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This is a corpus-based study of a key aspect of academic writing in one discipline (biology) by final-year undergraduates and first-, second-, and third-year graduate students. The papers come from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, a freely available electronic database. The principal aim of the study is to examine the extent of variation in citation practice in the biology subcorpus. To that end, it explores citation practices from a number of perspectives, including the distribution of integral versus parenthetical citations, the choice of reporting verbs, the effect of citing system, and the occurrence of selected features such as the use of citees' first names. Results show little difference between the undergraduate and graduate papers, some effect of the citing system, and a somewhat richer intertextuality in the "evolutionary" as opposed to the "molecular" biology papers. Overall, this is an impressive body of student work from the viewpoint of textual variation in citation practice, but it should be remembered that the corpus consists of only "A" papers from a flagship research university.

EAP practitioners in advanced courses have often focused on assisting junior scholars who are non-native speakers of English with their attempts to publish in English. Today, however, university administrators increasingly rely on post-publication data such as citation records. We therefore suggest that identifying heavily cited and largely uncited papers would be an addition to the advanced writing instructor's toolkit. In fact, many proposals have been made to account for citational success and failure. Disentangling these variables is complex and typically requires in-depth knowledge of the chosen sub-field. Here we examine the reception histories of a decade's worth of main articles in the "English for Specific Purposes Journal", using the "Google Scholar", "Scopus" and "Web of Science" databases. Analysis of the 15 most cited articles indicates that placement in an issue, gender, first language, author status, and provenance are not major determinants. Instead, area of research interest (i.e., discoursal features of academic text) and type of ESP (i.e., EAP) were the main predisposing factors. We then conduct a close analysis of the two top 1990s papers (both, incidentally, written by women whose first language is not English and working in non-Anglophone settings). We conclude with some implications of these findings for EAP practitioners and their "customers". (Contains 5 tables.)

This paper discusses the "John Swales Conference Corpus" (JSCC), which contains the lectures and discussion sessions from an applied linguistics conference held in 2006 at the University of Michigan. This corpus constitutes a useful resource in that it provides insights into the language of a narrowly defined academic community. Moreover, it spans the entire series of conference presentations rather than just snippets, so it licenses the investigation of inter-textual links, semiotic spanning, and related co-textual phenomena. After a brief outline of the properties of the JSCC and a review of the relevant literature, we present three exploratory case studies, with a particular focus on the discussion sections. First, some major phraseological differences between the presentations and the discussion sections are identified. The second case study, focusing on the chairs' utterances, uncovers a high degree of regularity, especially with regard to opening remarks, and the chairs' attempts to downplay the authoritative role that they have been assigned. The third case study rounds off our exploratory analyses of the JSCC with a closer examination of the different causes of laughter in the discussion sections, which underscore how the language of discussion sections in a specialized conference is heavily influenced by shared professional knowledge and personal relationships among the participants. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

This practitioner-oriented paper opens with an account of the difficulties EAP materials providers encounter in finding "perfect texts" for pedagogical purposes. It then discusses two alternative options. In the first, the materials writer creates a collection of source texts for class integration and summary work; in the second, the materials writer creates an imaginary student's responses to found or adapted source material. This second case is extensively illustrated, so that it becomes available as "freeware". It is therefore argued that there is merit in the "occasional" use of instructor-written materials in selected EAP contexts. In closing, the paper places the elaborated case study in the wider context of more needing to be known about learner and instructor roles in advanced writing courses and workshops.

This article compares French and English academic article abstracts from the language sciences in an attempt to understand how and why language choice might affect this part-genre--both in actual use and according to authors' linguistic and rhetorical perceptions. Two corpora are used: Corpus A consists of abstracts from a French linguistics journal and a corresponding English one; Corpus B contains paired French and English abstracts from the bilingual EAP journal "ASp"; additionally, we report on e-mail interview findings from two of the "ASp" authors. Differences emerged at three levels. First, it was found that certain features such as choice of voice are ascribable to general differences between the two languages. Second, it would appear that personal pronoun use, sentence length and transition word selection can be aligned with expectations as to what constitutes appropriate academic style. Thirdly, differences in the way the research reported is "situated" are most likely due to differences in discourse community size. The methodological implications of these studies are discussed at the close.

This paper presents a discussion of an experimental, innovative course in corpus-informed EAP for doctoral students. Participants were given access to specialized corpora of academic writing and speaking, instructed in the tools of the trade (web- and PC-based concordancers) and gradually inducted into the skills needed to best exploit the data and the tools for directed learning as well as self-learning. After the induction period, participants began to compile two additional written corpora: one of their own writing (term papers, dissertation drafts, unedited journal drafts) and one of "expert" writing, culled from electronic versions of published papers in their own field or subfield. Students were thus able to make comparisons between their own writing and those of more established writers in their field. At the end of the course, participants presented reports of their discoveries with some discussion of how they felt their rhetorical consciousness was raised and reflected on what further use they might be making of corpus linguistics techniques in their future careers. This paper gives an overview of how this course was structured, presents the kinds of discoursal and other linguistic phenomena examined and the sometimes surprising observations made, and reports on the pluses and minuses of this corpus-informed course as a whole, seen from the point of view of both learners and instructors.

Presents two explorations of English for academic purposes practice. The first looks at dissertation writers, explores their rhetorical and other difficulties, and suggests ways of mitigating them. The second deals with students at the opposite end of the spectrum--entering undergraduates taking their first class in anthropology and assisted by a linked course designed to initiate them into disciplinary literary practices. (Author/VWL)

Explores competing pressures toward English for specific purposes accommodation to institutional exigencies and to a critical response to those exigencies. Discussion focuses on the design and implementation of an English for academic purposes course for a master's of Architecture students at a U.S. university. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on languages for specific purposes, providing a brief historical perspective, examining it as a profession, discipline, or neither; its role in science and law; language for business purposes; and the position of English worldwide. (Author/VWL)