Search

With a growing recognition of the need to go beyond text and look into the context where the writing (or the teaching/learning of it) takes place, the ethnographic perspective has been fruitfully adopted in academic writing research. The present study, integrating the perspective of genre and ethnography as methodology, probed into the context of L2 English writing instruction in a Chinese university where three writing-related courses were offered to English majors throughout the curriculum. Through a sustained engagement in the courses under focus, we collected multiple types of data, such as the students' writing samples, documents, teaching materials, and semi-structured interviews with students and course instructors, in an attempt to give a rich account of the core participants' real-life experiences in teaching and learning L2 English writing. Results demonstrated that, although informed by the same national syllabus, the L2 writing instruction in reality consisted of a pedagogical "mosaic" that included the traditionalist, process-based and genre-based approaches, as well as various strategies chosen and practiced by individual instructors based on their own theoretical and pedagogical orientations. Future research may explore L2 writing instruction in analogical contexts more extensively through the suggestions offered in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reporting verbs (RVs), as rhetorical lexical devices, play a key role in academic writing because they enable writers to attribute content to other sources and allow them to convey both the kind of activities reported and their evaluation of the reported information. However, no study has been conducted on how RVs are used differently between bachelor's theses (BTs) and master's theses (MTs) in the Chinese context. Through corpus-based and comparative analysis, this study, therefore, aims to analyze and compare the use of RVs between 30 BT Introduction Chapters and 30 MT Introduction Chapters by Chinese English-majored students in terms of denotative potentials and evaluative functions based on Hyland's (2002) classification framework. The results reveal that RVs used by undergraduate students are smaller in amount and narrower in range compared with those used by master's students. Concerning the denotative potentials of RVs, a similar distribution of RVs was found in the two corpora. Both undergraduate and master's students prefer Discourse Act RVs and Research Act RVs to Cognition Act RVs. Regarding their evaluative functions, undergraduate students show a tendency toward non-factive RVs, while master's students tend to use factive RVs. These findings provide a valuable view of how Chinese English-majored students use RVs in their thesis writing, but their knowledge of the rhetorical functions of this device is still insufficient. The findings might increase thesis writers' knowledge on the significance of RVs and raise their awareness of using RVs appropriately and effectively in their thesis writing, or even in all kinds of academic discourse. This paper then provides some suggestions for thesis writing courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citing previous works is an important rhetorical feature of academic writing and it is challenging for novice writers, especially non-native English writers (NNEWs). However, little is known about how NNEWs cite in each chapter of their master's (M.A.) theses. This paper thus reports on the citation practice in 24 TESOL M.A. theses written by Vietnamese students. Citation types were first searched on the Antconc software with the use of the Regular Expressions (Regex) written for both conventional and 'invented' citing ways by this group of writers, and then based on Thompson and Tribble's (2001) framework, citation functions were investigated and classified. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with thesis writers and thesis supervisors. Besides the general citation practice by this group of NNEWs, and the different citation functions and types in different chapters of their theses, the study also found that these writers were not fully aware of the significance of citations as a rhetorical device in their thesis writing, and insufficient attention was paid to the in-text citations in the TESOL discourse community in Vietnam. These findings suggest explicit instructions on citations in order to help novice writers to fully acquire the citation use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]