A Cross-cultural analysis of the generic structure of business management research articles: the methods section

Many studies have focused on the analysis of each of the prototypical four sections of the research article (i.e. Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Swales 1990). However, whereas some sections have been subject to a great deal of analysis, especially the Introduction, others have not attracted as much scholarly attention. That is the case of the Methods section. Nevertheless, it is believed that the particular organization and content of this section plays a crucial role in the production of a successful research article. The Methods sections of 24 research articles in Business Management written in English for an international readership and in Spanish for a local audience will be contrastively analysed in terms of their rhetorical organization. When comparing the results to those from previous analyses in the fi eld of medicine, it stems that the Method sections in Business Management articles contains some specific steps which could be considered characteristic. Further, the results from the analysis of the comparable corpus indicate that there are certain differences in the extent of inclusion of some steps in the research articles in the two cultural contexts. It seems that both the disciplinary culture and the broad cultural context in which the research articles are written may shape and constraint the microstructure of the Methods sections. Muchos estudios se han centrado en el análisis de las cuatro secciones prototípicas del artículo de investigación (Introducción, Métodos, Resultados y Discusión, Swales 1990). Sin embargo, mientras algunas de estas secciones han sido el foco de numerosos estudios, en particular la Introducción, otras no han recibido tanta atención. Éste es el caso de la sección de métodos. A pesar de ello, se considera que el contenido y la organización estructural de esta sección juegan un papel importante en la consecución de un artículo de investigación adecuado. Este artículo analiza la sección de Métodos de 24 artículos de investigación en el campo de la Dirección y Organización de Empresas escritos en inglés para la comunidad internacional y en castellano para una audiencia local en relación a su organización retórica. Al comparar los resultados con los obtenidos en estudios previos, se constata que la sección de Métodos de los artículos de Dirección y Organización de Empresas contiene algunos steps (o sub-secciones retóricas) que l

Getting research published internationally in English: An ethnographic account of a team of Finance Spanish scholars’ struggles

Intercultural text-based research has shown remarkable differences in the rhetorical structure and devices of research articles (RAs) in different linguistic/cultural contexts of publication, including the Spanish local context and the English international context. However, not much attention has been paid to the research article (RA) writing process, which can throw light into the publication practices of second language (L2) scholars in particular disciplinary fields and which can help unveil their main writing difficulties. In this paper I focus on the “text histories” of a team of Spanish researchers in the field of Finance who struggle to get their research articles published internationally in English. These text histories correspond to 24 papers drafted and (re)submitted over the past 5-6 years. The analysis focuses on the extent to which they aim to publish their RAs in English, how they cope with writing their texts in English, their success in such a task and the kind of negative comments included in the referee reports they receive. Results show that this team of L2 scholars almost exclusively write their RAs in English and aim at publishing them in English-medium international journals; for this demanding task, they draw on a number of strategies. They are partially successful in that they have managed to publish half of their RAs in the first site where they were submitted. Their manuscripts received a lot of negative comments; especially relevant is the inclusion of a high number of unspecific negative comments related to language or style in major revision reports. Looking into the writing process can be of great help to provide L2 scholars with useful guidelines on drafting their RAs in English for international publication and to gain an insight into the forces driving international publication in this context

Engagement markers in research project websites: Promoting interactivity and dialogicity

Scholars are currently not only required to produce primary output, i.e. peer-reviewed research articles, chapters or books, which constitutes certified and legitimised knowledge (Puschmann 2015), but also to disseminate such output, which is frequently carried out digitally and in English. In this context it is the aim of this paper to gain insights into scholars'' digital discursive practices by analysing academic websites of research projects funded under the European H2020 programme. More specifically, it explores the ways in which a potentially wide, blurred audience is addressed by means of engagement markers, particularly, reader pronouns, questions, and directives, including imperatives, obligation modals and adjectival phrases expressing necessity. Results indicate that the frequency of use of engagement markers varies across websites and that it may affect their degree of potential interactivity. They further show that some engagement markers are more common than others and that they tend to display specific rhetorical purposes. Differences on their use and function when compared to their use in RA writing are also shown. It is concluded that these interpersonality features have an important role in the potential promotion of dialogicity in this digital medium, and crafting an effective professional identity of the research teams

Looking into ELF variants: A study of evaluative it-clauses in research articles

Given the high number of non-native English speakers in academia, it becomes necessary to look at the use made of English as a lingua franca (ELF), especially in written communication. It is the aim of this paper to look at ELF in a written academic genre, the research article (RA), in the discipline of business management. A corpus of ELF RAs written by scholars with different linguacultural backgrounds will be compared with a corpus of RAs written by scholars affiliated to Anglo-American institutions. The analysis will focus on a particular genre- specific formulaic sequence (Hu¨ttner, 2007), evaluative it-clauses. Results show differences in their frequency of use, the choice of adjectives, and (lack of) modality. The findings can be interpreted as lexico-grammatical innovations (Dewey, 2007), creative expressions (Seidlhofer, 2011), or emerging patterns (Jenkins, Cogo, & Dewey, 2011) in the process of adaptation, evolution and dynamism of English as used in international written academic communication

Macrostructure and use of nominalizations in applied sport science abstracts in the Internet

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Dialogic interaction with diversified audiences in Twitter for research dissemination purposes

International research groups are expected to ensure global dissemination and visibility of their knowledge production, for which Twitter is effectively employed to reach diversified audiences. This paper analyses the dialogic dimension of tweets published in accounts of Horizon2020 research projects, where group’s productivity and work are promoted, and multiple readers addressed. Our study focuses on the use, in these Twitter accounts, of interactional pragmatic strategies, their verbal realisation through engagement markers, as well as on medium affordances and non-verbal markers. A sample of 1 454 tweets from 10 accounts of the EUROPROtweets corpus were coded and analysed through NVivo. The data-driven pragmatic analysis triggered the identification of 8 interactional strategies. We then quantitatively analysed the use of engagement makers and qualitatively studied the characteristic non-verbal markers with a dialogic function within each of these. Our findings will help understand the complexities of current digital academic professional practices, especially as regards the dynamics of dialogic interaction in social media. © 2022 Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Mur-Dueñas, P. and Šinkūnienė, J. (eds) (2018) Intercultural Perspectives on Research Writing. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 301 pp.

The growing importance of English in international academic communities has recently become one of the key issues in applied linguistics and discourse studies. The international role of English and the intercultural nature of most academic communities has emphasised the need for cross-cultural studies and in particular of cross-cultural rhetoric. Considered from this perspective, Pilar Mur-Dueñas and Jolanta Šinkūnienė’s edited volume on academic writing across cultures is a timely addition to the literature on Intercultural Rhetoric (IR). Thevolume not only continues the tradition of publications dedicated to various aspects of contrastive rhetoric, but also makes an original contribution to the field of intercultural studies by adopting IR approaches to the analysis of academic texts written in L2 English. The volume devotes particular attention to academic genres such as research articles, conference abstracts, PhD abstracts and research abstracts by writers of Czech, Lithuanian, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese and Malaysian, with a focus on a wide variety of lexico-grammatical, discursive and rhetorical features, such as shell nouns, reformulation markers, the anticipatory it structure, personal pronouns, hedges, boosters, citations, evaluative acts and evaluative language.The volume consists of a preface by Ken Hyland and an introduction by the editors, followed by thirteen contributions which are organised into three thematic parts: Part I is devoted to a three-fold intercultural analysis, comparing L1, L1 English and L2 English academic texts; Part II focuses on a twofold intercultural analysis, comparing English L1 and L2 academic texts; Part III explores English L1 and L2 as examples of ELF academic texts. An afterword by Ulla Connor closes the book.A preface by Ken Hyland entitled Academic writing and non-Anglophone scholars sets the volume in the context of both intercultural studies and academic discourse studies. The preface highlights the close connection between the two approaches but also emphasises that the chapters “offer rich and nuanced findings of academic writing across cultures” (p. ix), as they contribute to a better understanding of the role of multilingual or EAL (English as an Additional Language) research in the context of increasing international English-medium publication.The introduction by the editors offers a nice overview of intercultural research in EAP and ELF and stresses the importance of adopting IR approaches to the analysis of academic texts written by non-Anglophone scholars in order to explore “the challenges they face while writing and publishing in English for an international readership” (p. 1).The three papers in Part I offer analyses of research articles (RAs) written in English by Czech and by Lithuanian scholars and are compared to RAs in their respective L1s and to RAs written by L1 English scholars in the Humanities. In the first, Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova looks at the rhetorical functions of integral and non-integral citations across the generic moves of research articles in a specialised corpus of Linguistics research articles including Czech-medium and English-medium texts written by Czech authors and English-medium texts by Anglophone scholars. Her careful analysis shows that Czech linguists writing in English tend to use fewer citations than their Anglophone colleagues, suggesting that these divergences are related to the linguacultural background in which Anglophone and Czech linguists strive to construct their identities as members of the global and/or local academic community. The next paper by Jūratė Ruzaitė and Rūta Petrauskaitė discusses the trends of internationalisation with a focus on academic conventions in Linguistics RAs articles published in a Lithuanian journal as compared to those published in a well established international English journal. Their paper points at an interesting finding that “in the field of Linguistics it is no so much the language that predetermines differences in the two journals, but the academic conventions that differ across cultures and publishing houses” (p. 39). Jolanta Šinkūnienė’s paper closes Part I with the analysis of personal pronoun use in Linguistics research articles written in Lithuanian and in English by Lithuanian scholars, and in English by British scholars. Interestingly, she finds that “Lithuanian linguists tend to employ personal pronouns more frequently when they write in English than when they write in Lithuanian” (p. 77), suggesting that this tendency is “the result of the influence of the Anglo-American academic writing tradition” and it reflects “an attempt of the scholars to adapt their writing style to the conventions of the language in which they compose the text” (p. 77).The focus of the four papers of Part II is on L2 and L1 English academic texts, covering genres such as research articles, PhD abstracts, conference abstracts, written by French, Malaysian, Chinese, and Czech writers in English and by Anglophone writers. By investigating the use of shell nouns in a comparable interdisciplinary corpus of 400 PhD abstracts written in English by English and French native speaking writers, Geneviève Bordet shows that “the discipline expresses its identity not only through the choice of specific encapsulating functions but also the adequacy of the selected labeling term considering this function” (p. 101). From a cross-cultural perspective, this result, as she suggests, may be related to a narrower available lexical range for writers of English in a Francophone context. In the second paper of Part II Maryam Mehrjooseresht and Ummul K. Ahmad investigate the use of evaluation markers in thesis abstracts (MA and PhD) written in English by Malaysian novice researchers in Science and Engineering fields. Interestingly, they find cross-disciplinary differences in the use of evaluation across the abstracts as well as some rhetorical difficulties by novice scholars to frame such evaluation, leading them to appear very assertive by using expressions of certainty. The third study by Xinren Chen is based on a corpus of 95 Linguistics research articles written by Chinese researchers with a research background in Applied Linguistics and published in the only English-language teaching journal entitled Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics, representing three periods of time (1996, 2005-2006, 2015-2016). The author analyses the rhetorical structure of the introductory part of the RAs under investigation in an attempt to reveal whether and to what extent Chinese writers “move over time towards the conventional construction of the identity as creators of a research space in the introductory part of their RAs published in a national context” (p. 129). The study highlights a diachronic change, showing that Chinese writers, from the most recent period (2015 2016), tend to transfer Swales’ CARS model in their writing of the RA introductory part. The focus of the last paper in Part II by Renata Povolná is on the textual organisation of 80 conference abstracts written in English by both Anglophone scholars and scholars from countries where Slavonic languages are spoken (Czech, Slovak, Polish and Ukrainian). The author finds an interesting difference in the types of moves and patterns of move sequences applied by scholars from different groups: Anglophone writers show preference for a three-move pattern whereas non-Anglophone writers prefer a two-move pattern. As she suggests, this can be influenced “by a relatively lengthy style often associated with L1 academic texts, which authors of Slavonic origin sometimes transfer from their L1 texts into academic genres written in English” (p. 168).Part III of the book contains six papers, focusing on texts produced by non-native English scholars from various linguacultural backgrounds with the aim of exploring their impact on shaping English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in research settings. In the first paper Rosa Lorés-Sanz explores three corpora (abstracts written in English as L1, in English as ELF, and English abstracts translated from Spanish) to identify the rhetorical patterns which characterise English research article abstracts in Sociology. She highlights interesting differences between the English abstracts translated from Spanish and the texts written in L1 English and  in ELF. More specifically, she finds that the English abstracts translated from Spanish have “a less complex rhetorical structure (fewer moves in the structure)” (p. 188), showing a general level of hybridity as a result of the translation into English. On the other hand, she shows that in the abstracts written in ELF there is a co-existence of different rhetorical patterns together with the conventional ones. This, as she suggests, arises “as a result of contact among users of ELF” (p. 188). The second study by Jingjing Wang and Feng (Kevin) Jiang investigates hedges, boosters and self-mentions as main expressions of epistemic positioning used in research writing by Chinese PhD students as compared to expert writers’ texts across four science disciplines: Physics, Life Science, Material Science, Computer Science. Differences in their use have been found both across the two groups of authors and across disciplines. The authors emphasise the need to raise novice scholars’ awareness on the expression of stance and of constructing an authorial identity in expected, conventional ways within the discipline. The next four papers of Part III are based on the SciELF corpus, consisting of academic articles written by users of ELF in different disciplines (SciELF 2015). The papers have not undergone any professional proofreading and most of them are final drafts of unpublished manuscripts. Marina Bondi and Carlotta Borelli focus on markers of authorial voice and metadiscourse in a subcorpus of the ScieELF, collected from articles in the field of economics (the SciELF-Ec corpus). The results are contrasted with those from a corpus of published articles in English for general reference. They find that the SciELF-Ec corpus is “characterised by prototypical metadiscursive elements: frequencies insist on a restricted range of evidentials, frame markers pointing to topic and focus, as well as prototypical general labelling nouns and forms of locative self-mention” (p. 232). The paper provides valuable insights into the role of the “cooperative imperative” of ELF users, requiring language accommodation to ensure communication (Seidlhofer 2009). Silvia Murillo investigates reformulation markers and the processes they introduce. She contrasts these markers in the SciELF corpus and in a comparable corpus of English as a Native Language (ENL) texts (SERAC). The comparison between ELF and native English reformulation markers points to similar tendencies regarding their general frequency. However, as the author shows, the findings also “reveal a tendency towards specialisation/simplification in the SciELF corpus, in the types of reformulation markers used and in the functions performed” (p. 249). Enrique Lafuente-Millán’s study looks at evaluation in RA introductions in the Social Sciences extracted from the SciELF corpus and contrasts it with a corpus of published RA introductions written by ENL researchers (SERAC). His results reveal that ELF writers use evaluation much less often to promote the importance, comprehensiveness and usefulness of their own research, which can be a challenge when trying to get their research results accepted for publication in a competitive, international context. Part III closes with Pilar Mur-Dueñas’ study which looks at a specific lexico-grammatical feature, the anticipatory it pattern, in the SciELF corpus, with the aim of investigating its interpersonal functions. The results are compared to those found in a comparable corpus of ENL published RAs from the SERAC corpus. She nicely demonstrates that differences emerge from the specific realisations of the pattern, which appear to be creative uses of the language to express interpersonal meanings. As she suggests, “this reveals some degree of dynamism in the English language as it is being used internationally for scholarly communication” (p. 294).The afterword by Ulla Connor closes the volume emphasising the importance of IR approaches to academic writing studies in an English as a Lingua Franca world.Overall, Intercultural Perspectives on Research Writing offers a significant representation of corpus and discourse work on intercultural studies of academic writing. The organisation of the volume provides readers with the opportunity to either read the chapters in sequence or choose most relevant sections. The volume will be essential reading for scholars undertaking research in the field of intercultural studies, but it will be also relevant to anyone with an interest inIntercultural Rhetoric and ELF.                                                                                                                                           Giuliana Dian

The teaching-learning process of English as a foreign language

This Trabajo Fin de Máster summarizes the main learning and most relevant competences acquired while completing the Master focused on the teaching profession that I have been taking in the specialty of English. It is divided into three main sections. First of all I make some reflections about my process of learning in each course. Then, in the second section, I present and self-assess the sub-competences I acquired in each module and I present through a summarizing chart the main competences of the Master I have achieved at the end of that section. I will synthesize my innovation research project in the third part, and I will finish by explaining the importance of my future permanent training, putting forward some of the ways of developing it

Developing students' oral communication skills in the primary EFL classroom: a project-based proposal

Over the last years, there has been a growing concern about the best approaches and methodologies to teach English for equipping students with the essential skills for effective communication, especially orally as well as with other key competences, such as lifelong learning. This dissertation shows the process carried out to plan and design a project for an English Foreign Language (EFL) Primary classroom whose main objective is to improve students’ oral communication skills. The project has been developed relying on the approaches that have proved to be most effective for the teaching and learning of EFL, namely, Project Based Learning, Communicative Language Teaching, Task-Based Learning, and Cooperative Learning. The evaluation of the proposal shows how the use of active, participative and communicative methodologies which consider the learners agents of their own learning and provide them with the necessary scaffolding to build their own meanings, positively affects the development of students’ oral communication skills. The work climate that is created through these methodologies also gives confidence to learners who feel more and more capable of expressing themselves in English. This project shows that these approaches are indeed to be followed in our 21st century Primary EFL classrooms

Self-reference in research articles across Europe and Asia: A review of studies

Numerous cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary studies have looked at the manifestation of author stance in academic texts. One of the most recurrent areas of contrast has been the use of personal pronouns across linguistic and disciplinary cultures. This paper aims at reviewing previous research on self-reference in research articles taking an intercultural perspective. It focuses on 22 studies which report on results regarding this stance feature in 13 lingua-cultural contexts (Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Russian, Spanish). They have been extracted from relevant publications in the fields of English for Academic Purposes and English for Specific Purposes over the past 25 years (1998–2012). A close analysis of this research highlights different cultural trends in constructing writer-reader relationships in this academic genre and reveals important methodological issues across different studies. This review article also has implications for English as a lingua franca (cf. Mauranen 2012) as used in international publications