Interactions in New Academic Discourses
Genre and Discipline
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Foreword: Interaction in written academic texts (KEN HYLAND)
- Acknowledgements
- PART I. Introduction
- CHAPTER 1. Interactions in academic discourses: What’s new?
- PART II. Stance and engagement in new academic discourses
- CHAPTER 2. Reworking research: Interactions in academic articles and blogs
- CHAPTER 3. Stance in academic blogs and three–minute theses
- CHAPTER 4. “This book should be required reading for any academics in the STEM field”: Engagement in two forms of book reviews
- PART III. Disciplinary variations in new academic discourses
- CHAPTER 5. “Think about how fascinating this is”: Engagement in academic blogs across disciplines
- CHAPTER 6. Stance–taking in journal article highlights: How academics promote their research across disciplines
- PART IV. Final remarks
- CHAPTER 7. Conclusions and implications
- Bibliography
- APPENDIX A. Source of journals for the book reviews
- APPENDIX B. Source of journals for the highlights
- Index
- Series Index
Tables
Table 1. Corpus size and composition
Table 2. Stance and engagement features in the two genres (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 3. Reader pronouns across genres (per 1,000 words and percentage of total)
Table 4. Proportion of directives across genres (per 1,000 words and % of total)
Table 5. Corpus size and composition
Table 6. Stance features across genres (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 7. Functions of attitudinal markers across genres (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 8. Forms of self–mention across genres (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 9. Corpus size and composition
Table 10. Engagement in two forms of book reviews (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 11. Reader mention in two forms of book reviews (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 12. Functions of directives in two forms of book reviews (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 13. Appeals to shared knowledge in two forms of book reviews (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 14. Disciplinary engagement sub–corpus size and composition
←ix | x→Table 15. Engagement features by discipline (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 16. Functions of directives by discipline (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 17. Functions of audience–oriented questions by discipline (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 18. Appeals to shared knowledge (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 19. Corpus size and composition
Table 20. Stance features by discipline (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 21. Types of hedges by disciplines (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 22. Functions of attitudinal markers by disciplines (per 1,000 words and %)
Table 23. Forms of self–mention device by disciplines (per 1,000 words and %)
KEN HYLAND, UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA
Foreword: Interaction in written academic texts
It is now a cliché that academic discourse is interactive. Writers and readers consider each other, try to imagine each other’s purposes and strategies, and write or interpret a text in terms of these imaginations. But the study of interaction in academic writing has only emerged as a major area of research in the last twenty years or so. It has replaced the pervasive view that knowledge is built on experiment, induction, replication and falsifiability; a perspective which says scientific papers are persuasive because they communicate truths based on direct observation of the social or natural world. Instead, by giving greater attention to the role of interaction in this process, analysts now explore the ways that we cooperate with one another to build relationships, convey information and create our social worlds through discourse.
Quite simply, it is not enough for writers or speakers to describe their results as a neutral presentation of facts because science has no voice to speak for itself. Research findings have to be interpreted, explained and argued for by human actors. Because there is always at least one way of understanding data we have to look for proof in the textual practices for producing agreement. Truth, then, is what you can get people to believe – and this means taking an appropriate stance and engaging effectively with an audience (Hyland, 2005).
This “interactional turn” in applied linguistics, rejects the notion of objective argument and puts the people back into texts. It emphasises that in addition to research elements of persuasive activity, such as selecting an appropriate topic, approaching the topic in a useful way, getting the methods right and so on, academics have to worry about rhetoric. How confident and assertive should we be in our writing? Is it appropriate to explicitly stand behind our claims? How “friendly” or distant should we be with readers? These are not trivial questions but can determine whether ←xi | xii→a text succeeds or fails to convince readers, whether peers or reviewers, of an argument and this, in turn, can have significant career implications.
The ability to interact effectively with an audience therefore presents considerable challenges for writers and speakers. With publication inseparable from the process by which prestige and credibility are assessed in academic life, publication now equals “productivity” and is used as a crude measure of worth, with institutions conferring promotion and tenure on the length of personal bibliographies (Hyland & Jiang, 2019). As a result, everyone and his or her neighbour is now trying to publish in international English–language journals listed on the prestigious Web of Science databases. There may, in fact, be as many as nine million scholars working in 17,000 universities seeking to publish in English–language journals (Bjork et al., 2009) with a staggering 3 million new peer–reviewed articles published each year (Johnson et al., 2018). All this means there are now more journals, more scholarly papers, more publishers, more co–authorship and, crucially, more academics, many writings in a language which is not their native tongue (Hyland, 2015).
It is no wonder, then, that academics have been found to suffer more stress in their jobs than front–line workers in the police and hospital Accident and Emergency Units, with half of those working in the UK needing treatment for anxiety at some stage in their careers (Kinman et al., 2006). The situation is not helped by scholars being increasingly encouraged to promote their work, and themselves, by reaching new audiences through recently emerging genres. These genres, as Joanna Zou shows, often require writers to interact with readers and hearers in very different ways to those they may be familiar with. Focusing on stance and engagement markers, she explores how writers, and sometimes speakers, stand behind their words and reach out to different audiences in these genres.
Details
- Pages
- XVI, 178
- Year
- 2022
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781800793453
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781800793460
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781800793477
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781800793484
- DOI
- 10.3726/b18115
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2022 (November)
- Keywords
- new academic discourses interaction genre discipline Interactions in New Academic Discourses Hang Joanna Zou
- Published
- Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2022. XVI, 178 pp., 2 fig. b/w, 23 tables.
