1,721,277 research outputs found
Introduction [Academic Discourse across Disciplines]
No full textThe introduction outlines the importance of disciplinary variation in academic discourse studies and presents the sections and chapters of the volume
Can GPT-4 learn to analyse moves in research article abstracts?
No full textOne of the most powerful and enduring ideas in written discourse analysis is that genres can be described in terms of the moves which structure a writer’s purpose. Considerable research has sought to identify these distinct communicative acts, but analyses have been beset by problems of subjectivity, reliability and the time-consuming need for multiple coders to confirm analyses. In this paper we employ the affordances of GPT-4/Copilot to automate the annotation process by using natural language prompts. Focusing on abstracts from articles in four applied linguistics journals, we devise prompts which enable the model to identify moves effectively. The annotated outputs of these prompts were evaluated by two assessors with a third addressing disagreements. The results show that an 8-shot prompt was more effective than one using two, confirming that the inclusion of examples illustrating areas of variability can enhance GPT-4’s ability to recognize multiple moves in a single sentence and reduce bias related to textual position. We suggest that GPT-4 offers considerable potential in automating this annotation process, when human actors with domain-specific linguistic expertise inform the prompting process
Undergraduate understandings: stance and voice in Final Year Reports
Full text linkThe notion of voice has been discussed from different perspectives in academic discourse studies, often in relation to discursive identity and self-representation in research genres. Not much attention has been paid, however, to what constitutes authorial voice in a textbook. Textbook writers tend to hide behind the values of the community, often attributing stance to the community in general, but attention should be paid to ways of expressing epistemic and deontic modality, attitudinal values or evaluations of importance. Focusing on authorial voice in academic textbooks, this chapter looks at writers’ professional identities, studying how writers relate discursively to their object of discourse as well as to other textual voices, especially other discourse participants - the student-reader and the discourse community at large. The chapter presents an overview of the literature on voice in textbooks showing that this has often looked at textbooks as merely expositive texts, concealing the argumentative nature of science in an attempt to offer an established view of the discipline. The literature review also shows that a range of lexico-grammatical tools can be used in the typical moves of instructional discourse. These include self-mention, forms of engagement and markers of evaluation, highlighting the writer’s interpretative position in the text and the dialogic involvement of other voices: issues like factivity, hedging, attribution, metadiscourse and repetitive textual structures can contribute to the voice of the textbook writer addressing the student as well as the colleague. The overview of the literature is followed by a sample study of a corpus of academic history, representative of the authorial voices university students are exposed to in their early studies. Historical discourse seems to deviate from some specific tendencies noted in the hard and social sciences. Hedging, for example, is found to be more frequent in textbook chapters than in journal articles, but it is also accompanied by greater display of data and facts. The overview of positive and negative keywords reveals a varied use of authorial voice: the Textbook writer moves between the Recounter (with an emphasis on facts and the narrative) and the Intepreter (assessing historical actors and processes of change), whereas the researcher talking to other researchers in the journal article highlights the Academic Arguer (placing the research in the context of a debate). Markers of importance prove to be in line with this tendency, variously showing a preference for forms that assess entities and processes, rather than alternative perspectives. The voice of the Interpreter, supported by the authority of the Recounter, may well be the most suitable for a genre addressing such a wide range of readers with their background knowledge and expertise
Text mediation and collaborative meaning-making: Language support for an EAL academic author
No full textWriting for international publication in English poses considerable discursive challenges for EAL (English as an additional language) academics. In non-Anglophone settings, where assistance is limited, many turn to local English teachers at their university for ad hoc language support. However, the impact of these part-time text mediators on specialized texts is uncertain and doubts persist about their capacity to understand and shape meaning beyond language. This case study investigates how a language mediator helped a Chinese hematologist to convey his intended meaning when revising a submission for a medical journal. We show how mediator-author collaboration draws on their respective expertise to shape academic texts. While the mediator’s independent revisions mainly fixed language issues, her interaction with the author effectively addressed deeper structural and rhetorical challenges. Transcripts of conferencing sessions revealed how the mediator’s rhetorical and linguistic strategies complemented the author’s disciplinary knowledge to co-construct meaning and the articulation of complex ideas. By comparing the mediator’s solo efforts with the outcomes of collaborative interaction, we demonstrate how their partnership transformed the manuscript into a publishable text. These findings have important practical implications
Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres
Full text linkReview of: HYLAND, Ken; GUINDA, Carmen Sancho. Stance and voice in written academic genres. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.Reseña de: HYLAND, Ken; GUINDA, Carmen Sancho. Stance and voice in written academic genres. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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