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The contexts, theoretical and methodological orientation of EAP research: Evidence from empirical articles published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes
Abstract
This paper reports the results of a review and analysis we conducted on 416 empirical articles (EAs) published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP) over its lifespan (2002-2019). We present the results of the review and analysis across four broad themes, namely, (1) contexts and participants, (2) research foci and theoretical orientations, (3) research methodology and data sources, and (4) pedagogical implications. In addition to presenting the overall results, we also report findings across two periods (2002-2011 and 2012-2019). The typical article in JEAP was written by a single author addressing an instructional issue based on genre theory as related to undergraduates in universities and using combined methods (employing both quantitative and qualitative data and analysis). We present and discuss the findings overall, as well as across the two periods in relation to the four broad themes and their categories. Based on the findings, we make suggestions for future research in JEAP.
... However, chronologically, the findings revealed a decrease in the percentages of the eclectic mixed methods studies in (17.4%) and an increase in the percentages of mixed methods research (4.6%) in the third period. Riazi et al. (2020) synthesized 416 empirical articles published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP) from 2002 to 2019. The cumulative findings revealed that combined methods were by far the most prevalently represented methodological approach in the data set (n = 214, 51%). ...
... In the absence of these quality features, one would not be able to draw sound inferences from mixed methods studies, which subsequently brought about what Creswell and Plano-Clark (2018) has referred to as "interpretive inconsistency" (p.106). In order to enhance interpretative rigor and attend to L2 complex problems, we here argue for changing MMR consumers' style of thinking away from method-oriented approach (i.e., combining methods) to methodology-based (i.e., mixing methods in all phases ranging from conceptualization to implementation) pedagogical agenda (Riazi 2016;Riaizi and Candlin 2014;Riazi et al. 2020). It is relatively recently that a few published articles adhere to the systematic use of "multiple methods research in the ways that researchers have in related fields such as nursing or education" (Riazi et al. 2018, p. 51). ...
... However, in this study, we identified the strengths and deficiencies of MMR knowledge and skills from applied linguists' perspective to see their knowledge and skills required to conduct a principled and systematic mixed methods research. Together with other text-based MMR studies (Hashemi and Babaii 2013;Riazi 2016;Riazi et al. 2020), our findings highlight the lack of optimal and systematic pedagogical MMR culture. ...
Since the 2010s, the appeal for utilizing mixed methods research in applied linguistics and its related strands has been expanding. However, recent text-based studies highlighted some deficiencies in planning and practicing MMR. As such, the current study, adhering to Guetterman’s (2015) framework, examined applied linguistics’ mixed methods research proficiency, targeting 175 applied linguists who published in top-tier journals. A mixed methods proficiency questionnaire was created to examine applied linguists’ proficiency (i.e., knowledge, experience, ability, and skill) of the mixed methods research movement. Our results revealed that applied linguists were professionally knowledgeable about the foundations of MMR research, the rationale of MMR, MMR questions, and designs. However, they need to improve their knowledge of mixed methods’ integration, transparency, and quality. The results further revealed that despite the moderate skillfulness of applied linguists in MMR studies, they should boost their MMR skill repertoire in MMR quality features such as integration, validity, and meta-inferencing. Our PLS-Path findings support Guetterman’s proficiency model, providing a new pedagogical culture in MMR studies wherein exposure to experience or professionalism in MMR has played a contributory role in enhancing MMR knowledge and skills. Accordingly, applied linguists might be able to shift their MMR orientation away from eclecticism to principlism and innovatism.
... Recently, burgeoning bibliometric studies have echoed diverse topics, including the need for methodological reforms in second language research (Gass et al., 2020;Riazi et al., 2020). These bibliometric studies have drawn upon advanced visualization tools to scrutinize the authorship and trends in applied linguistics studies (e.g., Chen, 2018) or concerns about the underrepresentation of scholars of color in American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) communities (Bhattacharya et al., 2019). ...
... As a result, the surge of ethnographic studies (De Costa, 2014) and studies examining identity construction in TQ required researchers to use multiple knowledge sources for providing a thick description. In line with Riazi (2016Riazi ( , 2017 and Riazi et al. (2020), we maintain that each data collection method has its strengths and rigor. TESOL researchers seem to rely on eclectic orientation and MMR with several data collection techniques to address their research problems from multiple perspectives. ...
We report the results of a bibliometric study of 696 empirical articles (EAs) published in TESOL Quarterly (TQ) over its lifespan (1967-2019). We report overall and periodic reviews (1967-1979, 1980-1989, 1990-1999, 2000-2009, 2010-2019) concerning the following themes: (1) contexts and participants, (2) research foci and theoretical orientations, and (3) research methodology and data sources. A typical article was written by a single author addressing a learning/teaching English issue related to undergraduates in US universities. The most common research foci were instruction, learning, and assessment. A quarter of the articles did not have a specifiable theoretical orientation, and for those that had, the main theoretical orientations were linguistic/scientific, linguistic/cognitive, and social. The most frequently used research methodologies were quantitative, qualitative, and eclectic, and the top three data sources used by researchers were elicitation, multiple sources, and observation. Based on the findings, we make suggestions for future research in TESOL. Overall, the present review and analysis of published EAs give readers a birds-eye view of the research gravity in TQ over the last 52 years.
... L2 writing research is highly interdisciplinary and draws on various disciplines to substantiate its content and methodology. Based on recent studies (see, e.g., Benson et al., 2009;Canagarajah, 2016;Pelaez-Morales, 2017;Riazi et al., 2018;Riazi et al., 2020;Richards, 2009) qualitative methods are predominant in the articles published in the journals of JSLW, TESOL Quarterly, and Applied Linguistics respectively. All these reports attest to an earlier account by Lazaraton (1995), asserting that "qualitative research has made significant gains in terms of visibility and credibility in recent years" (p. ...
... In Benson et al.'s review that included 10 applied linguistics journals over ten years, 47% (n= 225) were designated as case study followed by discourse analysis, which was 11% (n= 53), and ethnography and classroom interaction, which were 10% (n= 49). Also, our findings are in line with those reported by Riazi et al. (2020) as they reported over half of the qualitatively-oriented studies in EAP, 53% (n= 78) did not specify the particular method they used. For those articles where researchers did identify a method, case study was found to be the preferred method in almost one fifth of the articles, that is, 19% (n= 28), followed by ethnography with 9% (n= 13), genre analysis with 5% (n= 7), grounded theory with 3% (n= 5), and systemic functional linguistic (SFL) with 3% (n= 5). ...
A challenging step in any qualitative research project is data coding and analysis. If the data coding is done appropriately, it will lead the researchers to develop patterns or themes and to make final inferences about the research problem. As such, qualitative researchers are supposed to take systematically informed steps and procedures to perform qualitative data coding and analysis. However, this is not as easy as it might be thought, and even published articles might fall short of providing a thorough explanation of their methods and procedures, making it difficult for other researchers, especially early career researchers, to aim for replication of the study. This article presents a review of the methods and data coding and analysis procedures in the field of L2 writing as a case in point. We scrutinized and analyzed all 168 articles with a qualitative orientation published in the Journal of Second Language Writing (JSLW) over its lifecycle. We present the results and discuss some articles to illustrate how L2 writing researchers handled qualitative data coding and analysis and showcase problematic areas. The outcomes of the review and analysis, including the showcase articles, provide some tips and guidelines for prospective L2 writing researchers and other stakeholders more broadly.
... A coding scheme (Appendix E) was developed to derive the information necessary from each study in the sample to address the research questions. In designing the coding scheme, the categories and variables were informed by three main resources: (a) research synthesis guidelines (e.g., Cooper et al. 2019), (b) previous research syntheses of L2 studies and eye-tracking studies (e.g., Crowther et al. 2021;Riazi et al. 2020;Strohmaier et al. 2020), and (c) the eye-tracking literature (e.g., Fiedler et al. 2020;Godfroid 2019;Holmqvist et al. 2011). The initial coding scheme was developed by the authors. ...
Eye-tracking has become increasingly popular in second language (L2) research. In this study, we systematically reviewed 111 eye-tracking studies published in 17 L2 journals to explore the application and replicability of eye-tracking technology in L2 research. The results revealed eight areas of application of eye-tracking in L2 research, among which grammar and vocabulary were the most frequently examined lines of inquiry. We also identified three types of cognitive mechanisms investigated in L2 eye-tracking studies: attention, higher cognitive processes, and cognitive load. Attention was predominantly measured via fixation temporal indices, while higher cognitive processes were frequently measured by using fixation count and fixation temporal measures. In addition, the measures adopted to assess cognitive load mainly depended on the task type. Finally, with respect to the replicability of the studies, transparent reporting practices were evaluated based on 33 features of replicable studies. We found that more than 95% of the reviewed studies reported less than 70% of the information essential for future replication studies. We suggest that the reporting of the information critical to conducting replicable L2 eye-tracking research needs improvement in transparency and completeness. The implications of this study are discussed.
... In the literature, there are also studies that reach different findings about method tendency. Riazi, Ghanbar and Fazel (2020) found that out of 416 articles examined in their studies, 51% of them used mixed research, 35% of them qualitative and 11% of them used quantitative research. ...
Bu çalışmanın amacı, eğitim bilim alanlarında ulusal ve uluslararası nitelikte iki dergide yayınlanan makalelerin yöntemlerini belirlemek ve belirli bir zaman aralığındaki eğilimlerini karşılaştırmalı olarak analiz etmektir. Çalışma içerik analiz yöntemlerinden biri olan betimsel içerik yöntemi kullanılarak gerçekleştirilmiştir. Çalışma kapsamında uluslararası dergi olarak The Journal Science Education and Technology; ulusal dergi olarak ise Eğitim ve Bilim Dergisi amaçlı örneklemeye göre seçilmiştir. Dergilerde 2018-2021 yılları arasında yayınlanmış bilimsel araştırmalar incelenmiş ve toplam 505 çalışmaya ulaşılmıştır. Çalışmaların içeriklerinde yöntem, desen ve analiz çeşidi değişkenleri incelenerek elde edilen veriler betimsel analizle çözümlenmiştir. Analiz sonuçlarına göre, 505 çalışmadan 202 tanesinde araştırma yöntemi net olarak açıklanırken, 303 çalışmada araştırmanın yönteminden doğrudan bahsedilmemiştir. Bu çalışmaların yöntem bilgisine, araştırmanın deseni veya analizleri incelenerek ulaşılmıştır. Bu iki dergideki makalelerde en fazla nicel yöntemlerin, en az ise karma araştırma yöntemlerinin tercih edildiği belirlenmiştir. Araştırmanın bir başka önemli bulgusu, ulusal içerikli çalışmalarda yöntem bilgisine, uluslararası içerikli çalışmalara göre daha fazla yer verilmesidir. Araştırmanın bulguları bilimsel çalışmalarda belirli bir standartlaşma olmadığını gösterdiğinden, bu durumun makale içeriklerinin anlaşılırlığını olumsuz etkilediği şeklinde değerlendirilmiştir. Bir derginin kendi standartlarını oluşturmasının, o derginin okuyucuları açısından kullanışlılığı artıracağı önerilmektedir.
... In addition to these broader fields, specific facets of EAP research have also been investigated, including genre analysis (Pérez-Llantada, 2015), interaction in written discourse (Hyland & Jiang, 2022c), and metadiscourse (Hyland & Jiang, 2022a). Studies have also systematically examined and reviewed papers published in specific journals, such as the flagship journals English for Specific Purposes (ESPJ), Journal of Second Language Writing (JSLW) and Journal of English for Academic Purposes (JEAP) (Liu & Hu, 2021;Riazi et al., 2018Riazi et al., , 2020. To track changes in EAP research over time, scholars have also incorporated papers from BALEAP proceedings volumes and accounts of Professional Issues Meetings (Charles, 2022). ...
Diverging from the long-held homogeneous view of academic discourse, the issue of disciplinarity has come to the forefront in EAP teaching and discourse analysis. Although disciplinary discourse is a well-established and expanding line of inquiry, there has been limited retrospective analysis to unpack its evolutionary nuances. This bibliometric study maps its evolution from 1990 to 2022, tracing its journey from a fringe component within applied linguistics and language pedagogy to a globally recognized field. Using 921 articles retrieved from the Web of Science’s core collection, our analysis reveals enduring scholarly interest in disciplinary literacy, writing, and socialization, with a marked shift since 2006 towards exploring the interplay between disciplinary knowledge-making practices and interpersonal features, such as stance, identity, and function. These studies, often using corpus approaches, highlight how these themes both reflect and are shaped by the disciplinary epistemology and ideology inherent in communities of practice. Emerging areas include student writing, spoken English, multimodal resources, and the temporal and interdisciplinary dynamics in various disciplines. The diverse authorship and geographical sources across various fields further underscore the global relevance of these topics. This overview could serve as a valuable resource for researchers, educators, and practitioners navigating this dynamic and significant field.
... The inclusion criterion was the involvement of first-hand quantitative, qualitative or mixed data. The inclusion criterion was the involvement of firsthand quantitative, qualitative, or mixed data including corpus-based studies with no participants in the traditional sense and excluding review and conceptual articles in keeping with Riazi, Shi, and Haggerty (2018) and Riazi, Ghanbar, and Fazel (2020). Further, unlike Lim's study (2014) which concerned dissertations in quantitative experimental research, this study included all types of research studies, that is, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods (see Riazi & Candlin, 2014). ...
This study presents a microscopic analysis of distributional and syntactical aspects of 2189 research questions (RQs) in 748 articles from four leading L2 research journals published between 2000 and 2019. Concerning distributional features, The Modern Language Journal was found to include the largest number of both RQs and constituent words. Syntactically, there was no significant difference between polar and non-polar RQs. However, RQs were mainly formulated either as simple or complex questions with only a few comprising compound or compound-complex structures. Additionally, a substantial majority of RQs were used in the present tense, with past tense and future being the next frequent tenses. More specifically, it was noted that most of the RQs involved simple present tense wh-questions, insinuating that L2 researchers opted for more qualitative RQs, lending themselves to more extensive descriptions, explanations, and interpretations. The findings will have several implications for students and instructors of graduate writing courses.
... One aspect of move analysis that seems to need further development is multimodality (Guillén-Galve & Vela-Tafalla, 2020;Prior, 2013;Riazi et al., 2020;Xia, Vol. 11(2)(2023): 237-260 2020). ...
Graphical abstracts (GAs), as other new digital forms of communicating science, have been promoted as tools to escalate the reach of journal articles and move science into unconventional environments such as social media. Despite the rapid and widespread adoption of the GA in various fields, its genre status is still controversial due to its unstable structure and functions. Here, we examine the move structure of 100 GAs published in 2022 in 10 high impact journals in medicine and chemistry. We aim to verify adherence to the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion pattern and the role of visual and written resources in move realization. We also discuss selections of multimodal resources that may result from the processes of recontextualization of scientific discourse to audiences other than expert peers. Our findings reveal that move structure varies across fields: in chemistry, only Results are obligatory, while in medicine the obligatory pattern is Methods-Results-Conclusion. Move realization in predominantly multimodal, with visual resources as the key element in the presentation of Methods and Results, while the written mode is characteristic of Conclusion. Acknowledgment of readers other than the peer scientist is evident in three medicine journals whose GAs are not produced by the author of the respective articles, but by graphic designers.
... One aspect of move analysis that seems to need further development is multimodality (Guillén-Galve & Vela-Tafalla, 2020;Prior, 2013;Riazi et al., 2020;Xia, Vol. 11(2)(2023): 237-260 2020). ...
Graphical abstracts (GAs), as other new digital forms of communicating science, have been promoted as tools to escalate the reach of journal articles and move science into unconventional environments such as social media. Despite the rapid and widespread adoption of the GA in various fields, its genre status is still controversial due to its unstable structure and functions. Here, we examine the move structure of 100 GAs published in
2022 in 10 high impact journals in medicine and chemistry. We aim to verify adherence to the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion pattern and the role of visual and written resources in move realization. We also discuss selections of multimodal resources that may result from the processes of recontextualization of scientific discourse to audiences other than expert peers. Our findings reveal that move structure varies across fields: in chemistry, only Results are obligatory, while in medicine the obligatory pattern is Methods-Results-Conclusion. Move realization in predominantly multimodal, with visual resources as the key element in the presentation of Methods and Results, while the written mode is characteristic of Conclusion. Acknowledgment of readers other than the peer scientist is evident in three medicine journals whose GAs are not produced by the author of the respective articles, but by graphic designers.
... Within the linguistics field, a scan through Plonsky's (n.d.) Bibliography of Research Synthesis and Meta-analysis in Applied Linguistics and a rudimentary search through Google Scholar results in scoping reviews that tend to be one of the following three types: (1) geographical e.g. MENA Region (Hillman et al., 2021), Iran (Farsani and Babaii, 2018) and Turkey (Selvi, 2021); (2) bibliometric mappings of specific journals, e.g., Journal of Second Language Writing (Riazi et al., 2018), Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Riazi et al., 2020) and Computer Assisted Language Learning Journal (Goksu et al., 2020); or (3) sub-field specific e.g., Arabic as a heritage language (Visonà and Plonsky, 2020), L2 learning in online games (Jabbari and Eslami, 2019), and L2 written corrective feedback (Mao and Lee, 2020). ...
We provide a scoping overview of research into the topic of teaching English composition in the tertiary Saudi context. Our aims are to identify current trends, research design and conduct, and determine future agendas within this area. This bibliometric study examines papers in this area over the past two decades. A total of 133 papers that have been published between January 2000 and December 2020 were collected and analyzed in respect to the following themes: (a) context and participants, (b) topics, (c) research methodology and data sources, and (d) journals and publications. The results show that the majority of the participants were gender segregated and undergraduates majoring in English or preparatory year students. The most common topics are perceptions and computer assisted language learning. Quantitative methods were overwhelmingly present with 75.9% of the papers with either an exclusively quantitative or mixed-method approach; surveys being the most frequently used data source in both cases. The papers were found to be published mainly in a few journals, some of which might be considered predatory. The reasons why many have resorted to publishing in these low-impact journals are discussed.
... A review of 416 empirical articles published in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes recently (Riazi et al., 2020) showed that development of academic language and literacies which includes "multiple, dynamic, inter-related competencies" (p. 7). These competencies are categorized into three dimensions and sub-components, as captured in Table 1 below. ...
This paper reports on the implementation of online and hybrid communities of practice (CoPs) in an academic English course for international graduate students in a Canadian university. The study aimed to examine how participation in CoPs supported students in developing the academic language and literacies required in their programs. The research was informed by sociocultural theory (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991), and Scarcella's (2003) academic English framework. Each student self-identified an area of academic English they wished to develop, designed strategies to help them improve in that area, and carried out their strategies over three months. The 23 students were put into CoPs, and they collaborated with their CoP members to provide feedback and support to each other. The data for the study were artefacts shared by students online, including written posts, discussions, video and audio clips, images, links, and drafts of their work. Data from seven focal participants were analyzed deductively using codes generated inductively through a literature review. The results indicated that the CoPs developed students' academic language competencies, facilitated constructive feedback, affirmed students' diverse identities, and provided a supportive space for academic socialization. The study recommends the integration of CoPs into academic language support for international students.
... First, it focuses on EAP pedagogies in the classroom rather than a discussion of traditionally oriented conceptions of vocabulary learning (Coxhead, 2006;Nation & Webb, 2011) and corpus-or vocabulary-based research (Durrant, 2016;Gardner & Davies, 2014). The pedagogies C o p y r i g h t e d M a t e r i a l o f t h e C h i n e s e U n i v e r s i t y o f H o n g K o n g P r e s s A l l R i g h t s R e s e r v e d reflect the links between research and practice, and respond to scholars' calls (Hyland & Wong, 2019;Riazi et al., 2020) for more classroom implications to influence learners' development of academic literacy and skills. Second, the book provides insights into EAP instruction at different disciplinary and educational levels, such as undergraduates (Chapters 1-3, 7-11), postgraduates (Chapters 3-4), and student teachers (Chapter 6) in pre-or in-session courses. ...
Over the past four decades, the instruction of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has gained much attention from teachers, subject specialists, scholars, and policymakers in search of optimal teaching methods for learners. This search has led to some extensive implications, but it is difficult to arrive at generalized findings because resultant methods are variable according to geographical, historical, and sociopolitical contexts that constrain EAP course design and delivery (Wingate & Tribble, 2012). To address this challenge, this timely publication edited by MacDiarmid and MacDonald (2021) embodies EAP pedagogies through research-informed practice and classroom-based research in English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) contexts in anglophone and non-anglophone countries to underpin follow-up classroom practice. This review, accordingly, discusses EAP issues under the impact of contextual factors and covers corresponding pedagogies to facilitate learning.
... In genre-based research articles, theoretical discussion can often be limited to a polite nod to a seminal text or contributor (as noted in Jiang, 2021 andRiazi et al, 2020) with less opportunity to explore how ontological and conceptual commitments embedded in the chosen theoretical framework may be playing a role in the issues being addressed. This chapter offers some examples of how sociological paradigms, themes and concepts can be used to review discussions about genre-based pedagogies. ...
This chapter revisits key concepts within genre traditions that have been influential in different EAP contexts. It reveals some ways in which grand sociological paradigms and themes have informed the development of genre theories and pedagogies. As well as identifying examples of theoretical eclecticism, some of the pedagogical implications of different conceptualisations of genre, purpose, context, structure, system and function are reviewed. These are related more closely to known challenges when using genre theories for learning and teaching purposes, with the aim of demonstrating how intellectual heritage and ontological commitments are embedded in our work with genre in EAP. Expanding our understanding of the sociological, anthropological, linguistic and socio-linguistic underpinnings can facilitate reflection on our genre-based practices with students and enhance our discussions about the learning possibilities of these approaches as well as the layers of complexity within them.
... First, it focuses on EAP pedagogies in the classroom rather than a discussion of traditionally oriented conceptions of vocabulary learning (Coxhead, 2006;Nation & Webb, 2011) and corpus-or vocabulary-based research (Durrant, 2016;Gardner & Davies, 2014). The pedagogies C o p y r i g h t e d M a t e r i a l o f t h e C h i n e s e U n i v e r s i t y o f H o n g K o n g P r e s s A l l R i g h t s R e s e r v e d reflect the links between research and practice, and respond to scholars' calls (Hyland & Wong, 2019;Riazi et al., 2020) for more classroom implications to influence learners' development of academic literacy and skills. Second, the book provides insights into EAP instruction at different disciplinary and educational levels, such as undergraduates (Chapters 1-3, 7-11), postgraduates (Chapters 3-4), and student teachers (Chapter 6) in pre-or in-session courses. ...
Over the past four decades, the instruction of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has gained much attention from teachers, subject specialists, scholars, and policymakers in search of optimal teaching methods for learners. This search has led to some extensive implications, but it is difficult to arrive at generalized findings because resultant methods are variable according to geographical, historical, and sociopolitical contexts that constrain EAP course design and delivery (Wingate & Tribble, 2012). To address this challenge, this timely publication edited by MacDiarmid and MacDonald (2021) embodies EAP pedagogies through research-informed practice and classroom-based research in English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) contexts in anglophone and non-anglophone countries to underpin follow-up classroom practice. This review, accordingly, discusses EAP issues under the impact of contextual factors and covers corresponding pedagogies to facilitate learning.
... In the field of applied linguistics, with the rise of methodological turn (Byrnes, 2013) and methodological awareness (Plonsky, 2017), there are relatively few studies examining the prevalence rate of research orientations (see Amini Farsani & Babaii, 2018; Riazi, Ghanbar, & Fazel, 2020;Riazi, Shi, & Haggerti, 2018). Furthermore, though conducted in the meta-researchism era, these studies examined research orientations in a local context (e.g., EFL contexts) or targeted a specific journal in the field (i.e., Journal of English for Academic Purposes; Journal of Second Language Writing). ...
Addressing meta-research is contemporaneous with a nascent call in the field of applied linguistics and L2 studies for methodological awareness. Adhering to synthetic techniques and bibliometric analysis, we manually examined and coded the methodological orientations and scientific collaboration of 3,992 applied linguistics articles published in 18 leading journals from 2009 to 2018 and analyzed their citation impact. The results showed that 178 (4.5%) of articles were non-empirical and the rest were empirical. Among empirical articles, the most prevalent research approach was quantitative (42.6%), followed by mixed-methods research studies (25.9%) and qualitative studies (24.9%). Systematic reviews (2.2%) were the smallest groups. Systematic reviews had a bigger citation impact than the other three research approaches. However, there was no statistically significant difference between the number of citations of the other three approaches (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods). The rates of collaboration in general and international collaboration and interdisciplinary collaboration in particular were significantly higher in quantitative articles than the articles of other research approaches. Education and psychology were two disciplines that had the highest rate of collaboration with applied linguistics researchers.
... A decade ago, Hamp-Lyons (2011: 100) also decried this lack of focus on the EAP practitioner, asserting that "progress in materials development has not been matched by progress in developing and delivering professional training courses for future teachers of EAP, and a great need still remains in this area". A recent review article by Nazari (2020) and studies of the bibliometrics of journals in the EAP and ESP fields (Hyland & Jiang, 2021;Liu & Hu, 2021;Riazi, Ghanbar, & Fazel, 2020) also highlighted the limited range of research on EAP teachers. Thus, although such programs are becoming increasingly widespread around the world, it seems that only marginal research attention has been paid to the training, development, and practices of teachers (Basturkmen, 2014(Basturkmen, , 2019Belcher, 2013). ...
Given the importance of teaching methodology in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and professional development (PD) for EAP teachers, this survey examined and explored the differences of the self-adjudged perceptions of EAP practice competences and PD activities of two main groups of Iranian teachers: those with an English language teaching (ELT) background and subject content teachers who teach EAP. A sample of 105 EAP teachers (53 English language teachers and 52 content teachers) responded to two questionnaires: a granulated, 72-item questionnaire exploring competences in a wide variety of aspects of EAP practice and a smaller 19-item questionnaire relating to frequency of participation in PD activities. Additionally, the teacher data sets were triangulated by the use of a 58-item questionnaire completed by 502 Iranian undergraduate students taking EAP courses. The teacher questionnaire findings indicated higher self-adjudged competences by the ELT-background teachers in the areas of receptive and productive skills, grammar and vocabulary, feedback and error correction, and assessment and evaluation. Similarly, the student questionnaires rated those teachers with an ELT background more highly in the same five areas. The implications of the findings for the future development of EAP in Iran in terms of teacher development and further research are then discussed.
... A journal could be portrayed, at least, from a textual perspective such as a critical review of literature and a numerical perspective such as publication and citation structures. From the textual perspective of 416 empirical papers published from 2002 to 2019, a portrait of Journal of English for Academic Purposes taken by Riazi, Ghanbar, and Fazel (2020) reveals single authorship, genre-theory-related teaching learning issues in undergraduate setting, and adaptation of mixed research method. From the second perspective of 1,589 articles published in over four decades by System, a portrait taken by Lei and Liu (2019b) shows the journal's top discussed topics, cited articles, cited references, and productive authors along with their affiliations. ...
Bibliometric portraits of a single journal appear to be rarely taken in the field of applied linguistics. Viewed from the angles of publication, citation, and indexation, one of the journals worth a bibliometric portrait is the Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics. Casting local and regional concerns on the global applied linguistics, the journal has ranked among the big five Open Access Journals in the Asiatic region since its foundation in 2011.
... A journal could be portrayed, at least, from a textual perspective such as a critical review of literature and a numerical perspective such as publication and citation structures. From the textual perspective of 416 empirical papers published from 2002 to 2019, a portrait of Journal of English for Academic Purposes taken by Riazi, Ghanbar, and Fazel (2020) reveals single authorship, genre-theory-related teaching learning issues in undergraduate setting, and adaptation of mixed research method. From the second perspective of 1,589 articles published in over four decades by System, a portrait taken by Lei and Liu (2019b) shows the journal's top discussed topics, cited articles, cited references, and productive authors along with their affiliations. ...
Bibliometric portraits of a single journal appear to be rarely taken in the field of applied linguistics. Viewed from the angles of publication, citation, and indexation, one of the journals worth a bibliometric portrait is the Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics. Casting local and regional concerns on the global applied linguistics, the journal has ranked among the big five Open Access Journals in the Asiatic region since its foundation in 2011. Capturing a corpus of 426 documents by 824 authors from 144 organizations through two free bibliometric tools, i.e. Publish or Perish and VOSviewer, this study portrays the journal from 2011 to 2020 through the lens of Microsoft Academic, one of the largest yet free academic search engines and bibliographic databases. The portrait exhibits the journal’s scientific productivity and quality, including the most prolific authors and their affiliations. It also depicts the co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, self-citation, and bibliographic coupling. How some aspects such as the relative dominance of authors from the university publishing house has evolved before and after the Scopus indexation provide a more vivid portrait of the journal. It could provide not only retrospective but also prospective insights into the ongoing contribution of the journal to the big enterprise of applied linguistics.
... The reason for this is that, over time, the focus of journals tends to narrow and reify around the particular research interests of their editorial boards and their regular reviewers. Evidence for this tendency is discernible in recent studies of the bibliometrics of journals in the EAP and ESP fields (Hyland & Jiang, in-press;Liu & Hu, 2020;Riazi et al., 2020). ...
This paper presents a proposal for the future development of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) as a global academic field that involves pedagogy, theory, and research. The paper considers the future development of EAP in three areas: its knowledge base, EAP practitioner formation, and EAP communities. It calls for a broadening of understandings of how EAP is conceptualized and consideration of the different areas of knowledge that should contribute to the field. Particular theoretical and research lacunae are identified as potential areas for future study. It is hoped that the ideas presented here may stimulate discussions and motivate scholarship and research in new areas that meet the needs of students in the diverse contexts in which EAP is taught.
Scientometric methods have increasingly been used to provide historical as well as state-of-the-art accounts of research in various disciplines, including applied linguistics. To provide an updated overview of the research trends in applied linguistics, we analyzed 7602 articles with over 198,000 unique references published between 2017 and 2021 in 42 SSCI-indexed applied linguistics journals. We aimed to track the (un)changing research foci and methodological orientations by examining the most frequently discussed topics, the most highly cited publications, and the most highly cited authors. The most popular research topics included multilingualism, translanguaging, psychological factors, vocabulary learning, teaching methods and teacher factors, linguistic complexity, bilingual advantage, and grammatical processing. New research tools (e.g., R statistics and eye-tracking), qualitative approaches, and research syntheses were on the rise. The heightened methodological awareness indexed applied linguistics’ greater effort to update and refine its toolkits as well as its emergence as a maturing discipline with greater diversity. Our analysis also identified newly emerged most cited publications (e.g., Ofelia García and Li Wei. Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and newly emerged most cited authors (e.g., Suresh Canagarajah, Paul Nation, R Core Team, Ofelia García, Douglas Bates, Luke Plonsky), pointing to new movers, shakers, and innovators in the discipline.
Using bibliometric and data mining tools, this chapter gives an empirical analysis of the evolution of Applied Linguistics (AL) research. CiteSpace was utilized to conduct a co-citation analysis on the bibliographic information of 23,790 research articles from the most representative AL journals indexed in the Web of Science (Clarivate. Web of Science Core Collection: Search Tips, 2022. https://clarivate.libguides.com/woscc/searchtips. Accessed 16 Nov 2022) database since the launch of the journals. After categorizing the articles into 12 key research areas, they were critically assessed in terms of their respective paradigms. The results show the evolution of paradigms in AL research, with positivism being the dominant paradigm. Additionally, three other paradigms, namely, constructivism, critical theory, and post-positivism, were found to coexist in the field, although to varying degrees. The authors of this study employed a dictionary model to mine the dataset. This is the first study to combine data mining techniques and bibliometric methodology to explore paradigms in AL research, providing new insights into the field and contributing to scientometrics.
A brief literature review indicated that more bibliometric studies should be conducted regarding mixed-methods research (MMR). To fill this gap, the study reported in this chapter followed a bibliometric analysis approach and investigated MMR citation and co-citation in AL. We retrieved 256 published articles from 18 prominent AL journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). We conducted two levels of analysis. The first level of analysis was mapping the publication trends of MMR studies and citation analysis of the impact. The second level analysis was co-citation analysis, including document co-citation analysis (DCA) and author co-citation analysis (ACA). The results of the analyses are presented in five areas. The first is the publication trend and citation regarding MMR in AL. The second is the bibliometric trend in published MMR studies in L2 journals. The third is the profile of the institutions and countries in MMR-published articles. The fourth part reports the most cited MMR articles. Finally, the fifth part presents the network map and density view of the most cited sources. We believe that this study can complement the current bibliometric studies in AL by filling the identified gap, that is scientometric analysis of MMR in AL.
This chapter reports on preliminary findings from a larger study, and relates to the nature of a social change-oriented EAP curriculum where advancement of social justice is one of the key outcomes. As such, the chapter aims to introduce the concept of curriculum for change and how it relates to social justice, to justify the need for such a curriculum in EAP, and to suggest a curriculum for change framework as a first step to turning theory into practice.
To set the scene, the troubled relationship between higher education (HE) and social justice is outlined and followed by a discussion of the literature on social change, social impact, and social value, as they relate to education. Those broad discussions then pave the way for more specific considerations relating to sustainable development and, within it, social justice. Drawing on those key terms, the chapter then discusses HE curricula as one means of supporting social change and advancing social justice, introduces the concept of curriculum for change, and explores constituents of such a curriculum, culminating in a proposal of a curriculum for change framework. The chapter concludes by summarising the key constituents of curriculum for change, exploring limitations and implications of the proposed approach to curriculum development, and inviting the reader to critique and test curriculums for change in their EAP context(s).
Kukuczka, J. (2024). Curriculum for change. In: P.Breen & M. LeRoux: Social Justice in EAP and ELT contexts. Bloomsbury.
This chapter reports on preliminary findings from a larger study, and relates to the nature of a social change-oriented EAP curriculum where advancement of social justice is one of the key outcomes. As such, the chapter aims to introduce the concept of curriculum for change and how it relates to social justice, to justify the need for such a curriculum in EAP, and to suggest a curriculum for change framework as a first step to turning theory into practice.
To set the scene, the troubled relationship between higher education (HE) and social justice is outlined and followed by a discussion of the literature on social change, social impact, and social value, as they relate to education. Those broad
discussions then pave the way for more specific considerations relating to sustainable development and, within it, social justice. Drawing on those key terms, the chapter then discusses HE curricula as one means of supporting social change and advancing social justice, introduces the concept of curriculum for change, and explores constituents of such a curriculum, culminating in a proposal of a curriculum for change framework. The chapter concludes by
summarising the key constituents of curriculum for change, exploring limitations and implications of the proposed approach to curriculum development, and inviting the reader to critique and test curriculum for change in their educational context(s).
REFERENCE: Kukuczka, J. (2024). Curriculum for change. In: P. Breen and M. LeRoux (eds.) Social Justice in EAP and ELT contexts. Bloomsbury. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/social-justice-in-eap-and-elt-contexts-9781350351202/
The current study draws on synthetic techniques and bibliometric analysis to explore the patterns of scientific collaboration in light of methodological orientations. We examined 3,992 applied linguistics (AL) articles published in 18 top-tier journals from 2009 to 2018 and analyzed their methodological orientations and scientific collaboration. Considering that the number of co-authored papers outweighs single-authored counterparts, our results revealed that the overall degree of collaboration for AL journals was moderate-to-high (57.7%). In particular, quantitative studies contained the highest degree of collaboration (66.8%). This was followed by systematic reviews (60.9%), and mixed-methods approach (55.7%). Country-wise, our overall findings further indicated that the United States and the United Kingdom were the two main hubs of collaborative activities for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research. While the USA was the top country in systematic reviews like all other research approaches, the UK was the fifth country in systematic reviews. As for collaborating authors, our findings demonstrated that the most influential quantitative researchers had collaborated on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and data mining. While the mixed-methods researchers had a tendency to collaborate on conceptual issues subscribing to the language testing and assessment strand, the most productive qualitative researchers had collaborated on L2 writing issues. Implications for applied linguistics research are further discussed.
This chapter discusses the complexity of cultural identity and its various conceptions and reviews findings on research in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), highlighting that even though identity has significantly increased as a research topic, case studies and approaches to teaching intercultural awareness and intercultural communicative competence have significantly decreased. Within this context, the use of Hymes’ speaking model (1967) is suggested to be implemented as a class tool to raise students’ cultural awareness of cultural identity as a distinct and communal system of communicative practices. This framework could help students deconstruct the interaction of the elements of culture in speech extracts regarding the commemoration of 50 years of operation of the Salvago Commerce School in Alexandria, Egypt.
This review of recent scholarship (RRS) paper is a follow-up of the first, published in this journal in 2014. For this RRS paper, we identified and included 304 mixed-methods research (MMR) papers published in 20 top-tier applied linguistics (AL) journals. We used a six-pronged quality and transparency framework to review and analyze the MMR studies, drawing on six quality frameworks and transparency discussions in the MMR literature. Using the quality and transparency framework, we report on: (1) which sources AL MMR researchers use to frame their studies, (2) how explicitly they explain the purpose and design structure of the MMR studies, (3) how transparently they describe method features (sampling procedures, data sources, and data analysis), and (4) how they integrate quantitative and qualitative data and analyses and construct meta-inferences. The results of the analyses will be reported and will show how MMR has developed and is represented in the published articles in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The discussion of the results will also highlight the areas future AL MMR researchers need to consider to make their studies and reports more rigorous and transparent.
Interest in language variation is a staple of English for Academic Purposes research and underpins its distinctive character as a field of inquiry. It is the specific nature of language use which defines EAP, yet this definition has been established almost entirely on the basis of inter-discoursal studies, with comparisons of register, genre, discipline, first language, etc. dominating our understanding. In this paper we take a different approach and focus on variation within the field, and specifically within its flagship journal, JEAP. Categorising every paper between volume 1 and 52 as principally taking a textual, critical, contextual or pedagogical orientation, we explore writers’ preferences for metadiscourse use. The differences which emerge can be attributed to the proclivities of sub-field authors and different knowledge-making practices. The findings offer evidence of intra-disciplinary variation in discoursal preferences and hopefully contribute to our understanding of both the journal and our field.
BALEAP is a global association which aims to advance the learning and teaching of EAP in higher and further education. At its fiftieth anniversary, it is timely to examine its contribution to EAP research. This paper draws on evidence from a corpus of 1,310 titles of papers from volumes of BALEAP proceedings and accounts of Professional Issues Meetings over 1975–2019. Bottom-up corpus analyses and top-down examination of the titles were used to ascertain the most frequently researched topics and the extent to which they varied over the 45 years. Six topics were each mentioned in over 10% of titles: students, language, writing, courses, assessment and specificity, but only assessment experienced a rising trend over the period. Low results were found for five approaches: intercultural, critical, corpora, genre and academic literacy. Topics that increased in popularity included in-sessional issues, technology and teacher education, while decreases occurred for graduates, language, and specificity. These trends suggest research gaps to be addressed in the least popular or declining areas e.g. digital and multimodal genres, disciplinary/interdisciplinary contexts, and with non-traditional participants e.g. teaching staff or displaced academics. This study strongly argues that the current wide diversity of research topics in BALEAP should be maintained.
Responding to the limited research on English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teachers, and especially in the context of ‘expanding circle’ countries, this study aimed to explore Iranian EAP teachers’ teaching competencies and professional development (PD) activities as well as their perceptions about the roles, responsibilities, and challenges in teaching EAP. Data were collected from 105 university EAP teachers through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The questionnaire findings in relation to teacher competencies identified self-reported strengths in the areas of reading and speaking skills development and aspects of pedagogy. Potential areas for further development were related to listening skills, certain areas of writing, providing feedback, and performing needs analyses. Content analysis of the interviews indicated nine major categories of roles and responsibilities involved in the delivery of EAP courses (teaching, PD, collaboration, testing, motivation, materials, needs analysis, research, and text analysis) and seven major challenges (students, materials, EAP teachers, administrative issues, curriculum and syllabus, testing, and content knowledge). Additionally, the teachers provided information about their pathway to EAP teaching and their viewpoints about the role of content knowledge, essential qualifications for EAP teaching, and content of EAP teacher education programs. Finally, implications for practice and suggestions for further research are presented.
Studies on the productive use of collocations have enabled researchers to harness a wealth of information about the phenomenon. However, most such studies focus on the collocations that come to the surface in finished texts, and have not been able to capture the range of collocational choices available for writers to choose from as they write. The present investigation addresses this gap by examining the collocations users of academic English at a British university were able to recall when presented with a selection of general academic writing frames. The study examined the collocations instinctively available to a group of 90 academics, tutors of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and students at PhD, MA and undergraduate levels in an academic writing gap-filling test where more than one collocation could be used in each gap. The results indicate that experience of English academic writing plays a more decisive role than having English as a first language (L1) in the collocations effortlessly available to EAP users.
The Lancet. Volume 391, No. 10140, p2601, 30 June 2018.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31139-5
Author Gender in The Lancet journals.
Abstract
Despite substantial advances in recent decades, gender inequality persists in many scientific fields,1including medicine2,3 and global health. In an upcoming theme issue on women in science, medicine, and global health,4 The Lancet will focus on helping to understand and remove women's disadvantage in these fields. Nevertheless, dedicating a few words to women's representation in The Lancet journals is worthwhile. Here, I present a snapshot of the gender of the authors who publish in The Lancet journals.
This corpus-based study compares L1-English and L1-Chinese undergraduate students' use of lexical bundles in English argumentative essays, and identifies the most common bundle misuses in L2 student writing. Data consist of two corpora of student-produced argumentative essays: 101 high-rated essays written by L1-English students and 105 high-rated essays written by L1-Chinese students. Using Biber's (Biber et al., 1999; Biber et al., 2004) structural and functional taxonomy, we compared the forms and functions of four-word bundles used by L1-English and L1-Chinese university students. Findings indicate that L2 students not only use substantially more bundle types and tokens than L1 writers, but the structural and functional patterns of bundles also differ. While L1 writers' bundles consist of mostly noun and preposition phrases, L2 students use significantly more verb phrase (clausal) bundles. Results also show that L2 student writers use significantly more stance bundles than L1 writers. In addition, most of the misused bundles in the L2 writers' essays pertain to grammatical mistakes, particularly with articles and prepositions. We conclude with some pedagogical implications for ESL composition.
For the first time, the major theoretical and pedagogical approaches to genre and related issues of social construction are presented in a single volume, providing an overview of the state of the art for practitioners in applied linguistics, ESL/EFL pedagogies, rhetoric, and composition studies around the world. Unlike volumes that present one theoretical stance, this book attempts to give equal time to all theoretical and pedagogical camps. Included are chapters by authors from the Sydney School, the New Rhetoric, and English for Specific Purposes, as well as contributions from other practitioners who pose questions that cross theoretical lines.
Genre in the Classroom:
*includes all of the major theoretical views of genre that influence pedagogical practice;
*takes an international approach, drawing from all parts of the world in which genre theory has been applied in the classroom--Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, the Middle East, the United States;
*features contributors who are all both theorists and classroom practitioners, lending credibility and authenticity to the arguments;
*combines theory and practice in every chapter, showing how particular theoretical views influence classroom practice;
*grounds pedagogical practices in their own regional and theoretical histories;
*openly discusses problems and questions that genre theory raises and presents some of the solutions suggested; and
*offers a concluding chapter that argues for two macro-genres, and with responses to this argument by noted genre theorists from three theoretical camps.
This chapter describes the history of intercultural rhetoric and its current theory and research methods, illustrated by examples of recent topics and published research. Intercultural rhetoric is the study of written discourse between and among individuals with different cultural backgrounds. Sample studies within English for specific purposes (ESP) highlight the range of methodologies used within this perspective. Applications of the research to ESP instruction is described using a sample ESP program for international medical residents. Robert Kaplan's observations about English as a second language (ESL) students' paragraph writing pioneered attention to cultural differences in the writing of ESL students. The development of genre analysis has been beneficial for intercultural rhetoric research as it has forced researchers to compare the same specific genre across different cultures. Finally, the chapter explores future research directions for intercultural rhetoric in ESP settings.
The number of non-native students studying in English-medium universities has increased over the past decade. Paralleling this growth is the interest in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). No one research-based volume has yet investigated the theoretical issues and pedagogical concerns of the area. This wide-ranging volume of specially commissioned articles from leading scholars in the field aims to bring to the wider community current research in the field and its implications for pedagogy. It offers a state-of-the-art representation of research in EAP and will help define the field in the coming years.
ESP has always sought to empower the learner yet has also been criticized for restricting the learner's potential (cf. Widdowson's "curse of Caliban"). The same dichotomy obtains in the dominance of English as a lingua franca in the professions. This dominance has both a negative and a positive aspect. The negative aspect leads to linguistic imperialism (Phillips 1992) and hegemony (e.g., Mayer 1986) and is expressed, for example, in the general preference for ESP over EGP (General) and for training (e.g., Caterpillar Fundamental English, or CFE, as described in Eastman 1983) over education. The positive aspect leads to the adoption of useful standards (e.g., Mauranen 1993) and the acceptance of international responsibility to provide, for example, access to key words in the information hierarchy (Kaplan 1983), instruction in genre analysis(Mustafa 1995), and the opportunity for students to research occupational subcultures (Johns 1988). It is important for ESP to remain firmly on the positive side of the power dichotomy and to realize that, like dentistry, the success of ESP may lead to its diminution (e.g., Pennington 1995), i.e., that once nations have acquired their rightful place in the world, they will be in a position to argue for greater use of their own languages, including in the professions.
Teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP) requires teachers experienced in Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) to acquire additional skills, abilities and approaches. Beliefs about CLT teaching may not be appropriate for teaching EAP, especially to low level learners. Making teachers aware of their beliefs is the first step in helping them to change. This study explored the beliefs of two teachers as they piloted and evaluated a new coursebook for low level EAP, which is based on a functional syllabus and supports students to perform beyond their current level of competence. The teachers were interviewed about their experiences of using the coursebook and from these interviews, 23 pairs of contrasting belief statements were interpreted. Informed by the literature and the BALEAP Competency framework for Teachers of EAP, these statements were categorised as barriers to or success factors for successful EAP teaching. They were compiled into a reflective questionnaire, which was completed online by 124 teachers. The results highlighted two key aspects where CLT and EAP approaches differ: the description of the language system within which teachers frame their talk and the approach to scaffolding student performance.
Gender disparities appear to be decreasing in academia according to a number of metrics, such as grant funding, hiring, acceptance at scholarly journals, and productivity, and it might be tempting to think that gender inequity will soon be a problem of the past. However, a large-scale analysis based on over eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain. For instance, even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, close inspection reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious first and last author positions. Moreover, women are significantly underrepresented as authors of single-authored papers. Academics should be aware of the subtle ways that gender disparities can occur in scholarly authorship.
Accuracy in use of inflection is a defining feature of native and non-native academic writing. In EAP contexts, non-native texts are dominated by errors in use of tense and agreement, despite accuracy being an important element of text complexity and EAP teaching and assessment. An open question is to what degree the absence of inflection in the EAP learner's L1 resembling English tense and agreement is associated with inaccuracy. This study examined verb form errors in the EAP writing of L1 Chinese learners and assessed the degree to which errors stem from the absence of similar inflection in the L1. The use of three forms that are especially important in native and non-native academic writing, tense/agreement, passives, and modals, was analysed. These forms were especially relevant due to the fact that only modals and passives have cognates in English. Analyses show errors were most frequently omission and misuse. Errors with tense/agreement outnumbered both passives and modals, suggesting the former are especially difficult to master as cognate forms are absent in the L1. Furthermore, similar rates of misuse and omission were found across passives and modals, suggesting these forms are attainable. Implications for teacher-training, materials development, and error-correction are discussed.
Halliday’s threefold perspective “learning language, learning through language, learning about language” (Halliday, 1993, p. 113) has shed light on the ways language learners learn to mean in contexts of use. Grounded in Halliday’s language-based theory of learning, this study explores how Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) metalanguage can scaffold language choices in the EAP writing classroom and help L2 writers learn how to mean in article reviews. This case study translates Halliday’s (1978) SFL and its recent development of the Engagement framework (Martin & White, 2005) into a pedagogical instrument, exploring how the framework can serve as a heuristic to scaffold L2 writers’ awareness of voice. The findings show that the Engagement constructs focused students’ attention on key voice resources and the rhetorical goals they enabled, providing a heuristic that students could use in their writing. Their varied uptake of Engagement metalanguage and the differential repertoires displayed in their writing reflected different metacognitive developments. Findings from this study can provide EAP instructors with immediately useful metalanguage for discussing voice with their students in more accessible ways, in their efforts to help students gain greater discoursal control of voice as their students manage to accomplish key rhetorical goals in article reviews.
In EAP contexts, attaining a desired level of competence and fluency in academic writing is important for students majoring in English-medium undergraduate programs because their academic achievements are determined by the texts they produce in English. Undergraduate students in Turkey are observed to experience difficulties with academic writing as they try to accommodate their existing writing knowledge to the requirements of the new discipline-specific writing and learning situation of tertiary level education. Placing the students at the core of inquiry, the study explored factors influencing students' academic writing practices in English. The participants of the study were nineteen English major undergraduate students studying in Istanbul. The main data were obtained from background questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and were qualitatively analysed. The findings revealed that undergraduate writing is influenced by an array of interrelating educational and contextual factors: (1) the amount and nature of L1 and L2 pre-university writing instruction and experience, (2) students’ perceptions about academic writing and disciplinary-specific text genres, (3) prolonged engagement with the academic context and discourse, and (4) expectations of faculty members. The insights gained from the study provide important implications for reconceptualization of writing instruction in Turkey.
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The field of English for specific purposes (ESP), which addresses the communicative needs and practices of particular professional or occupational groups, has developed rapidly in the past forty years to become a major force in English language teaching and research. ESP draws its strength from an eclectic theoretical foundation and a commitment to research-based language education which seeks to reveal the constraints of social contexts on language use and the ways learners can gain control over these. In this chapter, I will briefly point to some of the major ideas and practices that currently influence ESP, focusing on needs analysis, ethnography, critical approaches, contrastive rhetoric, social constructionism, and discourse analysis. I then go on to look briefly at some of the effects ESP has had on language teaching and research, arguing that it has encouraged teachers to highlight communication rather than language, to adopt a research orientation to their work, to employ collaborative pedagogies, to be aware of discourse variation, and to consider the wider political implications of their role. Together these features of ESP practice emphazise a situated view of literacy and underline the applied nature of the field.
In this historical survey, we review 272 empirical research articles published in the Journal of Second Language Writing (JSLW) over its first quarter century of publication. We report overall and periodic analyses (1992–1999, 2000–2010, 2011–2016) in respect to the following themes: (1) contexts and participants, (2) research foci and theoretical orientations, and (3) research methodology and data sources. The typical research contexts and participants were undergraduates in U.S. universities or colleges. The most common research foci were feedback and writing instruction and the main theoretical orientations were cognitive, social, socio-cognitive, genre, contrastive rhetoric, and critical theories. The most frequently used research methodology was qualitative and the top three data sources used by L2 writing researchers were multiple sources, text samples, and elicitation. Based on the findings, we make suggestions for future research in studies of L2 writing. Along with Tony Silva’s reflections on our results, the present analysis gives readers a birds-eye view of the scholarship on L2 writing over the last 25 years as represented in the JSLW.
This paper explores the significance of gender in research and academic writing for publication. It reports on a gender-focused, interview-based study with 10 multilingual women scholars, set within a longitudinal research project in which they have participated for between 11 and 14 years. The scholars work in two disciplinary fields, education and psychology, and come from four national contexts: Hungary, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal. The paper argues that gender remains an ‘occluded’ (after Swales, 1996) category in research on academic writing for publication but is implicated in practices around academic knowledge making in important ways. Key themes emerging from the data are discussed: the passions driving intellectual work; academic inscription practices; networks of collaboration; being a carer; academic service work; the body in academia. The value of exploring women scholars’ perspectives and practices through the lens of trajectory is underscored, offering as it does glimpses of how they enact agency at specific moments of their academic lives, in an increasingly rigidly governed and evaluated social space.
A persistent finding in studies of research productivity is the ‘gender gap’ where men seem to publish more academic research than women. However, this gap varies widely from study to study, and little has been done to explore how these claims might be sensitive to what is being measured and how. Using a dataset of publications statistics spanning five years for a Norwegian social science research institute, this paper looks at how (and why) measuring productivity in different ways provides different pictures of the gender gap. Based on the situated context of the institute, we also disaggregate the data by staff category, methodological orientation, and language background, and consider the impact of leaves of absence. We find widely varying measures of the gender gap depending on how we measure and disaggregate, and argue that different bibliometric indicators capture different aspects of research performance, including diversity of output and collaboration, which reflect different publication practices that are both gendered and situated. We suggest that looking at academic writing as a situated - and gendered - social practice offers a potential for deriving more theoretically consistent explanations for both the seeming persistence of the gender gap and the wide contextual variations.
Discussions of qualitative research usually begin by contrasting qualitative with quantitative approaches. Quantitative research may best be defined as research that relies on the reduction of data to numbers and statistical argument, and typically aims to produce knowledge that holds true of relatively large populations. In applied linguistics, quantitative approaches are often underpinned by theoretical assumptions about universal language learning processes and the influence of contextual factors such as gender, culture, and sociopsychological differences. Qualitative research in applied linguistics takes many forms and may best be defined as research that relies mainly on the reduction of data to words (codes, labels, categorization systems, narratives, etc.) and interpretative argument. In applied linguistics, qualitative research is also associated with a focus on the individual and the particular in regard to “cases” as subject matter, the visibility of the researcher and the specificity of findings. Whereas quantitative research findings are, in principle, unrelated to the identity of the researcher, qualitative findings are always contingent upon particular processes of data collection, analysis, and interpretation carried out by particular individuals in particular settings.
This paper explores the impact of teaching importance marking expressions on EFL learners’ comprehension of main points in English academic lectures. The participants of the study were 100 EFL learners (53 males and 47 females) studying medicine at a major university in Iran. Half of the participants were assigned to the experimental group and the other half were put in the control group. The learners in the experimental group received explicit instruction in importance markers within 15 one-hour sessions, whereas the students in the control group participated only in the classes of their regular major-related courses, one of which was a course on English for the students of medicine. A test of the comprehension of important points in English academic lectures was developed and used as a post-test to measure the students’ comprehension of important points. The results of t-test showed that knowledge of how importance marking is done in English academic lectures improves the EFL learners’ comprehension of the main points of lectures. This was taken to mean that genre awareness or an understanding of the discourse structure of academic lectures improves the students’ comprehension of the main points of lectures.
Research highlights the importance of stance in academic writing, and recent research shows increasing emphasis on stance in undergraduate writing. Most studies of student writing focus on epistemic stance in terms of certainty and not generality; yet instructional materials suggest that developing writers need to learn to limit generalizations. This study examines the use of certain indefinite pronouns and extreme amplifiers that help indicate generality as a part of stance in three corpora: new college writing, advanced student writing, and published academic writing. The study shows two specific and shared rhetorical uses of generalization markers, emphasizing the wide applicability of a claim and projecting shared ideas. The study also shows clear differences in the frequency of generalizations used and the breadth or scope of generalizations made. Published academic writing contains the fewest generalization markers, while new college writing shows the most generalizations as well as generalizations that span large groups and periods of time. The findings suggest that in non-discipline specific essay writing, new college students' frequent use of generalization markers contrasts the more circumspect stance features in advanced student and published discipline-specific writing, posing questions for writing instruction as well as essay-based writing assessment.
As apprenticeship models have evolved, language teacher education (LTE) has increasingly adopted evidence-based approaches to teacher preparation. Intended to promote subject matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and procedural knowledge, LTE curricula often target novice teachers' agency, identity construction, and critical awareness. An ongoing challenge facing LTE involves cultivating candidates' disciplinary knowledge and facilitating their socialization into professional discourses, yet little research has examined the role of genre awareness in language teacher development. This article explores two aspects of teacher learning in LTE: (1) influences of implicit and explicit genre-oriented practices designed to raise genre awareness and (2) teacher candidates' perceptions of genre-oriented instruction as a source of professional knowledge and skill. Guided by mixed-methods action research principles, the authors analyze quantitative and qualitative data from 58 teacher candidates in a US-based, graduate-level LTE program. Data collection methods included a questionnaire interrogating students' academic literacy experiences, and focus group discussions. While supporting the goal of developing candidates' pedagogical content knowledge, findings suggest that some methods for cultivating content expertise are perhaps insufficient for promoting critical disciplinary knowledge and appropriating genre expectations. The article discusses the potential benefits of genre-oriented approaches designed to enhance novice teachers' genre awareness and critical literacies.
The study examined three categories of multi-word verbs (phrasal, prepositional, and phrasal-prepositional verbs) in comparison to free combinations. It explored four aspects of their usage in student presentations—their frequency, the preferred order and meanings the presenters favored, their choices of unique vs. repeated uses of verb combinations, and the relationship between the lexical diversity of the presentations and students' use of multi-word verbs. The research is based on the individual presentations of English native-speaking college students (n = 30).
The analysis revealed that students used multi-word verbs as frequently as they did free combinations. It also showed that prepositional verbs were twice more prominent than phrasal verbs, followed by the relatively infrequent use of phrasal prepositional verbs. The students tended to use the multi-word verb structures repetitively and the lack of strong correlations between the lexical diversity of the presentations and the three multi-word verb subcategories pointed to the relative independence of the variables. The semantic analysis of the phrasal verbs revealed that, even though the majority of them had multiple meanings, they were predominantly used with a single meaning in the presentations. The findings have implications for ESL teaching and material design purposes.
This corpus-based study examines the use of interpersonal metadiscourse devices in eight American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference handbooks spanning the years 2007–2014. A concordance program (CasualConc) was used to search for recurring patterns in the AAAL corpus and to compare the results with a corpus compiled from conference handbooks of four different hard disciplines. Of particular interest was whether or not the pattern it + passive reporting verb + that-clause; for example, it is argued that rather than I argue that figured significantly in the corpora. Previous research has suggested that impersonal it and the passivization of the reporting verb function to depersonalize propositions put forth in academic writing and that this language choice is one feature of an objective, as opposed to a subjective, academic writing style. The frequency findings for the AAAL corpus indicated an overwhelming usage of three interpersonal metadiscourse structures (I argue that, we argue that, it was found that), while the pattern we show that was most prevalent in the hard disciplines corpus. The study concludes with a discussion of how knowledge-making practices are crafted through particular discourse conventions in order to establish one's insider status within an academic community.
This paper illustrates a corpus-aided approach for the teaching and learning of rhetoric in an undergraduate writing course for second language writers. The twenty-one international students in the course read and analyzed texts produced by a local environmental group and an international mining company regarding a proposed copper mine in the U.S. southwest. The textual analysis was enhanced and supplemented by a series of activities using corpus data derived from collections of texts from the opposing groups. The contrastive analyses made possible through the study of texts and corpus data from the sharply distinct groups enabled students to notice, analyze, interpret, and discuss the meaningful and purposeful linguistic and rhetorical variation present in the texts, the corpus data, and the debate. This implementation of localized, specialized corpora comprised of texts with immediate relevance to the students' campus and community provides a means to incorporate corpus study in the writing classroom from a rhetorical perspective. This article details the principles guiding the design of the approach, explains the corpus-aided activities, reports students' attitudes to the use of corpus data in their academic writing classroom, and offers suggestions for implementing similar activities in L2 writing classrooms.
This article reviews the developments in significant pedagogical and research domains in TESOL during the 50-year history of TESOL Quarterly. It situates these developments in the shift from a modernist to postmodern orientation in disciplinary discourses. The article also considers the changes in modes of knowledge dissemination in the journal by examining the changes in locations of research, authorship, article genres, and research methods. While there is an evolving diversity in the disciplinary discourses of TESOL that can appear to be a threat to the field's coherence, the article argues that this diversity can contribute to a more plural knowledge base and constructive disciplinary growth for TESOL.
Four major themes appear to be running through ESOL teaching and research efforts at the present time: (a) In our focus on learners, we are attempting to capitalize on their intrinsic motivation to learn English as a means to their empowerment; (b) sociopolitical issues have us focused on English as an international language and on language policy issues in many countries, including the U. S.; (c) efforts are being made to make curricula more content-centered and task-based, with an emphasis on pressing global issues; (d) our methods are, in turn, increasingly oriented toward cooperative, learner-centered teaching in which learner strategy training plays a significant role.
Compared to conversation or other written registers, written academic prose favours heavy nominal groups, in which the head noun is typically accompanied by premodifiers such as adjectives or nouns, and/or by postmodifiers such as prepositional phrases. Focussing specifically on the noun phrase, this article uses the hypothesised developmental progression index suggested by Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011) to consider academic writing produced by two groups of graduate L2 writers. The first group was preparing for graduate study, and the second was already enrolled for graduate study. Noun phrases in our two sets of data were identified and pre-and postmodifiers were manually coded. Findings confirm the proposed developmental index in the sense that the less proficient group relied heavily on attributive adjectives, a modifier hypothesised as being acquired early. In addition, use of noun modifiers by the more proficient group was much closer to published frequencies for academic prose than was use by the less proficient group. Based on our findings, we make suggestions for applications in the EAP classroom.
This paper investigates research publication practices in the field of Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) and aims to raise awareness of the current use of English by LSP scholars (Anglophones and non-Anglophones) who need to gain visibility in international academia and recognition in their home educational contexts. This article draws on the JCR-indexed LSP journal Ibérica and the submissions from a group of Anglophone and non-Anglophone scholars who have contributed to the journal with English-written articles despite the fact that Ibérica is a multilingual journal, encourages submissions in four other languages, and assesses all manuscripts on an equal basis regardless of submission language. In order to broach the “publish in English or perish in academia” dilemma through the eyes of this particular journal the replies from a five-item questionnaire delivered online are illustrated and discussed. Answers provided by 161 respondents support many of the statements already explored in the literature (particularly as regards threats and opportunities of English as a common language in academia) but also bring to the fore new views and concerns which are worth investigating in depth.
Formulaic sequences are widely used in academic writing and are known to be an important aspect of EAP writing development. However, little research has investigated the frequency, function and degree of fixedness of their use by ESL writers across proficiency levels. This study examines the use of lexical bundles in written responses across three proficiency levels in the TOEFL iBT (N = 480). Bundles that were identical to those found in the prompts were analyzed separately. Biber, Conrad, and Cortes' (2004) taxonomy was used to identify bundle functions. Following Biber (2009), the degree of fixedness for each of the four slots in the bundle was investigated in relation to the other three. The results indicate that lower level learners used more bundles overall but also more bundles identical to those in the prompts. In contrast, the functional analysis reveals a similar use of stance and discourse organizing bundles across proficiency levels and very few referential bundles used by any of the groups. In addition, there were few differences in fixed versus variable slot bundles across proficiency levels. These findings have important implications for instruction and assessment of EAP writing.
How university students write from sources has been an issue of long-standing interest among researchers of advanced academic literacy. Previous research in this regard in the context of L2 writing has tended to focus on novices' textual borrowing; less attention has been given to exploring the potential light that theories from other intellectual domains may shed upon students' process of source-based academic writing. The study to be reported in this paper used activity theory as an analytic tool to examine three ESL students' activities of fulfilling a policy paper assignment at a university in Hong Kong. In the paper I present a description of the activity system concerned and its internal contradictions, characterize the sequences of actions that constituted the individual students' activities, and analyze the students' source-use practices in terms of their efforts to address a set of source-bound systemic tensions. At the end of the paper I propose a few lines of future explorations using activity theory as a heuristic to study literacy activities in academic contexts.
Native-English-speaking English teachers at universities in EFL contexts are often asked to edit scientific manuscripts written by English as an additional language (EAL) colleagues. However, a lack of familiarity with scientific writing can make such editing tasks burdensome to English teachers. Using Lave and Wenger's (1991) notion of legitimate peripheral participation as an analytical lens, this study explored how English teachers who regularly edited healthcare-related texts learned the “craft” of scientific editing. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four English-teaching editors employed at universities in Japan, with a focus on these editors' initial difficulties with editing and how editors overcame these difficulties. Two participants also completed think-aloud editing tasks, which were followed by stimulated recall interviews. Results indicate that four issues are of potential significance to these English teachers' learning of and attitudes towards the craft of scientific editing: 1) the various styles and terminology of medical academic writing; 2) authors' involvement in the editing process; 3) the ability to communicate with authors in Japanese; and 4) early apprenticeship or immersion experiences. We conclude that universities in EFL contexts should encourage greater collaboration, involving both education and research, between English teachers and scientific professionals.
Post-secondary writing teachers in composition and English as a second language (ESL) writing programs are likely familiar with multi-draft composing. Both composition and ESL writing programs share nearly identical multi-draft models despite the very unique and different cultures of each group. We argue that multi-draft composing as it is currently used within second language writing programs can be overwhelming for ESL writers. In this study, we introduce the iterative multi-draft model, a revised and more manageable version of the traditional multi-draft model that can be used specifically with ESL writers to help them master essential writing skills in academic argumentation. A study of 42 compositions written by 14 students over the course of one semester in a North American pre-university intensive English program demonstrates that the new model can be effective. Although no significant improvement was seen in word choice and academic referencing, the iterative model produced a statistical effect on writing scores in three writing skill subcategories (content, organization, and grammar). Additionally, the iterative multi-draft model led to higher writing scores when compared to a traditional multi-draft model. Student perspectives on the model further indicate its relative strengths and weaknesses.
The assessment of listening comprehension for academic purposes is an area which has not received much attention from researchers. This article focuses on the form of the input for EAP listening tests. While there is a great deal of interest currently in the use of visual media for listening assessment, it is likely that tests with purely auditory input will continue to have a significant role. The article reports on the development of a test in two audiotaped versions: a scripted monologue and an unscripted discussion of the same topic by three speakers. The test was administered to two matched groups of learners taking an intensive pre-sessional EAP course. In contrast to the results of an earlier study by Shohamy and Inbar [Langugage Testing 8 (1991) 23], it was found that the monologue version was significantly less difficult than the discussion. Various possible reasons for the difference in findings are presented and the article concludes with a consideration of what can be learned from the research for the design of listening test tasks with interactive input.
EAP teaching materials frequently emphasise the importance of text-structuring metadiscourse (sometimes referred to as ‘signposting’ language) to signal hierarchical organisation in lectures, and EAP teaching materials are often rich in samples of this type of metadiscourse. This raises two key questions: how important this type of metadiscourse is as a means of indicating to an audience the organisation of a lecture, and what other resources are available to the lecturer. This article focuses on the roles of text-structuring metadiscourse and intonation in signalling the larger-scale organisation of academic talks. The occurrence of metadiscoursal and intonational signals of organisation is compared in authentic undergraduate lectures and in talks appearing in EAP listening skills materials. It is argued that both metadiscourse and intonation are used by academic speakers to help an audience form a coherent ‘mental map’ of the overall talk and how its parts are interconnected. However, it appears that the models of organisation in lecture discourse provided by some EAP materials may be misleading. The article ends by considering the implications of the findings for EAP listening skills courses.
Within the last two decades, a number of researchers have been interested in genre as a tool for developing L1 and L2 instruction. Both genre and genre-based pedagogy, however, have been conceived of in distinct ways by researchers in different scholarly traditions and in different parts of the world, making the genre literature a complicated body of scholarship to understand. The purpose of this article is to provide a map of current genre theories and teaching applications in three research areas where genre scholarship has taken significantly different paths: (a) English for specific purposes (ESP), (b) North American New Rhetoric studies, and (c) Australian systemic functional linguistics. The article compares definitions and analyses of genres within these three traditions and examines their contexts, goals, and instructional frameworks for genre-based pedagogy. The investigation reveals that ESP and Australian genre research provides ESL instructors with insights into the linguistic features of written texts as well as useful guidelines for presenting these features in classrooms. New Rhetoric scholarship, on the other hand, offers language teachers fuller perspectives on the institutional contexts around academic and professional genres and the functions genres serve within these settings.
Taking an assertive stance toward research being reviewed or reported is a challenging task for second language writers. This aspect of interpersonal meaning is especially difficult to address through direct instruction, as attention to particular grammatical and lexical choices outside of contexts of use is not enough to help students develop the prosodies (Hood, 2004; 2006; Lemke, 1992; 1998) that are required to be authoritative and create a texture that coherently presents an authorial perspective. This article illustrates how a systemic functional linguistics analysis can identify and render explicit to second language writers some ways published authors create textures of expanding or contracting options as research is presented, reviewed, and evaluated. Drawing on the Engagement framework (Martin & White, 2005), we illustrate different approaches to research article introductions in connection with their rhetorical purposes (Swales, 1990; 2004), highlighting the linguistic resources that are in interaction with each other as authors introduce their studies and review related studies. Specifically, we describe two patterns of expanding options and two patterns of contracting options found in educational research, and suggest pedagogical approaches to making these patterns salient to L2 writers.