Evaluative Stancetaking in English-Medium Academic Prose: A Study of Research Article Abstracts by Russian and Chinese L2 Writers
Аннотация
Background: Globalization has created the academic community’s need to learn English in order to publish internationally and caused intensive research into academic prose by non-native writers with the aim of revealing prevailing culture-and discipline-specific rhetoric structures and suggesting ways of improving academic writing skills.
Purpose: This contrastive study explored preferences in the employment of stance features in English-medium research article abstracts by second language writers from two different cultural backgrounds (Russia and China) assuming that variations in stancetaking are culturally shaped.
Method: Hyland’s (2005b) taxonomy of stance resources was adopted for the current study as the most comprehensive one including a wide range of writer-oriented features. This taxonomy can help identify pragmatic functions of linguistic markers used for stancetaking in academic prose. The methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis were applied.
Results: A contrastive analysis of the findings showed that the Russian and Chinese academic communities manifest different stancetaking preferences. The quantitative analysis revealed that Chinese-authored RA abstracts contained considerably more stance features than those written by their Russian counterparts. Most quantitative differences between the application of stance features by Russian and Chinese authors were statistically significant. It was also revealed that while the Chinese academic writers seemed to be more careful in making claims, anticipating and acknowledging, the Russian scholars chose to create an impression of certainty and assurance, instilling confidence in their readers. The differences in the employment of stance features identified in the study are likely to reflect culture-specific writing peculiarities of the Chinese and Russian academic communities which favour slightly different discursive strategies.
Conclusion: The findings carry pedagogical implications for academic writing course designers and can enhance L2 writers’ familiarity with the culture-specific academic writing conventions in the knowledge domain.
Скачивания
Литература
Abdi, R. (2002). Interpersonal metadiscourse: An indicator of interaction and identity. Discourse Studies, 4(2),39–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14614456020040020101
Alghamdi, G.A., & Suleiman Alyousef, H. (2022). The construction of knowledge claims in three disciplines: An exploration of hedging and boosting strategies in research articles written in English by Arab and Anglophone writers. Journal of Language and Education, 8(2), 32-48. https://doi.org/10.17323/jle.2022.12363
Alonso-Almeida, F. (2014). Evidential and epistemic devices in English and Spanish medical, computing and legal scientific abstracts: A contrastive study. In M. Bondi & R. Lorés Sanz (Eds.), Abstracts in academic discourse: Variation and change (pp. 21-42). Peter Lang.
Belyakova, M. (2017). English-Russian cross-linguistic comparison of research article abstracts in geoscience. Estudios de Lingüística Universidad de Alicante, 31, 27-45. https://doi.org/10.14198/ELUA2017.31.02.
Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1988). Adverbial stance types in English. Discourse Processes, 11, 1–34.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Pearson.
Boginskaya, O. (2022). Creating an authorial presence in English-medium research articles abstracts by academic writers from different cultural backgrounds. International Journal of Language Studies, 16(2), 49-70.
Boginskaya, O. (2023). Interactional metadiscourse markers in english research article abstracts written by non-native authors: A corpus-based contrastive study. Ikala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura, 28(1), 139-154. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ikala.v28n1a08
Boginskaya, O. A. (2024). A comparison of explicit and implicit approaches to EAP teaching to postgraduate students. Higher Education in Russia, 33(2), 148-161, https://doi.org/10.31992/0869-3617-2024-33-2-148-161
Çiftçi, H., & Akbaş, E. (2021). Stancetaking in spoken ELF discourse in academic settings: interpersonal functions of I don’t know as a face-maintaining strategy. Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7(1), 484–502. https://doi.org/10.32601/ejal.911499
Crismore, A., & Farnthworth, R. (1990). Metadiscourse in popular and professional science discourse. In W. Nash (Ed.), The writing scholar: Studies in academic discourse (pp. 118-136). Sage.
Duenas, P. M. (2010). Attitude markers in business management research articles: A cross-cultural corpus-driven approach. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 20(1), 50-72. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1473-4192.2009.00228.x
Fløttum, K. (2012). Variation of stance and voice across cultures. In K. Hyland & C. Sancho Guinda (Eds.), Stance and voice in written academic genres (pp. 218-231). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030825_14
Graff, G., & Birkenstein, C. (2010). They say/ I say. Norton.
Gray, B., & Biber, D. (2012). Current conceptions of stance. In K. Hyland & C. S. Guinda (Eds.), Stance and voice in written academic genres (pp. 15–33). Palgrave Macmillan.
He, D. (2017). The use of English in the professional world in China. World Englishes, 36(2), 571-590. https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12284
Hryniuk, K. (2018). Expert-Like Use of Hedges and Boosters in Research Articles Written by Polish and English Native-Speaker Writers. Research in Language, 16(3), 263-280. https://doi.org/10.2478/rela-2018-0013
Hu, G. & Cao, F. (2011). Hedging and boosting in abstracts of applied linguistics articles: A comparative study of English-and Chinese-medium journals. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(11), 2795-2809. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2011.04.007
Hu, G & Wang, G. (2014). Disciplinary and ethnolinguistic influences on citation in research articles. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 14(1), 14–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2013.11.001
Hyland, K. (2001). Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles. English for Specific Purposes, 20(3), 207-26. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0889-4906(00)00012-0
Hyland, K. (2005a). Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. Continuum.
Hyland, K. (2005b). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7, 173–192. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605050365
Hyland, K. (2013). Writing in the university: Education, knowledge and reputation. Language Teaching, 46, 53–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444811000036
Hyland, K. & Jiang, F. K. (2017). Is academic writing becoming more informal? English for Specific Purposes, 45, 40-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2016.09.001
Hyland, K., & Zou, H. (2021). “I believe the findings are fascinating”: Stance in three-minute these’. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 50, 100973. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2021.100973
Isık-Tas, E.E. (2017). Authorial identity in Turkish language and English language research articles in Sociology: The role of publication context in academic writers’ discourse choices. Journal of English for Specific Purposes, 49, 26-38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2017.10.003
Korotkina, I.B. (2018). Academic writing in Russia: The urge for interdisciplinary studies. Higher Education in Russia, 10(27), 64-74. https://doi.org/10.31992/0869-3617-2018-27-10-64-74
Krapivkina, O. (2014). Pronominal choice in academic discourse. Middle-East Journal of Scientific Research, 20(7), 833-843. https://doi.org/10.5829/idosi.mejsr.2014.20.07.13676
Lee, Z. (2015). Etiquette behavior as the realization of Confucian values. Journal of Leningrad State University, 5(3), 92-100.
Lei, J., & Jiang, T. (2019). Chinese university faculty’s motivation and language choice for scholarly publishing. Ibérica, 38, 51–74.
Lorés Sanz, R. (2006). I will argue that: First person pronouns as metadiscoursal devices in research article abstracts in English and Spanish. ESP across Cultures, 3, 23-40.
Mikolaychik M.V. (2019). Lexical hedging in english abstracts of Russian economics research articles: A corpus-based study. Science Journal of Volgograd State University. Linguistics, 19(5), 38-47. https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2020.5.4
Prokhorov, Iu. E., & Sternin, I. A. (2006). Russkie: Kommunikativnoe povedee [Russians: Communicative behavior]. Flinta.
Pyankova, T. (1994). A practical guide for the translation of Russian scientific and technical literature into English. Letopis.
Seone, E. (2013). On the conventionalisation and loss of pragmatic function of the passive in Late Modern English scientific discourse. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 14(1), 70-99.
Shchemeleva, I. (2015). The development of stance-taking strategies in L2 students’ academic essays: The case of a content-based Russian-American teleconference course. Journal of Language and Education, 1(4), 45-53. https://doi.org/10.17323/2411-7390-2015-1-4-45-53
Walková, M. (2018). Author’s self-representation in research articles by Anglophone and Slovak linguists. Discourse and Interaction, 11(1), 86-105. https://doi.org/10.5817/DI2018-1-86
Wu, G., & Zhu, Y. (2015). Self-mention and authorial identity construction in English and Chinese research articles: A contrastive study. Linguistics and the Human Sciences,10(2),133-158. https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.v10i2.28557
Yakhontova, T. (1997). The signs of a new time: Academic writing in ESP curricula of Ukrainian universities. In Duszak, A. (Ed.), Culture and styles of academic discourse (p. 323-341). Mouton de Gruyter.
Xia, G. (2018). A cross-disciplinary corpus-based study on English and Chinese native speakers’ use of first-person pronouns in academic English writing. Text & Talk, 38(1), 93-113. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2017-0032
Xiong, D. A (2007). Comparison between English and Chinese metadiscourse. Journal of Chongqing Jiaotong University, 7(6), 101-105.
Xu, X., Nesi, H. (2019). Evaluation in research article introductions: A comparison of the strategies used by Chinese and British authors. Text & Talk, 39(6), 797-818. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2019-2046
Zanina, E. (2016). Strategic hedging: A comparative study of methods, results and discussion (and conclusion) sections of research articles in English and Russian. Journal of Language and Education, 2(2), 52-60. https://doi.org/10.17323/2411-7390-2016-2-2-52-60
Copyright (c) 2024 Национальный исследовательский университет «Высшая школа экономики»
Это произведение доступно по лицензии Creative Commons «Attribution» («Атрибуция») 4.0 Всемирная.
Авторы, публикующие статьи в журнале, соглашаются с условиями политики авторских прав.
