Metaphorical Analysis of Teachers’ and Students’ Perceptions of ESP

Despite the growing interest in English for Specific Purposes, little is known about university teachers’ and students’ perceptions towards the subject. The present research aims to investigate teachers’ and students’ perceptions towards ESP teaching and learning process in an Indonesian university. Employing metaphorical analysis, fifty students’ metaphors and thirty teachers’ metaphors were collected. The analysis of the metaphors revealed that while most students have neutral attitude towards ESP, most teachers experience ambivalences when teaching ESP. The study also found that the teachers conceptualized ESP as a physical activity requiring process, careful measurement, effort, preparation, and time

“Your Next Stay Will Be on Us”: Genre Analysis of Hotel Responses to Negative Reviews

The purpose of the present paper is to identify the typical moves, steps, and common expressions in hotels’ responses to negative reviews (RNRs) posted on TripAdvisor. A specialized corpus comprising authentic 29 responses, written by top seven 4- and 5-star hotels in Malang was explored by following Swales’ notion of move analysis. Corpus-assisted analysis was also applied to identify some frequent expressions typical to major moves. The findings revealed that the generic structure of RNRs written by top hotels in Malang contain six moves and 23 steps. Unique to this finding are four additional steps that were distinct from previous studies, but appeared in the corpus: appreciating the stay, promoting hotel’s facility, clarifying misunderstanding, and making amends. ‘Thank you for’ (appearing 30 times in 22 responses) were among the most frequent expressions in major moves such as appreciating the stay and expressing gratitude. Other common expressions were also identified from the corpus and used as the basis of proposing a brief guideline for composing RNRs, which can be useful for teaching business English, or English for Specific Purposes. Overall, these findings outline a generic pattern through which representatives of top hotels in Malang manage customers’ dissatisfactions and complaints. Since these findings were derived from natural-occurring data, they can also be useful to classroom instructions, especially in providing authentic materials

See: How Indonesian Student Writers Use Directives in Academic Texts

This study investigates the roles and functions of directives in academic texts mainly produced by Indonesian college students. Sixty-two (62) imperatives, 11 “it is + Adjective + to”-clauses, and 7 modals of obligation are searched for in academic texts taken from the Corpus of State University of Malang Indonesian Learners English (C-SMILE) and the Corpus of Indonesian Texts in Academia (CINTA). As a point of comparison, we use the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). We found that the corpora are similar regarding the high frequency of occurrences of the imperative see, among other directives. However, the corpora differ with regards to the functions of the imperative see. Whilst see in COCA plays an important role in directing readers to both internal and external sources, see in C-SMILE and CINTA is used exclusively to refer to internal resources. This suggests a lack of access on the part of Indonesian undergraduates’ to necessary reading materials. In addition, other directives, such as cognitive imperatives, are rarely used in the Indonesian corpora. The low frequency of cognitive imperatives indicates that the practice of inviting readers to develop their mental process of understanding has not been well established in Indonesian academic culture. These findings suggest the need to introduce to Indonesian student writers, various ways of engaging readers into texts

Successful Indonesian startups’ product blogs: A digital genre analysis and its pedagogical implications

Blogs can be deemed as an alternative digital media which have been strategically employed for business communication. One of the realizations is product blogs. As startups, which are identically linked to digital media, have been skyrocketing in number, product blogs play an integral role to accommodate their business communication. In writing an article for the product blogs, startups often open an internship vacancy for, among others, polytechnic students majoring English for business communication. However, generic structure of a product blog article is quite different from academic essays. There is a need to equip the students with adequate product blog article writing skills before they embark on internship. This study aims at empirically delving into generic structure of successful Indonesian startups’ product blogs. To achieve the aim, this research employed corpus-based research methodology. There were 33.430 tokens of product blogs from two unicorn startups. The framework for analysis was adapted from Askehave and Nielsen (2005). The findings show that there were three moves in the corpus, namely contextualizing product, detailing product, and soliciting response. Each move consisted of steps which were categorized into reading mode and navigating mode. The findings lead to pedagogical implications—inculcating the moves to polytechnic students majoring English for business communication—as an attempt to link and match between vocational pedagogy and industry requirements

Successful Indonesian startups’ product blogs: A digital genre analysis and its pedagogical implications

Blogs can be deemed as an alternative digital media which have been strategically employed for business communication. One of the realizations is product blogs. As startups, which are identically linked to digital media, have been skyrocketing in number, product blogs play an integral role to accommodate their business communication. In writing an article for the product blogs, startups often open an internship vacancy for, among others, polytechnic students majoring English for business communication. However, generic structure of a product blog article is quite different from academic essays. There is a need to equip the students with adequate product blog article writing skills before they embark on internship. This study aims at empirically delving into generic structure of successful Indonesian startups’ product blogs. To achieve the aim, this research employed corpus-based research methodology. There were 33.430 tokens of product blogs from two unicorn startups. The framework for analysis was adapted from Askehave and Nielsen (2005). The findings show that there were three moves in the corpus, namely contextualizing product, detailing product, and soliciting response. Each move consisted of steps which were categorized into reading mode and navigating mode. The findings lead to pedagogical implications—inculcating the moves to polytechnic students majoring English for business communication—as an attempt to link and match between vocational pedagogy and industry requirements

Directives in Academic Writing: A Contrastive Corpus-Based Study of C-SMILE and COCA

ABSTRACT   Ishak, Cita Nuary. 2014. Directives in Academic Writing: A Contrastive Corpus-Based Study of C-SMILE and COCA. Thesis, English Department, Faculty of Letters, State University of Malang. Advisors: (I) Prof. Dr. YazidBasthomi, M.A. and (II) Prof. Hj. UtamiWidiati, M.A., Ph.D.   Keywords: reader engagement, directives, C-SMILE, COCA, bald-on-record FTA   Academic discourse is a social construct (Swales et al. 1998), where maintaining personal engagement with readers is considered highly crucial (Hyland, 2002c). Successful academic writing therefore requires a clear awareness of and appropriate engagement with readers (Hyland, 2001). Among five elements to engagement proposed by Hyland (2005b), this present study focuses on directives. Directives are of special interest because while they function to bring readers into texts, they are categorized as bald-on-record face threatening act (Brown and Levinson, 1987) which potentially prejudice the ongoing writer-reader relationship in written academic discourses. Due to this nature of directives, they seem to be neglected by literature (Hyland, 2002b; Swales et al. 1998) and consequently, little is known about how the roles of directives in scholarly writings. This present research attempts to take this neglected yet critical area by exploring the use of directives in academic writings from two different corpora. This research investigates the use of directives in academic writings written in English by non-native and native English. The research data are academic writings in the humanities taken from the corpus of EFL writings, C-SMILE, and the corpus of academic articles written by native English, COCA. Forms of directives studied in this research follows Hyland’s (2002b) model of directives; they are imperatives, necessity modals, and predicative adjectives controlling a complement to-clause. Reader pronouns categorized by Kim and Thompson (2010) is combined with the necessity modals in order to find the accurate data from both corpora. Taking a contrastive corpus-based study, this research compares the quantitative results obtained from C-SMILE and COCA, qualitatively analyzes the similarities and differences spotted in the two corpora, and discusses some emerging issues from these findings. This research finds that both the EFL undergraduate students and the native authors of journal articles engage their readers through the use of imperative see. The similarity found is in the use of textual imperative see as the most prevalent directives in both Indonesian and American corpus. However, taking a microscopic look to this phenomenon, a number of differences are found. While see functions to refer to both internal and external resources in COCA, in C-SMILE it only refers to internal resources. Not only that, see in COCA interpolates writers’ evaluation of and attitude toward the works it refers to and this is what absent in C-SMILE. C-SMILE and COCA is similar in the way that we dominates the reader pronouns, but distinct in the necessity modals following the pronoun. The emerging issues arise from these findings are (1) the problem of lack of resources faced by the EFL undergraduates, (2) the imperative see that loses its ‘threatening’ potential in academic culture, and (3) the possible explanations behind the overuse of see and the underuse of other imperatives. Finally, this research touches upon the pedagogical suggestions for the problems regarding the lack of resources faced by the EFL undergraduates, the overuse of see, and the underuse of other forms of directives in the Indonesian corpus. One of the suggestions is dedicated for EFL lecturers to teach the importance of engaging readers into texts.