The Academia and I: A cross-cultural and a cross-disciplinary analysis of the use of authorial voice(s) in research articles

Adopting a corpus-based study methodology, a thorough analysis of authorial academic voices in research articles is attempted, by means of a cross-cultural (English by native writers and English by non-native ─Spanish─ scholars) and cross-disciplinary (hard vs soft sciences) perspective. The focus of the present dissertation has been the use authors make of two metadiscoursal elements, self-mentions and evidentials, which serve the purpose of bringing the author’s voice onto the text as well as the voice of the author’s colleagues.The conclusions drawn cast light on the way the realizations of these voices may be influenced by the discipline and/or by the linguistic background of the authors, and they may also show aspects of the contribution that Spanish writers are making to English as a Lingua Franca. Siguiendoun tipo de metodología aplicada al estudio de corpus, se pretende llevar a cabo un análisis de las voces relativas al autor y a la academia mediante un enfoque intercultural (investigadores no nativos –españoles- escribiendo en inglés) e interdisciplinar (ciencias duras frente a ciencias blandas). En esta tésis, se ha prestado especial atenciónal uso que los autores hacen de dos elementos metadiscursivos, selfmentions(menciones propias) yevidentials (citas), que tienen como propósito representar en el texto tanto la voz del autorcomo la de sus colegas. Las conclusions alcanzadas aportan luz sobre la influencia que pueden tener la disciplina o el trasfondo lingüístico del autor en la representación de dichas voces en el texto,mostrando además, aspectos acerca de la contribución que los escritores españoles hacen al inglés como Lingua Franc

A COMPARISON OF NICHE ESTABLISHMENTS IN ENGLISH RESEARCH ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS PUBLISHED IN INTERNATIONAL AND THAI JOURNALS

The present study looked closely at the niche establishments in the introduction sections of English research articles written by Thai authors and published in local Thai journals and compared them to those found in introduction sections written by non-Thai authors published in international and high indexed journals. Each of the two corpora contains forty introductory sections. The analysis was based on the frameworks of Swales (2004) and Lim (2012). It was found that the use of niche establishments in the international corpus was higher than that in the Thai corpus. In the Thai corpus, “Stressing insufficient research” was the highest strategy, but “Revealing methodological limitations” was completely absent. It is expected that the results will provide practical guidance for novice writers to write their research introduction sections with informative and convincing niche establishments and, to some extent, the results should also benefit English writing classes, especially in Thailand

Genre Variation in the Introduction of Scientific Papers in Iranian and International Computer Science Journals

Introduction functions as a showcase in research articles (RAs). It motivates the reader to read the rest of the paper. However, writing a well-crafted introduction is a complex task, mainly when the writer generates the manuscript in another language. This study investigated the rhetorical differences/similarities employed in the introductions of RAs published in Iranian and international ISI journals in Computer Sciences (CS) using Swales (2004) CARS model. Two sets of CS RAs (30 each) were randomly selected. Frequency and non-parametric tests were used to examine the differences between the two groups of introductions. The results indicated that M 1 S 1 (Generalizing the topic), M2 1A (Indicating the gap), M3 S1 (Describing the research), M3 S4 (Methods Summary), and M 3 S 6 (Stating research advantages) were used with high frequencies. M 2 S 2 (Announcing positive justification) was absent, and the others were in low preferences. Also, the Analysis illustrated a statistically significant variation between the introductions concerning the use of M3S7 (Demarcating the Research Organization). Findings support genre-based pedagogy in scientific writing classes to make the graduate CS students aware of these rhetorical structures conventional to introductions in CS RAs