Authorial Stance in Research Articles

Examples from Applied Linguistics and Educational Technology

P. Pho

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137032782
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

How do I structure a journal article?; "Can I use 'I' in a research article?"; "Should I use an active or passive voice?" - Many such questions will be answered in this book, which documents the linguistic devices that authors use to show how they align or distance themselves from arguments and ideas, while maintaining conventions of objectivity.

Part I

Rhetorical Structure and Authorial Stance

Introduction

The study of academic and professional discourse has flourished in the last two decades (Flowerdew, 2002c;Gunnarsson, 2009). The research article genre in particular has drawn tremendous attention from researchers, with many studies of the rhetorical structures or moves (i.e. segments of text that express a certain communicative function) of various sections of the research article (Stoller and Robinson, 2012; Swales, 2004). The great attention that this genre has received from researchers, as pointed out by Bazerman (1988), Myers (1990) and Swales (1990), seems to be due to its widely accepted role of presenting new knowledge. There have also been many studies, especially in the last ten years, of linguistic features in research articles in general, or linguistic realizations of stance (i.e. the writer’s identity as well as the writer’s expression of attitudes, feelings, or judgments) in particular (Englebretson, 2007b; Parkinson, 2011). However, there is a lack of studies which link these two aspects of the research article – moves and linguistic realizations of stance. This book investigates the move structure in all the sections of the research article, from the Abstract through to the Conclusion section. It explores not only the sequencing and structure of moves, but also how linguistic features are used to realize the author’s voice in the moves.

The research article is defined by Swales as

a written text (although often containing non-verbal elements), usually limited to a few thousand words, that reports on some investigation carried out by its author or authors. In addition, the research article will usually relate the findings within it to those of others and may also examine issues of theory and/or methodology. It is to appear or has appeared in a research journal or, less typically, in an edited book-length collection of papers. (Swales, 1990, p. 93)

Studies of research articles tend to focus on two main areas. One is on the global organizational structure or move structure of the research article, mainly following the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) approach, in particular Swales’ (1990) Create a Research Space (CARS) model. Studies of the structure of research articles have tended to concentrate on only one or two individual sections of the research article, especially on the Introduction (Samraj, 2002b; Swales, 1981) and, to a lesser extent, on the Discussion (Holmes, 1997; Peacock, 2002). A few studies investigate the organizational structure of other sections of the research article, for example, the Methods section (Lim, 2006) and the Results section (Brett, 1994) or of the research article as a whole (Kanoksilapatham, 2005), but such studies are rare. The unequal attention to the different sections of the research article may be due to the fact that Swales (1990) provides more detailed models for the Introduction and Discussion sections of the research article. Yet, as argued by Kanoksilapatham (2005), it is important to understand the complete rhetorical structure of the research article. One of the goals of this book is to describe the move structure of all the sections of the research article, from the Introduction through to the Conclusion section.

Although not as widely researched as the research article itself, the Abstract, which precedes the main article, has also drawn the attention of a number of genre researchers (Anderson and Maclean, 1997; Huckin, 2001). The research article proper and the research article abstract are generally considered two different genres (Bhatia, 1993; Swales, 1990). As can be inferred from the studies previously mentioned, research on journal articles tends to focus either on the research article abstract, or on the main research article (as a whole, or on one of its sections). There have only been a few studies comparing the two genres; for example, Nwogu (1990) compares three genres: the research article abstract, the research article proper and the popularized version of the research article, and Samraj (2005) compares the research article abstract with the Introduction section of the main research article. Considering that the Abstract is an essential part of the research article for most journals, it is worth investigating both the research article proper and the Abstract accompanying the article in order to give a complete description of the research article. This is one of the goals of this book.

The other focus of studies of research articles is on various grammatical and stylistic features of the research article such as the use of the passive and active voice (e.g. Tarone, Dwyer, Gillette, and Icke, 1998), tenses (e.g. Malcolm, 1987), reporting verbs (e.g. Thompson and Ye, 1991), and personal pronouns (e.g. Kuo, 1999). These studies have provided significant knowledge of the research article genre. The linguistic features investigated in most previous studies, however, tend to be scattered and there are no empirical studies of how linguistic features are distributed across the moves of the entire research article.

Most of the studies of linguistic features in research articles employ a qualitative approach rather than a quantitative one. In these studies, the researchers claim that certain linguistic features are ‘typical’ of a section of the research article without providing any statistical evidence. Therefore, the findings as to which linguistic features characterize a certain move or section of the research article cannot be assessed, or used as a basis for comparison with other disciplines, genres, or moves. A quantitative approach would provide more reliable evidence to identify particular features as characteristic of a communicative function in the genre and discipline being studied. This study thus uses a quantitative approach to establish which linguistic features are characteristic of each rhetorical move in applied linguistics and educational technology research articles, and the frequencies of the features are then compared across moves. In addition, qualitative analyses of how the features are used in the moves are also conducted in the present study. A combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches will provide a fuller picture of how the different moves are realized linguistically.

Some studies of move structure or linguistic features in research articles have attempted to compare these features across disciplines (e.g. Hyland, 2000; Peacock, 2002). As noted by Bhatia (1998), Fortanet, Posteguillo, Palmer, and Coll (1998), Hyland (1999), and Swales (1990), rhetorical structure and linguistic features vary according to academic discipline. A recent publication based on a large corpus of 450 research articles from three disciplines, economics, linguistics, and medicine, written in three languages, English, French, and Norwegian, has found that discipline has a greater effect than language on the distribution patterns of a variety of linguistic features such as first person subjects or metatextual expressions (e.g. section or above) (Fløttum, Dahl, and Kinn, 2006). It is one of the goals of this book to take this further to investigate not only whether the move structure of articles and their abstracts varies across disciplines, but also whether discipline has an effect on the distribution patterns of linguistic features in moves as well as in the article as a whole.

In previous studies of the research article genre, the ‘hard sciences’ have received more attention from researchers than the ‘soft sciences’. Disciplines of the natural sciences or ‘hard sciences’ investigated in previous studies include, to name just a few, medicine (Nwogu, 1990, 1997), biochemistry (Kanoksilapatham, 2003, 2005), biology (G. Myers, 1990), computer science (Posteguillo, 1999), and engineering (Koutsantoni, 2006). Different disciplines in the fields of the social sciences and humanities have also been studied, though to a much lesser extent, for instance sociology (Brett, 1994), psychology (Hartley, 2003), literature (Balocco, 2000), management (Lim, 2006), linguistics (Lorés, 2004), and applied linguistics (Yang and Allison, 2003). It is essential therefore to develop research on linguistic realizations of rhetorical functions in research articles in the ‘soft sciences’. Although there exist a great number of manuals and guides on academic writing in the social sciences and humanities (e.g. Graff and Birkenstein’s (2007) They Say/I Say), those books are generally not empirically based. The present book thus provides empirical substantiation for the current literature.

Another question is how similar related disciplines are. The disciplines of applied linguistics and educational technology have been chosen for the present study as these appear to be under-researched compared to scientific disciplines. Previous studies that investigate disciplinary differences tend to compare disciplines that are from different broad fields, for example, social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences (Fløttum et al., 2006). The present research asks whether there are identifiable differences between articles in related disciplines such as applied linguistics and educational technology. These two disciplines were also chosen as they are both of interest to language teachers although their foci differ. Whereas papers in applied linguistics tend to report linguistic research in language teaching, educational technology papers focus more on applying technology in various learning environments, one of which is language learning.

Apart from revealing the nature of the genres, this book has a practical application. A detailed study of the move structure of the entire article and how each move is realized linguistically can provide some guidelines for novice writers who want to be members of this discourse community. With English now the main international language for communication and academic research, more and more scholars from non-English-speaking backgrounds are trying to publish in English-medium journals (Canagarajah, 2002; Casanave and Vandrick, 2003; Hamel, 2007). Evidence from research into professional academic writing has indicated that many nonnative English-speaking researchers have difficulty getting their work published in English (Flowerdew, 1999; J. Flowerdew, 2008; Lillis and Curry, 2006). Many nonnative speaking scholars, despite their well-established expertise in the field, have their papers rejected when they submit to English-medium international journals. Many studies have looked into nonnative English speakers’ problems in writing academic papers. Sionis (1995), for example, reported the reasons why the articles written by the French researchers in his study were refused by the publishers as

not so much because of serious lexical or syntactic errors […] but rather because of such comments as ‘discontinuity in the argumentative process’ […], ‘lack of consistency’ […] and ‘failure to convincingly introduce, link or conclude various key-elements in several parts of the demonstration’. (Sionis, 1995, pp. 100–1)

Similarly, Flowerdew (2001) interviewed editors from 11 international journals in English language teaching and found that the most problematic errors made by nonnative English speakers were not surface language errors such as article use or subject–verb agreement. Nonnative English-speaking authors were at a disadvantage as compared to their native speaking peers because of the inappropriate use of hedges and downtoners, the structure of the Introduction/Literature Review and the Discussion/Conclusion sections of the research article, and the lack of authorial voice in their papers (Flowerdew, 2001). The problem has been found to apply to novice native English-speaking writers as well as nonnative English-speaking writers (Flowerdew, 2001). Therefore, investigating how writers express their authorial stances throughout the article including the Abstract can provide a useful resource for novice writers regardless of whether they are native or nonnative English speakers.

The book consists of four main parts. Part I contains the first chapter, which gives an overview of approaches to genre analysis – the New Rhetoric approach, the Systemic Functional Linguistics approach, and the English for Specific Purposes approach. It then introduces Swales’ (1990) move structure model for the Introduction section of the research article and shows how the current book builds on this model to develop a comprehensive model for move analysis of all the sections of the research article. The problem of section boundaries in the analysis of move structure is also discussed. The second chapter of this part discusses the notions of stance and evaluation. This chapter also shows how most existing work on authorial stance focuses on individual features of authorial stance, such as the use of hedging or personal pronouns, and that although some studies try to look at the variation of certain aspects of authorial stance across sections in the research article, there seem to be no studies examining the variation in linguistic realizations across rhetorical moves. There is a clear need for a comprehensive investigation of linguistic devices of stance at the move level. In Chapter 3 of Part I, I present a model for the analysis of move structure and authorial stance which is used to analyze authorial stance in research articles in the current study. This model employs both corpus-and genre-based approaches (i.e. bottom-up and top-down approaches, cf. L. Flowerdew, 2008) to investigate the move structure and linguistic realizations of authorial stance in various moves of the research articles. The top-down approach is used for the analysis of moves. The bottom-up approach is used for the analysis of various linguistic features in each move. A statistical model is then fitted to the data to determine the significant linguistic features in each move of the two disciplines.

Part II – Variations in Structure – discusses the move structure of the research article abstract and all the sections of the main research article. For example, most articles have five moves in the Abstract – Situating the research, Presenting the research, Describing the methodology, Summarizing the findings, and Discussing the research. The findings show that there are some differences between the two closely related disciplines in terms of move structure. While the move structures of the Abstract and the Introduction section of the main article are quite similar across the two disciplines, there are subtle differences in the other sections of the article. For example, applied linguistics authors tend to justify their methodology more, and provide interpretations of their results in the Results section more often than thos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Rhetorical Structure and Authorial Stance
• Part II Variations in Structure
• Part III Variations in Stance
• Part IV Conclusion and Implications
• Appendices
• Reference
• Index