracts (and their accompanying translations in English), taken from various fields in the humanities and social sciences.The methodology is based on the analysis of a number of features of the French marker including sentence position, text position, co-textual environment and discourse functions. Five main discourse functions for the French marker are distinguished: (1) return to a prior topic, (2) addition or continuation (3) enumerative addition), (4) alterity (5) digression. A second stage of the analysis involves identifying and examining the English translation equivalents of par ailleurs used in the accompanying English abstracts. Although the marker has no generally accepted standard translation in English, our hypothesis is that this contrastive focus can serve as a heuristic to better identify the core functions of the French marker and its role in signalling topic development.

This study reports on provision to assist students in the health sciences develop knowledge and skill in locating, evaluating, and synthesising sources to use as supporting evidence for the argument essays they are required to produce for first year courses at a university in New Zealand. Students were provided with support in the form of documents, tutorials, online discussion and structured assignment tasks, as well as through embedded instruction offered collaboratively by subject lecturers, an academic literacy developer, and a library professional. The provision was traced over students' first semester, and perspectives of staff and students elicited. Findings revealed that although it was generally evaluated as relevant and helpful, a number of problematic issues were identified related to information-sharing and the need for explicit instruction in linguistic and communicative components aspects of academic writing. The latter was evident in omission from the provision of topics such as disciplinary conventions, rhetorical purposes of citations, options for how to cite, and integration of sources into personal academic arguments. Findings suggest that the inclusion of opportunities to develop awareness of aspects of source-based writing in Year 1 and throughout students' undergraduate years would help them master this complex, multifaceted skill set.

Introduction To be a successful academic writer, we need a strong awareness of the circumstances that support our writing productivity. Commentary First and foremost, writing requires time-on-task. To obtain focused, effective writing time, we may need to increase our accountability related to writing. In addition, each writer needs a writing system - a set of processes that helps them to reliably complete their writing work. To build an effective writing system, we advocate for observation, reflection, and experimentation related to our writing processes. In particular, examination of the what, where, when, and how of writing is critical. Strategies for optimizing productivity during writing sessions are also needed. Implications Strengthening writing productivity requires mechanisms for accountability, awareness of our writing process, and strategies to enhance the effectiveness of each writing session.

This article sets the scene for the contributions in this Special Issue on Transnational Organised Fisheries Crime. It does so by providing insight into the myriad of complex criminal problems currently facing the global fisheries industry and introducing the fisheries crime concept alongside some of the other key legal concepts relevant to seeking solutions to these challenges. The article introduces the core topics under discussion in the subsequent articles and provides a glimpse into some of the solutions proffered to the challenges of fisheries crime, including from a law enforcement perspective. The articles in this Special Issue contribute to the growing pool of academic writing in the field of fisheries crime.

Formulaic language is widely used in academic prose and is known to be a useful measure of various aspects of language development. Prior studies have reported that L2 novice/student writers rely on formulaic language typical of conversation more than L1 academic writers do. However, these studies compared different types of academic writing, and thus do not clarify whether the L2 patterns they found are attributable to register or to characteristics of L2 writers, or both. The present study addresses this gap by examining the use of frequently recurring word sequences (lexical bundles) with comparable corpora of L1 and L2 novice academic writing, strictly matched for register and writing prompts. The study identified lexical bundles in the corpora, and analyzed these bundles’ structures and functions. The findings suggest that the two groups display many common features in the use of bundles, including heavy use of VP-based bundles, stance-expression bundles, idiomatic PP bundles, and informal quantifying bundles, all of which have been described in previous work as unique features of learner LB use. The findings are informative regarding the extent to which native and nonnative students enter college equipped with knowledge of formulaic language appropriate to academic writing.

This study examines the use of direct quotation in essays on English literary analysis written by entry level L2 (Czech) Bachelor students. A corpus of 188 student essays was compiled, tagged and interrogated to explore the lexical and typographic form of the direct quotations as well as the students' surrounding co-text. The five areas studied were: frequency, source, typographic accuracy, citation accuracy and method of textual integration including reporting verbs. The results show that L2 Bachelor students with no previous experience with EAP do use direct quotation extensively in their academic writing and most cite their source appropriately at least once per essay. There were however, issues regarding textual integration. As well as the usual integration methods of embedding and introductory constructions, most students use an idiosyncratic and non-standard form of free-standing quotation, and/or ‘shoehorned’ quotations. Shoehorned direct quotations are defined in this article as typographically embedded quotations that are contextually free-standing. Because these forms of integration lack any original lexis written by the student which cohesively links the quotation to the co-text, coherence and rhetorical function are at risk of being compromised. The use of such methods can be considered part of the L2 EAP writing development stage.

This paper introduces the key methodological challenges related to working with children within an ethnographic research design. After briefly identifying in-depth contextually rich data as the key aim of any ethnographic research, some of the particular challenges related to working with children are explored. These are described along two key axes: ethical issues related to power dynamics loaded in favour of the adult researcher, and practical, logistical barriers to generating data that are a true reflection of the young child's ideas and beliefs. 'Process assent' and 'ethical symmetry' are flagged as the key means of optimising ethicality, while the benefits of using the 'least adult role', and creative child centric activities are outlined as ways to generating and collecting trustworthy data.

Second language writing research has often analyzed written discourse to provide evidence on learner language development; however, single word-based analyses have been found to be insufficient in capturing learner language development (Read & Nation, 2006). This study therefore utilized both single word-based and multi-word analyses. Specifically, it explored vocabulary distributions and lexical bundles to better understand the development of writing proficiency across three levels in an English Placement Test corpus (EPT) (N = 1388). Inference tests for multiple population proportions were conducted to compare statistical differences in the proportions of vocabulary and lexical bundle distributions across all group levels. The results suggested that higher proficiency learners used a higher number of types, tokens, and word families than lower proficiency learners. Regarding lexical bundles, noun phrase-based and verb phrase-based bundles with referential and stance functions were significantly found in lower-level responses. Preposition phrase-based bundles were significantly used in higher-level written discourse. This study suggests the importance of vocabulary and lexical bundles in academic writing, the necessity of including these features identified in this study in a second language writing curriculum, and the need to incorporate these features prevalent in a rating scale for assessments of academic writing.

Contributing to the growing body of research on student texts, and the construct of disciplinarity at undergraduate level, this study involves a lexico-grammatical analysis of successful third-year student writing in two UK HE institutions from the disciplines of History and of Politics and International Relations. We use an inductive corpus approach in which the phraseological patterning around five grammatical keywords (of, and, that, as and this) is categorised according to semantic purpose. More similarities than variations were found across the four disciplinary/institutional sub-corpora, and, to a large extent, these similarities can be explained in terms of the shared foci of student Humanities and Social Sciences writing. From a practitioner perspective, we argue that the approach uncovers meaning-focused lexico-grammatical features of very high value due to their extremely regular occurrence within student texts. With regard to the EGAP versus ESAP debate, we suggest that an argument can be made for the teaching of ‘meta-disciplinary’ literacy skills.

Although peer feedback has received increasing attention from academic writing instructors and thesis supervisors in most recent years, we know little about postgraduate students’ perceptions and experiences of learning (if any) from providing feedback on thesis/dissertation writing. Drawing upon multiple sources of data including thesis drafts (original, revised and finalised theses), written peer feedback, semi-structured interview and stimulated recall, this case study investigates how and the extent to which seven Master's students benefited from providing feedback on their peers’ theses in the Macau EFL context. The data analysis revealed four themes of student learning from providing peer feedback: (1) raising awareness of the thesis/dissertation genre, (2) improving academic writing skills, (3) becoming a more skilful learner by seeking external assistance, and (4) becoming a more reflective and critical academic writer. The findings can further our understanding of the potential learning opportunities derived from providing peer feedback on academic theses.

Stand-alone literature reviews exist to synthesize the vast amount of data produced by modern academia, but to date, little research exists on this genre of written academic prose. The present study, therefore, investigates the frequency, dispersion, and discourse functions of lexical bundles in stand-alone literature reviews. A 3.4 million word corpus of 417 stand-alone literature reviews in psychology, education, and medicine was compiled, and four-word bundles occurring more than 40 times per million words were extracted. Part of the corpus was then divided into IMRD sections, (i.e., introduction, methods, results, and discussion), and the frequency, dispersion, and function of these lexical bundles were examined within each section. Results revealed that lexical bundles in stand-alone literature reviews were identical to those found in other studies of academic writing, which suggests that a core set of bundles for written academic prose may exist. However, the frequency of each bundle differed by section, and concordance lines presented a range of discourse functions. Bundles established research gaps, clarified results and methods, reported data, undergirded interpretations, and contextualized findings. Further research into lexical bundle frequency and use patterns within sections of stand-alone literature reviews is needed to establish pedagogical guidelines for lexical bundle use.

The ever-intensifying globalization and marketization of higher education are placing increased pressure on doctoral students to publish during candidature. This paper reports a study of Chinese nursing doctoral students' endeavors to publish in English. Drawing on Activity Theory, the study employed a multiple-case study design and collected multiple types of data from six doctoral students and one supervisor from a major research-intensive university in mainland China. Thematic and activity systems analyses of the data revealed a tension concerning the students' dual role as student and expert scholarly writer. The tension was manifested in the students' developing, but still limited grasp and use of some conceptual tools needed to publish their work. The analyses also showed that the students dealt with this tension by relying on mediating resources, such as cultural artifacts and social others that facilitated not only their publishing efforts, but also their socialization into the academic culture and community. These findings point to a deep-seated structural tension in doctoral education that, while constraining doctoral students' scholarly publishing endeavors, could also enable them to acquire the skills of the trade to publish and to be socialized into their disciplinary communities.

The purpose of the study was to examine L2 learners’ use of anaphoric this/these focusing on the variation of use across the skill levels. The writing samples of lower and higher-level L2 learners were compared in terms of the frequencies of this/these as pronouns and as determiners, the structural distribution of antecedents, and the semantic distribution of nouns following the determiners. Writing samples were academic essays (N = 735) from the sub-corpus of English Placement Test (EPT) composed of two levels. The results suggested several meaningful discrepancies in lower versus higher-level writing. First, lower-level students displayed an overall underuse of this/these. Second, students used an increased amount of pronoun this/these in more advanced levels, indicating a more complex nature of higher-level writing. The analysis of the structural types of antecedents suggested a developmental pattern, namely a significant decrease of noun phrase references and an increase of clausal and extended reference. Lastly, lower-level writing included significantly more concrete and abstract nouns after this/these, whereas higher-level students often used this/these followed by shell nouns for a more advanced practice. The study provides implications for L2 writing pedagogy, as well as L2 academic writing research.

Thesis and dissertation writing often presents significant challenges for many PhD candidates and it can be even more demanding for multilingual doctoral students who use English as an additional language (EAL). Second language writers who are unprepared to engage in disciplinary academic writing require institutional language support services. Among these services, individual (or one-on-one) consultations with learning advisers, who identify students’ specific writing issues and provide personalised advice, are resource-intensive but may have significant impacts on thesis and dissertation writing. This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of individual consultations through student learning experiences. It analyses the reasons for service use, evaluates students’ perceived impacts of consultations on thesis and dissertation writing, and explores their views on service improvement. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 13 EAL doctoral students enrolled in an Australian university. Results show that individual consultations were operated in four different formats and participants accessed consultation services because their learning needs were not met in group settings or they had identified writing issues. Participants reported pedagogical and psychological impacts, and provided practical suggestions for service improvement in terms of timing and adviser availability. This study provides important insights into the role of individual consultations on thesis and dissertation writing in a second language.

Academic writing tutorials are regarded as beneficial when they are conducted in an egalitarian and dialogic mode of interaction, enabling students to negotiate and explore ideas. However, previous research has revealed a tendency towards tutor dominance and prescriptive, monologic teaching behaviour. The research presented in this article explored the nature of interaction and instructional talk in tutorials delivered by peer tutors. The peer-tutoring model is often chosen to facilitate discipline-specific advice; however, peer tutors may not always be sufficiently experienced and trained to deliver dialogic teaching. This study examined ten peer-led tutorials with the aim to make evidence-based recommendations for tutor training. The initial quantitative analysis led to the identification of the two most dialogic and the two most monologic tutorials, which were subsequently subjected to a detailed discourse analysis. The findings show an overall high degree of tutor-dominated interaction. In the few dialogic tutorials, however, the tutors' skilful use of initiating and follow-up moves and frequent use of scaffolding techniques helped the students to engage more deeply with their topic and solve problems independently . The findings suggest that tutor training should focus more explicitly on the benefits, features and strategies of a dialogic tutoring approach.

The use of I in academic writing is a topic which causes debate among academics and academic language teachers and much confusion among students writing for assessment. Although some research into the use of pronouns in academic texts has been completed, the effect of genre on pronoun use in academic writing is under-researched. This paper therefore aims to identify the rhetorical function for which first person singular pronouns are used across different genres of business students’ academic writing. The rhetorical functions of the instances of I in thirteen genres of good quality student academic writing were analysed using a modified version of Hyland’s (2002) typology. The results showed that the genre of writing seems to influence the rhetorical functions for which I is used.

This study presents frequency and correlation analyses of noun modifiers in L2 student writing, as represented in Purdue University's Corpus and Repository of Writing (Crow). In the study, 79 argumentative papers are extracted from Crow to examine the use of 11 noun modifiers reported in Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011). In the frequency analysis, the modifiers used by L2 student writers are compared to those found in academic journal articles. In the correlation analysis, the frequency of each noun modifier is correlated with the students' TOEFL writing scores. The results show that the modifiers, especially phrasal noun modifiers (i.e., nouns as modifiers, prepositional phrases), are used more frequently in academic journal articles than in L2 writing and that the correlation between the modifiers and the students' TOEFL scores is much stronger for basic than for advanced noun modifiers. This suggests that first-year L2 students would benefit from targeted instruction on advanced noun modifiers during academic writing courses.

With the increasing demand for gender-fair language, an important issue to take into consideration in academic writing is the use of so-called epicene pronouns, i.e. singular personal pronouns unspecified for gender. Yet, little research has focused on how L2 English academic writers use these pronouns. The present study examines the use of epicene pronouns since the 1970s in L2 academic writing and analyses their current use, starting from 2010. The data originate from two corpora with academic papers written by Swedish-speaking university students of English: (1) the Finland-Swedish BATMAT corpus, which is used to extract diachronic data, and (2) the Swedish subset of the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase, VESPA-SE, which adds to the data of current use. The results show that although the use of generic he has decreased noticeably since the 1970s, there is considerable variation in and between the texts from the 2010s. Such variation is indicative of a language change that is still very much in progress. The findings also suggest that singular they is establishing itself as a third-person singular pronoun in L2 academic writing since this pronoun is used frequently with all types of epicene antecedents in the data of current use.

Most scholars agree about the importance of an authorial voice in academic writing. There is also a growing body of research on how voice is manifested in texts at a word and phrase level, but relatively little that investigates readers’ perceptions of authorial voice (the effect on the reader) or the development of voice over time. In our study, we explored these issues by eliciting the views of five supervisors as they read and evaluated authorial voice, in the texts of three PhD students, writing in English as an additional language (EAL). We used two sets of comparable texts written by the students relatively early and near the end of their PhD to address the issue of voice development. A thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews revealed what constituted evidence of authorial voice for the five expert readers. All were adamant that an authorial voice is crucial in the writing of PhD students, but found the task of defining and locating voice in the students’ texts, and in discerning progress in students’ abilities to articulate a convincing authorial voice very challenging. Of interest was the finding that the supervisors’ language backgrounds, disciplinary specialities, personal histories, and preferences shaped their impressions of voice. These differences in perceptions of what voice entails held by supervisors from the same broad discipline raise questions about how we approach the teaching and assessment of voice.

Measures of formality have historically been linked to the spoken-written language continuum; however, modern communication increasingly employs the written mode using different degrees of informality (e.g., emails, text messages, etc.). While allowances are made for these varied genres and registers, the use of informal expression in the written mode often impacts the quality of academic discourse. The present study aims to map the linguistic features of formality to describe this elusive, often stylistically mapped objective. A corpus of one hundred forty student essays were analyzed and rated for formality by three English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instructors. Those texts consistently scored across all three raters as “high” or “low” formality were further analyzed for lexico-grammatical features (e.g., pronoun use, conjunctions, lexical density, etc.) to determine what linguistic features distinguish the different levels of formality. The analysis reveals the most significant contributor to the impression of informality in the learner texts is infelicitous clause-level grammar, followed by grammatical intricacy, informal lexis and human interaction. These descriptions expand current understandings of how formality is defined and the paper concludes with pedagogical recommendations for supporting students and professionals in their development of formal, academic discourse.

This study reports findings of a comparative corpus-based analysis of informality in L1 and L2 undergraduate student argumentative essays. Data consist of two corpora of student essays: 101 high-rated essays written by L1-English students and 254 high-rated essays written by ESL students in US universities. Based on a taxonomy of the 10 most common informal features cited in style manuals, we compared informal language use in L1-English and ESL undergraduate student essays. Results reveal that overall frequency of informal features is significantly greater in L2 student texts. Findings also indicate that both groups rely on similar informal elements, yet they differ in distinct ways. While ESL student writers tend to employ significantly more anaphoric pronoun it and second-person pronouns, they use most other types less frequently than L1 writers, and generally appear to observe prescriptive rules more strictly. In contrast, L1-English writers tend to adopt a more liberal attitude toward these rules, employing a broader range of informal types, particularly those that have become relatively legitimized in academic writing. The paper concludes with implications for ESL composition pedagogy.

The case study attempts to explore identity construction by examining a Chinese college student's personal statement writing. Based on Ivanic's framework of writer identity construction, an analysis of similarities and differences was made on the student's personal statements written for four different programs over a three-year period. It is found that the student constructed the desired writer identity of a qualified and special applicant who would fit into the target program mainly by making three discoursal choices for different self-representations, namely, narrating life experiences, referring to oneself and others, and highlighting. The interview results indicate that personal statement writing helped the student perceive her self and identity, both retrospectively and prospectively. It offers a significant implication for academic writing teaching and research. It is hoped that this case study can stimulate further research of identity construction in and through the personal statement as an occluded academic genre.

This paper offers a critical examination of how the discourse function of definition is being used in academic writing. The main argument is that definitions do not only serve metadiscursive purposes but also ideational ones. As a form of elaboration in various discourse genres and disciplines, definitions have often been regarded as non-propositional because they help in explaining the meaning of utterances and ideas rather than in construing meaning or in building argumentation. In order to understand how definitional chunks fill both roles, that is, propositional and non-propositional ones, this paper investigates a corpus of research articles within two disciplines, Linguistics and Computer Science. Instances of definitions are classified in terms of their building units and their functions. Results indicate that definitions are neither homogeneous in their forms nor in the functions they serve in academic writing. The main conclusion is that the extent to which they serve propositional and non-propositional ends is governed, on the one hand, by functional reasons and on the second hand, by disciplinary practices.

Writers interact with readers using explicit signals of textual organization (e.g., firstly; however) and stance (e.g., possibly, surprisingly), known as metadiscourse markers (MDMs). Most metadiscourse studies, however, focus on academic writing exclusively, with minimal efforts comparing MDMs usage across communicative contexts. The present study examines English-as-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners’ use of MDMs in academic and colloquial writing. Each participant produced two texts on the same topic: a personal email to a close friend (colloquial) and an academic report to school principals (academic). The corpus of 704 texts were coded using Hyland’s metadiscourse model (2005). Trained EFL teachers scored texts for overall writing quality. The study first presented a distributional map of MDMs used in the EFL academic and colloquial writing corpora. Then, multi-level models revealed both similarities and differences in the use of MDM subtypes to serve distinct communicative purposes (e.g., more code glosses in academic writing; more boosters and engagement markers in colloquial writing). Finally, the use of MDMs was analyzed in relation to overall writing quality within and across communicative contexts. The results highlighted the strengths and weaknesses in EFL learners’ use of MDMs and informed the design of pedagogical approach attuned to the pragmatic functions of MDMs.

Self-mention in academic writing has been studied extensively, especially from the point of view of rhetorical functions. In this paper I argue that rhetorical functions represent only one dimension of self-mention. Adding the dimensions of grammatical forms and of hedging and boosting, I propose a three-dimensional model of self-mention. I then employ the model in the analysis of three types of writing in the field of linguistics – L1 English, L1 Slovak (a typologically different language), and L2 English writing by Slovak authors. The study shows that authors employ various degrees of the three dimensions of self-mention to meet expectations of their readers while maintaining a balanced power of self-mention. The results suggest that some, but not all, discourse practices related to self-mention might be transferred to L2 English from one's L1.

The language of evaluation in academic writing has been increasingly studied. However, little is known about how students learn to make evaluative meanings. This article reports on a study of evaluative that-clauses based on a longitudinal corpus of 632 argumentative essays by 158 Chinese undergraduate students. The findings of the study show a non-linear trajectory of change in the use of evaluative that-clauses over time. It was found that the proportion of verb that-clauses decreased whereas the proportions of noun that-clauses and adjective that-clauses increased. Further, while the range of the lexical words co-occurring with evaluative that-clauses expanded, the authorial visibility in stance expression decreased. These changes indicate signs of agency and suggest that the development of evaluative language resources is an organic, dynamic process. Overall the study points to the value of developing and exploring longitudinal learner corpora for studying language learning in general and development in evaluative language in particular. Taking an approach to treating learner language in its own right, the study further contributes to a small but growing body of research based on an empowering ideology and to the empirical literature on evaluation and language learning. Implications for writing instruction are considered.

Whilst theorizing and analyzing implicature has become very popular, work in this area has tended to focus in the area of conversational implicature. Meanwhile, the analysis of epistemology in applied linguistics has been dominated by the study of hedging, a model which posits that it is the addition of explicit linguistic devices that chiefly alters the strength of claims. In this paper I aim to demonstrate the importance of the more implicit perspective of implicature to the analysis of epistemic signaling in academic writing, through an empirical approach. Using a corpus of scientific writing from the field of genetics, a detailed analysis of propositions containing the string mutations in the gene encoding is described and I argue that the results of this analysis are more consistent with the theory of implicature rather than that of hedging as the model of the expression and nuancing of claims in genetics. Finally, I argue that the ontologically-driven approach taken in this study, being similar to that taken in disciplines such as the philosophy or sociology of science holds great promise for interdisciplinary work between these fields and that of applied linguistics.

Background Written feedback assists students in refining their future academic work. However, students prefer having feed-forward instead of feedback by their instructors that are the comments provided to them on drafts prior to the actual assignment submission. The current literature describes two common ways to convey feed-forward: the foremost one is on outlines while the second is on drafts. However, no existing literature had been found yet for sufficient guidance on the ideal approach of feed-forward to facilitate students' subsequent learning. Design A Quasi-experimental study design was employed to determine the effectiveness of feed-forward on outline versus drafts. Setting Study was conducted in a private nursing institution in Karachi, Pakistan. Participants 118 third-year undergraduate nursing students participated in the study. Methods Using consecutive sampling, 118 students were enrolled and equally divided in to two groups, each comprising of 59 students in the control and intervention arm. Control group received feed-forward through standard practice i.e. on their assignment outline while the intervention group received feed-forward on the draft of their scholarly paper. Results The performance of intervention arm had an upper hand over that of control wing as portrayed by their increased overall assignment and academic writing scores (of students on IELTs bands). The set outcomes also reflected better results in terms of the (reduced) frequency of visits to their instructors for clarification of written feedback. All in all, this research deduced that feed-forward on drafts is far more beneficial in contrast to that on an outline as it reinforces students' learning. Conclusion The study findings affirmed that feed-forward is a useful strategy to enhance students' subsequent learning.

This article uses this spirit of queer theory and uses a non-linear narrative structure to take us away from the usual course of academic writing to contest some significant aspects of management scholarship and academic identity. In addition to using queer theory as an analytical methodology, I rely on the theoretical space opened by the term postcolonial storytelling by telling stories that are inscribed in and intersect with the material architecture within organizations. These stories also act as metaphors that open up analytical space to talk about key issues related to postcolonial academic identity and queer theory. Thus, these stories simultaneously lament the lack of water in the western toilet, critique the position of God in academic scholarship, discuss the great toilet wars of Asia, and unpack the imaginary symptoms of queer theorists.

Of all my activities as a scholar, writing tends to take up most of my time. Accordingly, I have made it my mission to write as efficiently and effectively as possible. In this manuscript, which is reading material for my academic writing course at WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management, I summarize aspirations that I have collected over the past couple of years. My hope is that they will help students and professionals improve their academic and professional writing.