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Over the past two decades, extensive research has been conducted on the rhetorical structure of research articles (RAs) from the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) genre approach. However, RA configuration from the Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) genre perspective remains under-investigated, particularly in the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) field. This study aimed to examine the deployment of SFL elemental genres to construct the TCM RAs. To this end, 40 empirical articles published from 2020 to 2021 were selected from five high-impact TCM journals for the analysis. The findings showed that report, recount, argument, and explanation were employed to construct the TCM RAs. Under these broad genre families, 13 elemental genres were identified, for instance, descriptive report, procedural recount, exposition and factorial explanation. Regarding the frequency, report and recount played a major role in configuring the TCM RAs whereas argument and explanation played a supplementary role. Moreover, the ESP genre held that the macro-structure of RA is shaped like an hourglass, which was also attested by the present SFL elemental genres in terms of the generic complexity. Such deconstruction of a macrogenre into elemental genres serving as building blocks of text promises pedagogical implications for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teachers and graduate students.

Thesis defense presentation slides (TDPS) are a significant and unique genre in the final ritual of master's students' learning journey. However, few studies have explored this genre, especially its rhetorical structure, so students have scant knowledge of it. This study investigates the moves and steps of this genre focusing on their Introduction section. A move analysis was conducted of 20 TDPS introductions produced by Chinese master's students in Applied Linguistics. Adopting Chen and Kuo's (2012) framework, interviews with the TDPS authors were then conducted. This study confirms that the framework for M.A. theses, i.e., the source genre of TDPS, is applicable to the exploration of the TDPS rhetorical structure. Only Move 3 "Occupying the niche" was found to be obligatory. No obligatory step was identified, and just three steps were found to be conventional. This study provides insights into how Chinese students produce this underexplored genre and argues for more attention to be paid to studies of its rhetorical structure. The findings could raise students' awareness of genre when attempting to produce effective and acceptable presentation slides to better communicate with their target audience.

Textbooks provide students with models of written scientific literacy and also access to a wide range of knowledge. However, deconstructing their text structures which has potential contribution to facilitating students' reading comprehension receives lack of attention. The present study is to classify the genres and their generic structures within the textbooks used at Universitas Islam Negeri, North Sumatra, Indonesia (UIN-SU) for the purpose of teaching reading Economics and Islamic Economics texts. Data of the study were two textbooks of Economics and Islamic Economics. Five main genre frameworks based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) were used as method of the analysis: Report, Explanation, History, Argument, and Response genres. In the Economics, 17 genre types including two new ones under four main genre families of Explanation, Report, Argument, and History were found. On the other hand, in its counterpart, 25 genre types including 6 new ones under five genre families of History, Report, Explanation, Argument, and Response were identified. The difference of the key findings between the textbooks is proposed to be the consequences of the ideological discrepancy to which the textbooks belong as well as the resource discrepancy from which the two subdisciplines of Economics are oriented.

The great importance of textbooks in the English language in the academic, pedagogic, and scientific world is uncontested. Acquiring holistic knowledge of legal transdisciplinary is of great importance to Islamic law students in Indonesia. Nevertheless, English reading proficiency of Indonesian students is problematic. The present research was to identify the genre types and unfold them through what patterns the genres are mostly structured. Data of the study were one Islamic law textbook and one jurisprudence textbook used as teaching resources and required reading at Universitas Islam Negeri Sumatera Utara, Indonesia. Based on the five main Systemic functional linguistics-based genre frameworks for the analysis, findings from the Islamic law textbook showed 18 genre types including three proposed ones under four genre families of which History genres are the most frequent ones followed by Explanation, Report, and Argument genres. On the other hand, 16 genre types including three new ones belonging to four genre families were identified in the jurisprudence in which Report genres are the most frequent ones followed by Argument, Explanation, and History genres. The commonalities and discrepancies of the findings between the two legal textbooks are assumed to be the logical results of the ideological differences and the resource aspects from which the legal discipline is oriented. The findings of the study would be useful to design teaching of reading legal English texts that can facilitate students which is unfortunately neglected by both English and law teachers.

This study investigated the beliefs and practices of Chinese EFL supervisors regarding their written supervisory feedback strategies for undergraduate English majors' bachelor's thesis drafts at a Chinese public university. Qualitative data obtained from semi-structured interviews with six EFL supervisors and the text analysis results of the written feedback strategies used in six sets of first, second and third bachelors' thesis drafts showed matches between the supervisors' stated and actual written feedback strategies both in general and in different draft stages. In general, the supervisors believed in using an indirect strategy, and they provided written feedback indirectly in practice. For different draft stages, the supervisors believed in prioritizing indirect strategy in initial drafts and direct strategy in later drafts. In practice, they provided written feedback more indirectly for the first and second drafts, but they did so more directly for the third draft. These findings contrast with the literature and point towards some pedagogical recommendations.

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.

This paper revisited the issue of transfer in an unexplored context: the transition from instruction-based writing to the bachelor's theses by English-major students in one university in China. To explore the extent to which the writing instruction prepared the students for thesis writing practice, we created two corpora of student writing: 591 assignments produced by 40 students in 3 writing-related courses offered in the curriculum and 40 bachelor's theses produced between 2014-2018. Based on the taxonomy of elemental genres in the Systemic Functional Linguistics, we compared the genre distribution in the two corpora via log-likelihood tests. Results revealed that two patterns of "continuity" and two patterns of "discontinuity" existed in the students' literacy journey. Also, framed within the theory of adaptive transfer, a focus-group interview was conducted with four thesis writers in an attempt to trace their transfer of rhetorical knowledge between the two rhetorical contexts. Findings demonstrated that the students consciously "reused" and "reshaped" a pool of rhetorical knowledge acquired from the writing courses to navigate the complex task of thesis writing. This paper then concludes with implications for L2 writing research, curriculum, and pedagogy.

The importance of RA abstracts lies in their influence on the readers' decision about whether the accompanying article is worth reading. A number of studies have investigated the move structure of abstracts and have generated several influential models. However, little research has been conducted on subdisciplinary variations in move structure of abstracts. Additionally, previous studies have investigated independently either the move structure or the hedging use of academic writings. The attempt of the integration of the both have been lacking yet. Therefore, this study reports the analysis of move structure and hedging use in Management and Marketing abstracts. Comparative analysis was also conducted to investigate sudisciplinary variations in both move structure and hedging use between the two subdisciplines in the field of Business. In total, sixty-four research articles abstracts published in 2012 were randomly selected form eight leading journals in two subdisciplines. Hyland's model (2000) was adopted as analytical framework for move structure analysis, and Wordsmith Tool was used to search hedging in the corpus. Results showed that the move structure of I-P-Pr (Introduction-Purpose-Product) is the most dominant sequences in both Management and Marketing. Regarding the use of hedging, all the five types occurred in both subdisciplines of Business. The findings of this study have also demonstrated the existence of variations in terms of both move structure and the use of hedging in the abstracts between the two subdisciplines. Therefore, pedagogical implications can be proposed that teaching practices should address the variations so as to meet the specific expectations from different particular discourse communities.

Comparison of five Thai students in international work placements and three overseas students completing work placements in Thailand found that both groups encountered difficulties with immigration, language, and communication. Advantages reported included improved self-confidence and career enhancement. Results also show the effect of cultural differences on international exchange arrangements between non-Western and Western countries. (Contains 35 references.) (SK)

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]

Given the importance of stance expression in the writing of abstracts, this study adopted a corpus-based comparative approach to investigate the stance expression in abstracts of the Translation Practice Report (TPR) and the Interpretation Practice Report (IPR), which are two newly emerging reporting genres in Master of Translation and Interpretation (MTI) in China. Based on a set of corpora composed with 30 TPR abstracts (8,738 tokens) and 30 IPR abstracts (8,699 tokens) collected from 30 universities located in 16 provinces in China, the stance expression was examined in terms of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-mention by employing the stance framework in Hyland's (2005) interactional model. The findings revealed a genre-specific convention in utilizing the four categories of stance in both the TPR abstracts and the IPR abstracts, which is different from that in the abstracts of the empirical studies. The analysis also found discipline-specific variations of stance expression between the two corpora due to different disciplinary conventions and practice of the two subdisciplines. Then, the interviews with the insider informants were conducted to clarify and to enrich the research findings. The results in the study may be taken as a useful reference to expressing attitude in writing the abstracts in the MTI field of China, and possibly in other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Chinese English majors, bachelor's theses are regarded as the most substantial piece of writing in their undergraduate study. However, in the field of EAP/ESP and genre research, thesis writing at the undergraduate level has been relatively neglected. From the perspective of genre in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the macrostructure of a bachelor's thesis constitutes a macrogenre which combines more than one elemental genre to accomplish complex goals. An understanding of the deployment of elemental genres in this macrogenre can further help reveal the rhetorical values circulating in this thesis writing community. Based on the genre taxonomy developed by SFL genre theorists (e.g., Rose, 2010, 2015a, 2015b), this study analysed the genre deployment of 40 highly-rated bachelor's theses written by English majors at a Chinese university, triangulated with semi-structured interviews with thesis writers and advisors. The results show that the 40 theses contained 776 shorter texts instantiating 22 types of elemental genres across 7 genre families. Specifically, reports were most extensively used by the thesis writers to transmit their received disciplinary knowledge. Arguments and text responses, though ranking lower in number, were essential to the writers' projection of evaluative meanings and authorial selves. Stories, chronicles, explanations, and procedural genres were deployed sporadically, but empowered the writers to perform a constellation of social roles. The findings of this study may assist novice thesis writers by heightening their genre awareness, and more practically, increasing their knowledge on the specific types of elemental genres over which they need control to produce a rhetorically well-developed bachelor's thesis. This paper then concludes with implications for teaching and researching thesis writing in non-English dominant contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Results and Discussion chapters are considered difficult to write in a thesis, especially for non-native English writers. However, few studies have been conducted on how writers compose these two genres. This study, therefore, explores the move-step structures of these two chapters in 24 Master's theses written by Vietnamese postgraduates. Based on the framework by Chen and Kuo (2012) and the discourse-based interviews with actual thesis writers and supervisors, the study found that this group of writers constructed the genres according to their perceived communicative purposes of these chapters. Moreover, the presence of section/chapter introduction-next section/chapter introduction-section/chapter summary cycles tends to reflect the distinctive composition of these texts at the TESOL discourse community in Vietnam. These findings suggest that explicit instructions on rhetorical structures of these two genres should be provided to non-native English writers and attention should also be paid to specific practice of a genre composition in a particular discourse community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to write a successful conference abstract seems to be one barrier preventing new researchers from disseminating their research work in their particular disciplinary community. However, very few studies on how conference abstracts are structured have been conducted in order to help such novice researchers. This study, thus, aims to examine the rhetorical structure of conference abstracts in two TESOL conferences in Asia with the purpose of informing a particular group of new researchers in Asian settings about the actual practice of writing this particular genre. The findings from the open-ended questions and the move analysis of 137 abstracts indicated that there was a mismatch between these potential conference abstract writers' knowledge and the actual composition of these conference abstracts. Besides the rhetorical structures of conference abstracts, this paper also provided some pedagogical suggestions on dealing with this mismatch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally agreed that writing a thesis is a challenging task for both native and non-native English speaking students. Despite a considerable number of studies on this specific genre elsewhere, there is a scarcity of work in Vietnam to help TESOL students to write a thesis. Furthermore, the Introduction is considered one of two most difficult chapters to write. This paper, therefore, presents a study on the rhetorical structure of Introduction chapters of twelve M.A. theses from the three universities in the South of Vietnam. Employing the modified CARS' model by Bunton (2002), the results showed that three moves and 15 steps were employed by this group of non-native English writers despite the fact that they had little or no formal instruction on how to write this genre. Additionally, a new step was also identified in this corpus. These findings reflect Vietnamese students' ability to conform to the norms and to adapt the norms to suit cultural expectations. This paper proposes practical implications for teaching this particular group of novice writers in Vietnam as well as in settings with similar cultural values on how to compose the Introduction section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argumentative writing has long been regarded as an essential mode of written discourse. Despite some studies on argumentative essays across ages, grade levels, cultures and languages, research has not yet been conducted on writers from different academic disciplines in the Chinese context. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the current situation of move-step structure of argumentative essays written by English learners in an EFL context. Two sets of corpus of English argumentative essays written by Tongren University students were built, 100 from English majors and the other 100 from non-English majors. A selected analytical framework was used to analyze the move-step structure of the essays and some linguistic features were also investigated. Results revealed that the majority of the argumentative essays were found to follow the three stages set in the model. Findings also showed some differences in terms of move-step structure between the essays written by these two groups of students. In the conclusion, pedagogical implications informed by these results and findings are offered to benefit teaching argumentative essay writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]