Academic Discourse

John Flowerdew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317875741
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Academic Discourse presents a collection of specially commissioned articles on the theme of academic discourse. Divided into sections covering the main approaches, each begins with a state of the art overview of the approach and continues with exemplificatory empirical studies. Genre analysis, corpus linguistics, contrastive rhetoric and ethnography are comprehensively covered through the analysis of various academic genres: research articles, PhD these, textbooks, argumentative essays, and business cases. Academic Discourse brings together state-of-the art analysis and theory in a single volume. It also features: - an introduction which provides a survey and rationale for the material - implications for pedagogy at the end of each chapter- topical review articles with example studies- a glossary The breadth of critical writing, and from a wide geographical spread, makes Academic Discourse a fresh and insightful addition to the field of discourse analysis.

Part I

GENRE ANALYSIS

Chapter 1

A Generic View of Academic Discourse

Vijay K. Bhatia

OVERVIEW

It has become almost axiomatic to regard linguistic analysis and description as a kind of prerequisite to the development and design of any language teaching and learning activity, especially in the context of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Although the trust in the usefulness of linguistic descriptions for language teaching has not changed in the last few decades, the nature of linguistic analysis has developed considerably. Analyses of linguistic data for pedagogical applications have gone through a variety of stages in the past four decades. They started with the characterisation of statistically significant features of lexico-grammar to the study of textualisation in discourse, i.e. a characterisation of values these features of form realise in discourse. The second stage of development extended the study of textualisation to the study of macro-structures in texts, thereby bringing into focus the notion of discourse structure. The third stage of development marked a more significant shift of focus from the object of analysis itself, i.e. text, to the context in which it is constructed, used, interpreted, and perhaps exploited. It is at this stage that the focus shifted from text to what makes a text possible, from surface structure to deep structure of discourse, from discourse to genre, and finally from ‘what’ to ‘why’ in language use, and of course in language learning and language teaching. The next stage is already in place, which connects texts to social practice, shifting focus more centrally to the study of social structures, social identities and discourse systems, and things of that kind. One may notice here a subtle shift of attention from discourse to the underlying critical concerns of power and politics of language use, domination, and empowerment through linguistic and social practices via the context of communication, culture, and cognition.

Many of these developments can be characterised in terms of a quest for thicker descriptions of language use, often incorporating, and many a time going beyond, the immediate context of situation. This quest for thicker descriptions of language use has become popular as genre analysis, where an attempt is made to offer a grounded description of language use in educational, academic, or professional settings. We can also see how linguistic analyses have became much more than mere descriptions, often attempting to offer explanation for a specific use of language in institutionalised social, educational, academic, and professional settings. These efforts to offer more explanatory linguistic descriptions often attempt to answer the question ‘why does a particular use of language takes the shape it does?’ One way of looking at these varying perceptions of language description can be the way they relate texts to contexts, as in the following diagram.

Language Description

as

Text

What features of lexico-grammar are statistically and/or functionally distinctive? Context: narrowly configured in terms of textual links

Genre

Why do we use the language the way we do and what makes this possible? Context: more specifically configured in terms of disciplinary cultures

Social Practice

How do we relate language to social structures, social identities, and social practices? Context: broadly configured in terms of socio-cultural realities

It is obvious from the diagram that just as a very narrowly configured context is likely to make textual description less effective for language teaching purposes, similarly a very broadly configured context in terms of socio-cultural practices may make insights less relevant to the learning and teaching of language. Ideally, one may need to position oneself somewhere in the middle, looking at the use of language as genre to achieve non-linguistic objectives, thus maintaining a balance between the study of linguistic form, on the one hand, and the study of context, in a broad sense of socio-cultural factors, to focus on why members of specific disciplinary cultures use the language the way they do and what makes this form possible. Let me give further substance to this view of language as genre by identifying and discussing some of its main concerns.

GENRE ANALYSIS

Genre Analysis is the study of situated linguistic behaviour in institutionalised academic or professional settings, whether in terms of typification of rhetorical action, as in Miller (1984), and Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995); regularities of staged, goal oriented social processes, as in Martin, Christie, and Rothery (1987) and Martin (1993); or consistency of communicative purposes, as in Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993). Genre theory, in spite of these seemingly different orientations, covers a lot of common ground, some of which include the following:

1. Genres are reflections of disciplinary cultures and, in that sense, those of the realities of the world of discourse, in general.

2. Genres focus on conventionalised communicative events embedded within disciplinary or professional practices.

3. All disciplinary or professional genres have integrity of their own, which is often identified with reference to textual and discursive (text-internal) factors, or contextual and disciplinary (text-external) factors. However, it is not always fixed or static but often contested, depending upon the rhetorical context it tends to respond to.

4. Genres are recognisable communicative events, characterised by a set of communicative purpose (s) identified and mutually understood by members of the professional or academic community in which they regularly occur.

5. Genres are highly structured and conventionalised constructs, with constraints on allowable contributions in terms of the intentions one can give expression to, the shape they can take, and also in terms of the co-grammatical resources one can employ to give discoursal values to such formal features.

6. Established members of a particular professional community will have a much greater knowledge and understanding of generic practices than those who are apprentices, new members, or outsiders.

7. Although genres are viewed as conventionalised constructs, expert members of the disciplinary and professional communities are often in a position to exploit such conventions to express ‘private intentions’ within the structures of socially acceptable communicative norms.

As we can see, the most important feature of this view of language use is the emphasis on conventions that all the three manifestations of genre theory consider very central to any form of generic description. Genres are essentially defined in terms of the use of language in conventionalised communicative settings, which give expression to a specific set of communicative goals of specialised disciplinary and social groups, which in turn establish relatively stable structural forms and, to some extent, even constrain the use of lexico-grammatical resources. Often such constraints can also be attributed to variations in disciplinary practices.

The second important aspect of genre theory is that although genres are typically associated with recurring rhetorical contexts, and are identified on the basis of a shared set of communicative purposes with constraints on allowable contributions in the use of lexico-grammatical and discoursal forms, they are not static. As Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) point out,

genres are inherently dynamic rhetorical structures that can be manipulated according to conditions of use, and that genre knowledge is therefore best conceptualized as a form of situated cognition embedded in disciplinary cultures.

Emphasis on conventions and propensity for innovation – these two features of genre theory appear to be contradictory in character. One tends to view genre as a rhetorically situated, highly institutionalised textual event, having its own what I have elsewhere called generic integrity, (Bhatia, 1993); whereas the other assigns genre a natural propensity for innovation and change, which is often exploited by the expert members of the specialist community to create new forms in order to respond to novel rhetorical contexts or to convey ‘private intentions’ within the socially recognised communicative purposes. How do we resolve this contradiction?

Although genres are associated with typical socio-rhetorical situations and, in turn, shape future responses to similar situations, they have always been ‘sites of contention between stability and change’ (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995: 6). It may be that a person is required to respond to a somewhat changing socio-cognitive need, requiring him to negotiate his response in the light of recognisable or established conventions, since genres do change over time in response to changing socio-cognitive needs. Alternatively, it may be that he or she intends to communicate ‘private intentions’ within the rhetorical context of a ‘socially recognized communicative purpose’ (Bhatia, 1993).

It is often possible for some members of the professional community to manipulate institutionalised generic forms or generate new ones, which gives them ‘tactical freedom’ to exploit generic resources to negotiate an individual response to recurring and novel rhetorical situations. However, as Bhatia (1995) points out,

such liberties, innovations, creativities, exploitations, whatever one may choose to call them, are invariably realized within rather than outside the generic boundaries, whichever way one may draw them, in terms of recurrence of rhetorical situations (Miller, 1984), consistency of communicative purposes (Swales, 1990, and Bhatia, 1993), existence and arrangement of obligatory structured elements (Hasan, 1985). It is never a free-for-all kind of activity. The nature of genre manipulation is invariably realized within the broad limits of specific genres and is often very subtle. A serious disregard for these generic conventions leads to opting out of the genre and is noticed by the specialist community as odd.

Another aspect of genre theory is its versatility, which can be seen operating at various levels. The versatility of genre-based linguistic description can be seen at other levels too. Using communicative purpose associated with a specific rhetorical situation as a privileged criterion, genre theory combines the advantages of a more general view of language use on the one hand, and its very specific realisation, on the other (Swales, 1990: 58; Bhatia, 1993). In this sense, genre analysis is narrow in focus and broad in vision. The concept of communicative purpose itself is a versatile one. On the one hand, it can be identified at a high level of generalisation, whereas on the other hand it can be narrowed down to a very specific level. In addition, it may either be a single communicative purpose or a more detailed set of communicative purposes. Depending upon the level of generalisation and detail at which one specifies communicative purpose (s), one may be in a position to identify the status of a particular genre and its use of generic conventions (see Bhatia, 1995, for a discussion of promotional discourse). In academic discourse also, this versatility offers a convincing explanation for the tension between genres and disciplines, to which I shall turn briefly at this stage.

Genres, as we know, cut across disciplinary boundaries, in the sense that one can notice significant overlap in the case of genres such as research article introductions (Swales, 1981a, 1990), abstracts (Bhatia, 1993), textbooks (Myers, 1992b) and a number of others across a range of disciplines. However, it is also true that these very genres, at a different level of delicacy, display subtle variations across a range of disciplines (see Biber, 1988; Fortanet et al., 1998; Hirvela, 1997; Holmes, 1997; Bhatia, 1999a; Hewings and Nickerson, 1999; Hyland, 2000, and Samraj, this volume, among others). Often these variations appear to be more significant in the way lexico-grammatical resources and rhetorical strategies are exploited to give expressions to discipline-specific concepts, knowledge and its structure, modes of conducting and reporting research, level of rhetorical intimacy, and pedagogic approaches and concerns. These two apparently contradictory concerns in disciplinary discourses have strong implications for both the theory and practice of ESP. In the area of ESP theory, they have been very much a significant part of the history of language description ever since the early days of ESP. At the level of ESP practice, this tension between disciplinary overlap and variation underpins the tension between pedagogic convenience and pedagogic effectiveness, which has been at the very heart of EAP and ESP.

ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

Historical perspective

Academic Discourse has long been viewed as a unified register in applied linguistic literature, especially in lan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Approaches to the Analysis of Academic Discourse in English
• PART I: Genre Analysis
• PART II: Corpus-based Studies
• PART III: Contrastive Rhetoric
• PART IV: Ethnographic/Naturalistic Approaches
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index