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in Volume 5 of the Series
Research in English Language & Linguistics
edited by Josef Schmied in 2011
published in Göttingen: Cuvillier.
It is quotable
but please ask your library to order a copy here:
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Academic Writing in Europe: a Survey of
Approaches and Problems
Josef Schmied
Abstract
This survey sketches the new understanding of academic writing that has developed
over the last two decades, from a text-based to a writer- and reader-oriented perspective,
from a prescriptive to an empirical discipline. It sets academic writing in a wider
context (like English for Specific Purposes and English as a lingua franca) and clarifies
the main concepts. From a constructionist perspective, a discourse community develops
through common practice, using expected schemata for instance in genres like research
articles. They can be analysed empirically in corpus- and text-linguistic approaches,
where at least five dimensions can be compared in empirical research: genre, academic
discipline, national culture, language tradition, and language features. The problems
discussed range from fundamental ones (whether a lingua franca like English makes
non-native users of English in Europe lose national traditions) to practical ones (to what
extent the data available are compatible). Despite the problems, new opportunities arise
for English departments in Europe when they include an empirical discourse- and genrebased approach in their research and teaching.
1. Introduction: Understanding academic writing
Academic writing has established itself almost as an independent discipline in
applied linguistics, or at least as a research-led sub-discipline in English for
Academic Purposes (EAP). There is much more to it than what was taught 20
years ago: Old essay-writing focussed on language-specific student errors or
creative styles; old English for Specific Purposes (ESP) focussed on disciplinespecific vocabulary. The understanding of academic writing has changed
fundamentally from a formal text-based perspective to a functional perspective
that concentrates on the writer and the writing process and, even more, on the
reader and the cognitive construction of discourse in a community (cf. Hyland
2010a, Schmied 2008, Thompson 2001). This paradigm shift applies to teaching
as well as to research: Text-oriented research would, for instance, measure syntactic complexity by number of words or clauses per T-unit, or the specificity of
lexemes in ontological systems. Writer-oriented research has tried “think aloud
protocols” or task observations including keystroke recordings. Reader-oriented
research has emphasized the mediation between writers/institutions/cultures, and
conventions “describing the stages which help writers to set out their thoughts in
ways readers can easily follow and identifying salient features of texts which
allow them to engage effectively with their readers” (Hyland 2010b: 194).
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2. Key concepts of academic writing
2.1. Definitions of EAP and related terms
In this survey, I see academic writing as an important, if not the most important,
part of academic language behaviour in a discourse community. This discourse
community uses English for Academic Purposes in research and
teaching/learning, not only in universities in native-speaker cultures but also in
universities where English is used as an international language or lingua franca
at levels of international cooperation, where researchers as well as teachers and
students are non-native speakers of English.
Traditionally, discussions of language use have been seen as part of ELT
(English Language Teaching), or TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages) and TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). Today these
concepts are often seen as a wide field of related terms and acronyms like EAL
(English as an Additional Language), EIL (English as an International
Language), ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), ESP (English for Special
Purposes, or English for Specific Purposes), etc., where overlapping notions are
only a matter of perspective. EAP can be seen as the “higher end” of ELF
(which, in contrast to “Tourist English”, requires at least B2 in the European
Framework of Reference for Languages, EFRL). EAP emphasises the common
ground of specialised languages in terms of discourse or pragmatics, whereas
ESP tends to emphasise the differences in terms of lexicon and idiomaticity. EAP
also adds a theoretical framework to practical “writing classes”, which have
spread to universities in native as well as non-native countries, and which can be
seen as part of professional writing in the academic world, just like professional
writing in the domains of law (e.g. legal correspondence), journalism (e.g.
reportage), engineering (e.g. technical reports), marketing (e.g. advertisements),
entertainment (e.g. film scripts), and literature (e.g. “creative writing” of novels).
Within this wide field of EAP, at least three levels of communities can be
distinguished, and thus three types of EAP defined:
Student English: The academic ‘novice’ may come from an ůnglophone
background where English is used for a variety of intra-national functions
including teaching at secondary schools. Still, academic writing requires
additional training, for it necessitates the independent search for appropriate
information, its critical evaluation and media-specific presentation. The
traditional genre at this level is the academic essay of 2,000 to 5,000 words
(occasionally also a corresponding media-supported oral presentation).
Doctoral English: In contrast to student writing with its focus on digesting
research by others, doctoral students have to develop their own ideas, to
pursue their own research agenda and to write up everything in a major
contribution, which is the result of some sophisticated innovative Ph.D.
project that the writer takes a long time to accomplish.
Academic Writing in Europe: a Survey
3
(International) Research English: Although the written exchange of research
results has a long tradition (in Britain at least since the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society in the 17th century), the importance of
international scholarly articles has increased enormously over the last
decades, partly due to the increasing competition among universities and
researchers and partly due to the new electronic media. This has led to the
standardization of peer-review procedures and the corresponding discussion
of subject- and genre-specific conventions.
In contrast to student English, the latter two categories, doctoral and research
English, are more specialized in the sense that they (have to) follow more
subject-specific conventions. This applies to individual research journals as well
as whole research communities, e.g. in literary or social-science academic
cultures (with their MLA and the ASA/APA conventions, respectively). Such
conventions – together with the specialised terminology and argumentation
procedures – have made (even sub-discipline-specific) “specialised” academic
writing increasingly an in-group phenomenon. To balance this trend, a new EAP
category has gained more and more importance: non-specialised writing for a
general academic readership, which can be called “popular” academic writing or
Popular Academic English. This has political implications, since societies
demand increasingly to be informed about public investment in universities and
other research institutions.
2.2. Academic writing in the discourse community
Since I emphasize that the key concepts of academic writing have to be made
accessible to students, I will adopt a student perspective in this section. I will use
entries in Wikipedia (just like many students do) as a starting point and scrutinize
them from a perspective of knowledge transfer to see whether there are any
major discrepancies between the popular academic representations of these
concepts and my more specific academic conceptualisations. The Wikipedia
entry for discourse community is quite specific and very suitable for our
purposes – not surprisingly since it is based explicitly on Swales (1990):
A discourse community:
1. has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.
2. has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.
3. uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.
4. utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance
of its aims.
5. in addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis.
6. has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and
discoursal expertise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_community (27/03/11)
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The advantage of this entry is that it is very broad, but it also fits our concept of
academic community very well, especially the emphasis on genres and lexis. The
levels I have defined according to practice and expertise as student, doctoral, and
research English above, each with specific genres and lexical complexity. The
level-specific genres are constructed through university conventions and this
construction is in line with current thinking on wider academic perspectives.
Over the last two decades, academic writing theory has been closely
associated with social constructionism, and again we can use a well-founded
Wikipedia entry as a starting point:
A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and
groups participate in the creation of their perceived social reality. It involves looking at
the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition by
humans. Socially constructed reality is seen as an ongoing, dynamic process; reality is
reproduced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism (29/03/11)
The two concepts discourse community and social constructionism in higher
education can be combined in the concept of an academic community of practice:
A community of practice (CoP) is, according to cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave
and Etienne Wenger, a group of people who share an interest, a craft, and/or a
profession. The group can evolve naturally because of the members’ common interest in
a particular domain or area, or it can be created specifically with the goal of gaining
knowledge related to their field. It is through the process of sharing information and
experiences with the group that the members learn from each other, and have an
opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally (Lave & Wenger
1991). CoPs can exist online, such as within discussion boards and newsgroups, or in
real life, such as in a lunch room at work, in a field setting, on a factory floor, or
elsewhere in the environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practise (29/03/11)
Again, this Wikipedia entry is useful since our academic community is
constructed through “sharing information and experiences”, like (sub-)disciplinespecific conferences. Nowadays, the “written discussion” in scientific disciplines
takes mainly place in academic journals or even on pre-publication servers, since
the international academic discourse is accelerated enormously.
Although conference papers and journals are the central spoken and written
genres in academic communities today, there are many others. The Wikipedia
entry for genre gives a crisp summary:
ů text’s genre may be determined by its:
1. Linguistic function.
2. Formal traits.
3. Textual organization.
Academic Writing in Europe: a Survey
5
4. Relation of communicative situation to formal and organizational traits of the text
(Charaudeau & Maingueneau, 2002: 278-280).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre (27/03/11)
This is a good introduction, but for our purposes not explicit and detailed enough,
especially since research over the last 20 years has provided us with so many
insights into this central concept.
This exercise has shown that Wikipedia can be used as a resource in general
(popular) academic discourse to introduce novices to the basic concepts of a
field. Of course, this is not the case for all concepts we need for a scholarly
discussion of academic writing. The Wikipedia entry for “ůcademic Writing”
itself is little more than a number of lists of genres or key terms that does not
really help the novice in the field.
2.3. Genres as expected schemata in communities of practice
Although genres are recognised subcategories of research discourse (Swales
2004), developing an awareness of their conventions is often difficult for
students, since genres are abstractions of real texts, and students need to gain
experience through repeated exposure. From a cognitive perspective, genres are
schemata that help us engage actively in text comprehension as we develop a
feeling for relating new information to existing knowledge and previous
community discourse. We recognise prototypical genres as unmarked – and some
novices’ texts as unintentionally marked in community discourse, which may
distract the reader from the intended message of the writer. Thus genres link
users to their discourse community and they link texts to each other since real
academic discourse is a constant development of intertextuality. For students,
this means that they have to learn to select texts for their argumentation from the
existing literature, digest them by integrating them into their own writing and
continue the academic discourse by “spinning on the yarn”.
But genres also activate situational contexts in academic discourse and help
create the role of individual community members in the discourse. The students’
task is then to be aware of the conventions involved in a project proposal or a BA
thesis in their specialisation. Genres constitute the discipline as they form a
network with “neighbouring” genres. This community of practice forms a
network of members, who move “up” from novices to experts in their discipline
through producing the expected situated texts in the different types of genres.
There is no conclusive and comprehensive list of academic genres and there is
considerable overlap between the subgenres of academic books: introductory,
textbook, research monograph, (research) article collection, handbook,
encyclopaedia, etc. And even spoken and written subgenres may be related: a
conference paper and the related article collection, the key-note (lecture) and the
related handbook article, etc.
Thus genres are fuzzy concepts, but they are useful for empirical analyses of
stratified data-bases and related interpretations as well as for teaching. The
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advantages of genre-based instruction have been described persuasively by
Hyland (2004: 10f):
The main advantages can be summarized as follows. Genre teaching is:
Explicit. Makes clear what is to be learned to facilitate the acquisition of writing skills
Systematic. Provides a coherent framework for focusing on both language and contexts
Needs-based. Ensures that course objectives and content are derived from student needs
Supportive. Gives teachers a central role in scaffolding student learning and creativity
Empowering. Provides access to the patterns and possibilities of variation in valued texts
Critical. Provides the resources for students to understand and challenge valued
discourses
Consciousness raising. Increases teacher awareness of texts to confidently advise
students on their writing.
These features make the concept of genre accessible to students and useful, since
it allows them to meet the expectations of teachers, editors, and gatekeepers of all
types in the academic community. Although it is not a formal checklist, it
provides students and teachers with a frame they can use for self-study and for
teaching.
3. Approaches to academic writing
3.1. Corpus- and text-linguistic approaches
Students and researchers who intend to study academic writing can choose from
a wide range of approaches. Basically, I would like to distinguish between
approaches that focus on central formal or functional features across texts,
usually in stratified collections of academic texts (that is why I call them corpuslinguistic), and approaches that focus on the special or prototypical interplay of
features in texts or text-types (that is why I call them text-linguistic). Of course,
ideally both approaches overlap and a combination will provide us with the best
insights into this complex phenomenon.
Corpus-linguistic approaches are the standard approach in this volume. This is
partly due to the research networks in which this collection has been put together.
However it also seems to be the prominent approach of our time, since more
corpus collections and tools like AntConc give every researcher quickly a keyword-in-context and statistical survey as a starting point for thought and
discussion. Even academic novices at BA level for instance achieve a satisfactory
scholarly result. More difficult is the development of a simple formal and
functional feature analysis into a factor analysis of multiple dimensions (often
called Biber-type, since it has been used extensively by Biber, from Biber 1988
through Biber 2006 to Biber & Conrad 2009).
Examples of text-linguistic approaches can be found throughout the history of
the analysis of academic writing. Halliday (1997/2004), for instance, uses
different text types ranging from a Microbiology textbook to a New Scientist
article to illustrate answers to the big question “how does the language of science
Academic Writing in Europe: a Survey
7
reconstrue human experience?” (ibid: 49). This may be too difficult for a student
discussion and we rather illustrate the text-linguistic approach by discussing
examples of student writing from the ChemCorpus (s. below).
The best top-down approaches in text-linguistics would be to use a textprocessing system to show the systematic parallel structure of headlines or to
devise a hyper-text system to allow the reader to follow the links (cf. Schmied
2005). For our purposes two small case studies may suffice to illustrate the
holistic approach.
The first text-linguistic example is a distribution diagram of may in some
(short) exam texts from the ChemCorpus (Figure 1).
Figure 1:
Distribution of may in selected ChemCorpus exam texts
The AntConc diagram clearly shows that modal auxiliaries like may cluster in
specific parts of the text, they can be expected mainly in the second and the last
sections, when the secondary literature is discussed critically and when research
results are evaluated tentatively.
When we read through the may usages in the following examples in context, it
is clear that they are all used in epistemic function:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
This may lead to temporary or even permanent language attrition (fS07IH)
These additions may take several forms (fS09HF)
Firstly, they may be words that are completely new to English, words that
(fS09HF)
Secondly, they may be words new to the BrE variety, but (fS09HF)
Thirdly, they may be words that have currency in BrE, but, in Australia (fS09HF)
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(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
(10)
(11)
(12)
(13)
(14)
(15)
(16)
(17)
(18)
(19)
(20)
(21)
(22)
(23)
(24)
Finally, they may also be words that might be unfamiliar to speakers of Standard
English (fS09HF)
For some people it may seem that the Australian language travels from its roots,
but (fS09HF)
Many Australian[s] may be able to give a few examples, including (fS09HF)
In return, children may also address and refer to their parents differently
(fW09AB)
At home, a child may say “mum”, “mom” or “mummy” (fW09AB)
On the phone with a friend listening you may address your mother by saying
“mother” (fW09AB)
When you are at home, talking to another family member and your mother is not
present you may refer to her as “our mom” or “the old lady” (fW09AB)
He may have coursed [caused] offence talking this way (fW09AB)
In a meeting, for instance, where first names are generally used, the director may
say (fW09AB)
In everyday interactions, speech differences may also be reflected in people's
social networks (fW090AB)
To British ears a New Zealander’s “bad” may sound like “bed” (fW09AB)
the striking usage of ‘be’ which may support the creole hypothesis (fW09KU)
Therefore, a middle way between these hypothesises may be advisable (fW09KU)
I would conclude that AAVE may be an africanized language, which means
(fW09KU)
On the other hand it may be assumed that the text producer has a supertheme in
mind (mW07CB)
They may also be seen as linguistic principles (mW07CB)
Cohesion may well be viewed as a phenomenon of surface structure, i.e.
(mW07CB)
This may be done via anaphora or cataphora (mW07CB)
A specific seme may occur throughout the text (mW07CB)
All mays in this list are used to indicate tentative expressions, but even within
this semantic space of cautious meta-discourse, we recognise a few patterns:
may is serialised to list possibilities (Firstly to Finally in (3) – (6) in
fS09HF),
may collocates with verbs of thinking/seeing (assumed/seen/viewed in
mW07CB),
may is used with primary auxiliaries, especially be to express passive,
may often precedes also (four times by three different students), which
could be an advanced learner habit.
The second text-linguistic example is the introductory paragraph of a final exam
essay (on a language variation project) to illustrate how inherent lexical
structures could be made more explicit. First, we discuss the original text, then
we construct a new text version that is explicit and systematic according to our
principles:
Academic Writing in Europe: a Survey
9
Language never stands still. It varies over time and is in a constant process of change, even
though these processes might not be obvious. In many cases, linguistic variation is a result of
internal linguistic factors. However, since the middle of the 20th century, many studies on
language change have acknowledged that extralinguistic factors might have a considerable
impact on the innovation and spread of new linguistic variants. Although these so-called
sociolinguistic studies focused in the beginning predominantly on the category of social class,
the awareness grew that it might in fact be the correlation of a variety of extralinguistic factors,
such as age, ethnicity, and gender, that served best to explain the mechanism of linguistic
variation and change. The subsequent chapters will focus in particular on the category of
gender, as according to Labov (1990), the findings concerning the linguistic differentiation
between men and women belong to the clearest and most consistent results of sociolinguistic
research in the speech community. The first chapter will consider a number of methods and
approaches that are commonly used to carry out sociolinguistic studies and obtain reliable
results. As the argumentation will specifically deal with Great Britain, the correlation of social
class and gender will need to be considered in particular. The second chapter will then discuss
several generalizations that were made concerning gender-specific differences. The last part will
finally present a number of phonological and grammatical variables that might be included in
the study to analyse and reveal gender-based differences in linguistic variation. (fS10SK)
Apart from a “philosophical-essayistic” beginning, the text (fS10SK) consists of
two parts: first, a discussion contrasting two approaches to language variation
and change, and then a list of the sections that sketch the outline of this exam
paper. The first part contrasts (through however) the traditional 19th century
diachronic approach to language change with the modern sociolinguistic one
since the mid-20th century. A further contrast is established between the old
intra-linguistic and the new extra-linguistic factors, the latter expanding from
social class to other variables like age, ethnicity, and gender. These contrasts can
be made much more explicit in the re-written version (S10SK2) through the
different type of contrasts: intra- vs. extra-linguistic, 19th vs. 20th century,
however and although and the implicit initially vs. grew, as marked in the text
below. Such lexical patterns in texts can be supplemented by grammatical
patterns (like the will constructions above).
The second paragraph of the re-written text below is more clearly structured
through lexical repetition of section and the near-synonym part. However, the
contrast of the topics in the three sections (methods and approaches,
generalisations, and variables) is not as clear as it could be. Most other changes
in this introduction are simply structural simplifications that help the reader
process the text more easily (concerning as a preposition). The reduction of
tentativeness (i.e. auxiliaries, esp. might, the most “careful”) may also be a point
that has to be considered systematically at this advanced level of academic
writing, since novice writers have to learn to develop their own stance. Such key
concepts or guidelines can be deduced from this text example by the students
themselves, so that (hopefully) they will be able to transfer their knowledge to
similar texts later.
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Language variation and change have been studied as a result of intra-linguistic factors since the
19th century. Since the middle of the 20th century, however, studies on language change have
shown that extra-linguistic factors can have considerable impact on the innovation and spread of
new linguistic variants. Although these sociolinguistic studies focused initially on the category
of social class, the awareness grew that a combination of extra-linguistic factors, such as age,
ethnicity and gender, may explain best the mechanism of language variation and change.
The subsequent sections focus in particular on the category of gender, as according to Labov
(1990), the difference between men and women belongs to the clearest and most consistent
results of sociolinguistic research in the speech community. The first section considers methods
and approaches commonly used in sociolinguistic studies. As the project is situated in Great
Britain, the correlation of social class and gender is focussed on first. The second section then
discusses several generalizations on gender-specific differences. The last part presents
phonological and grammatical variables that might be included in the study of gender-based
differences in linguistic variation. (S10KS2)
The explicit use of cohesive devices is certainly a feature of advanced writers of
English. This is partly teaching-induced, since students are told explicitly to pay
attention to cohesive devices in their texts in today’s writing classes, and this
may thus change when students have learnt how to use less explicit devices at a
more advanced level (approaching native-speaker level C2 in the EFRL). Of
course, linguistics students who have worked through Halliday/Hasan’s cohesive
devices are more aware of the options and may thus tend to use them more often
for a period of time in their writing.
The comparison of selected concessive and contrastive markers by Wagner
(this volume) is an interesting case study that tests the usefulness of different
types of data-bases for comparative research, including the ChemCorpus
database.
3.2. Dimensions of linguistic analysis
When comparing databases for analyses of academic writing, we can distinguish
at least five dimensions of factors (cf. Yakhontova 2006):
Genre seems to be the dominant dimension in modern comparative research,
and research articles the master genre (cf. Bondi 1999 and Hyland 2010a:
117).
Academic discipline is the most hotly debated “cultural” component, because
the different “cultures” of “humanities” and “sciences” have been discussed
(e.g. Hyland & Bondi eds. 2006) since C.P. Snow’s catch phrase of the “two
cultures” (1959).
National culture seems to be less prominent in the discussions now than
during the contrastive period of linguistics, when English vs. German vs.
Spanish texts were analysed. However, with English as a lingua franca, the
issue is now whether German and other academic cultures can be expressed
in English for several reader perspectives, the native German and the native
English, and maybe others.
Academic Writing in Europe: a Survey
11
Contrastive language cultures are less prominent today, but still important at
least at the lowest levels of academic writing, when the International Corpus
of Learner English (ICLE) provides a database of argumentative essays –
irrespective of whether an “essay” is a realistic natural genre of academic
writing.
The language phenomena analysed have tended towards metalanguage in the
last few years, focusing on interpersonal devices of proximity (cf. 4.2.
below) from pronouns to modal adverbs.
The contributions to this volume (in alphabetical order in Table 1) are fairly
representative of the current research focus in these five dimensions:
The dominant genre is clearly the research article. It is however interesting to
see rare genres (like conference posters and course descriptions for students)
analysed, since these are relatively new and thus allow us to see the
establishment of formal conventions on the basis of functional needs.
The academic disciplines chosen for analysis show the usual contrasts between
“hard” and “soft”, with natural sciences usually assumed to be more standardised
already. But it is by no means clear whether all disciplines will follow the same
trends, since the diversity and artistic creativity in humanities may also be less
suitable for standardisation and thus follow the trends less rigorously.
genre
academic discipline
national
“culture”
language
phenomenon
D’Angelo
conference
posters
physics, law
––––
textual/
metadiscourse,
semiotics
Diani
university
lectures
linguistics, psychology,
economics
English vs.
Italian
person markers
Gesuato
course
descriptions
biology, geography,
history, journalism. law,
literature, music, physics,
psychology, statistics,
––––
modality, tenses,
lexicon, etc.
Haase
research
articles
physics
––––
modal adverbs/
auxiliaries
H lková
research
articles
management, politics,
sociology, adult education,
psychology
––––
conjunctive
adverbs
Maláskova
research
articles
humanities vs. social
sciences
––––
hedges
Provenzano textbooks
finance
Western vs.
Islamic
lexical, semantic
Wagner
linguistics vs.
methodology/cultural
studies/literature
German vs.
Czech
concessives/
contrastives
Table 1:
student
papers/theses
Dimensions of linguistic analysis in the contributions in this volume
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Similarly debated is the assumption that all national cultures will follow the
Anglo-ůmerican model (cf. 4.1), so that even a comparison of “national” cultures
of writing may be difficult, if it is not strictly tied to language properties, like
etymological or typological contrasts between Germanic and Romance languages
(thus the dimensions of national culture and languages are collapsed in Table 1).
The hotly-debated native-speaker issue is noticeably absent from this volume,
probably because all contributions are written by non-native speakers and
because it is difficult to find a suitably broad data-base that covers this aspect in
addition to the discipline and level (but Wagner indicates the direction).
Finally, the language phenomena discussed seem to focus on those features
that English traditionally has used for safe-guarding a good writer – reader
interaction, whereas the analyses of argumentative structures are not easily
comparable. The focus on metadiscourse is obvious in most contributions in this
volume, but it is viewed from very different perspectives: from a functional
perspective metadiscourse includes hedges (as in Maláskova), from a formal
perspective modal/conjunctive adverbs (as in Haase and H lková) and modal
auxiliaries (as in Haase and Gesuato); from a writer – reader discourse
perspective it includes personal markers, like I and we (as in Diani), and of
course, the “rare genres” studied by D’ůngelo and Gesuato require specific
variables, whereas the former concentrates on semiotics and multimodality (the
text and image interface) the latter also covers grammatical (tenses) and lexical
aspects (e.g. preferred key words from the academic word list). The culturespecific lexicon is the special focus in Provenzano’s contribution. Thus the
language features analysed in this volume give at least an impression of the many
aspects that are still worth exploring systematically in this “dimension”.
4. Problems of comparative research in academic writing
Despite the wide choice of approaches, some even easily accessible to novices,
comparative research in academic writing has its problems. These challenges can
however also be seen as opportunities that allow researchers to work on specific
issues in this wide field.
4.1. Culture-specific traditions
Several authors have pointed out the “cultural baggage” of English (Wierzbicka
2006) in its lexicon (like reasonable or fair) and grammar (in causatives and
epistemic adverbs), which makes English questionable as a neutral lingua franca
for non-native speakers. It has also been argued (Thielmann 2009) that academic
culture is linked closely to academic language and provocatively even that “one
cannot do science in a pidgin”. Detailed case studies can help clarify typological
and pragmatic differences between English and, for instance, German, so that we
can scrutinise academic argumentation styles (ibid.) on various levels of discourse:
Academic Writing in Europe: a Survey
13
Can we generalise that German style is more argumentative whereas English
style is more persuasive? Can we prove that weil is used to focus on the writer’s
decisive argument that convinces the writer and, hopefully, the reader, whereas
English because often refers to the argumentation by other writers? Is this
“persuasive” reader orientation in English always positive or can it also be seen as
negative, since this subjectification distracts from the force of the argument? Or
should we distinguish between a preference for authority- and a preference for
discourse-orientation in academic communities? Can we say that English has more
lexical diversity that allows the writer to argue more subtly when using because,
since, as instead of a simple weil or is this beyond the non-native writer already?
On top of all these multilingual/-cultural aspects, writers have to be aware of
intercultural implications. The whole field of contrastive rhetoric and culture needs
much more empirical research and rigorous conceptualisation (cf. Atkinson 2004).
Of course, the level of English in non-native academic writing and in non-native
writing courses needs to be discussed. Unfortunately, many EAP classes still deal
with prepositions and their use in idiomatic expressions and tense/aspect “rules”
instead of concentrating on the specific features of academic language and
academic English. Thus they never manage to address the following real issues:
Can we really criticize complex cognitive concepts like hedging and cohesion
or argumentation structure below a proficiency level of C1 (in the EFRL)? Can
we really write according to German academic traditions in English? Or is
German academic style also becoming more reader-oriented due to American
influence or due to changes in the staff-student relationship? Can a ‘dual
publication’ be a compromise, as suggested by Hamp-Lyons (2011: 2) “that
researchers who publish their work in languages other than English should be
free to re-publish the same work in English translation, with full attribution to the
original publication”?
Since academic knowledge creation is set in a specific learning situation, it
also requires socio-cultural knowledge of the discourse community (like
interpersonal conventions between writers and readers in terms of powerrelationships and associated roles of formality, authority, intimacy, and others).
Thus the conventions of English and American, German and French academic
circles have developed differently in the national academic cultures.
Only in a comparative perspective can we decide whether current trends
perceived by writers like Hyland (2005: 173f) in the Anglo-American tradition
are universal.
Over the past decade or so, academic writing has gradually lost its traditional tag as an
objective, faceless and impersonal form of discourse and come to be seen as a persuasive
endeavour involving interaction between writers and readers. This view sees academics
as not simply producing texts that plausibly represent an external reality, but also as using
language to acknowledge, construct and negotiate social relations. Writers seek to offer a
credible representation of themselves and their work by claiming solidarity with readers,
evaluating their material and acknowledging alternative views, so that controlling the
level of personality in a text becomes central to building a convincing argument. Put
succinctly, every successful academic text displays the writer’s awareness of both its
readers and its consequences.
14
Schmied
If there is such a universal trend in academic writing, non-native writers may
follow this trend in their mother-tongue or only in their English. More
specifically, the interesting question here is whether academic texts by German
or Italian students of English approximate the British and American models from
their native German or Italian traditions or whether the non-native writings are
closer to each other than to the source- and target-culture conventions. This idea
is visualised in Figure 2, where the lingua franca Englishes are seen like interlanguages closer together than the source texts (German and Italian, for
example). The arrows indicate that non-native speakers approximate AngloAmerican standards, that there is considerable overlap and that the variation
between source- and target-language is increasing, although the two-dimensional
nature of the diagram may be misleading (it does not suggest that German writers
approximate towards British and Italian towards American models). In fact, it
could be argued that the distinction between British and American English is
overemphasised in view of the increasing Americanisation world-wide and the
growing acceptability of other target models from Australia, Canada, etc. The
adaptation in other complex cultural writing spaces is a completely different
discourse (see Nkemleke fc. on Cameroon).
British
English
German
English
American
English
Italian
English
native
German
native
Italian
non-native / lingua franca academic English
Figure 2:
Approximation model for German and Italian academic writing styles
towards native-speaker models
The main distinction in this approximation model is between native German, Italian,
French, Czech, Chinese styles and the Anglo-American model. This does not imply
that complete approximation is necessary or that a “neutral” lingua franca style
cannot be accepted by non-native as well as native speakers of English.
Of course, the cultural influence of Anglo-American universities and AngloAmerican publishing houses is dominant, but it does not mean that European
publishes (like Elsevier, Benjamins or Mouton de Gruyter) or European editors
as gate-keepers are not possible. If we take the concept of a (neutral, explicit,
systematic) academic lingua franca seriously, this may even mean some training
for native speakers of English, since this non-natural academic writing is more
conscious and controlled, more reader- and culture-specific than usual, and it is at
a high level, i.e. it does not violate basic grammar rules but rather tolerates less
Academic Writing in Europe: a Survey
15
stereotypical usages in lexicon, idiomaticity, metaphor, argumentation structure
and other formal and functional conventions.
Since it is difficult to distinguish between Anglo-American and general style
trends from the text- through the writer- to the reader perspective (see above), it
may be worth summarizing explicit guidelines in current style guides or accepted
university textbooks. Thus it has been argued (Swales & Feak 2000: 16) that
“national” or cultural features of ůnglo-American writing are:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
be more explicit about its structure and purposes
be less tolerant of asides or digressions
use fairly short sentences with less complicated grammar
have stricter conventions for subsections and their titles
be more loaded with citations
rely more on recent citations
have longer paragraphs in terms of number of words
point more explicitly to “gaps” or “weaknesses” in the previous research
use more sentence connectors (words like however)
place the responsibility for clarity and understanding on the writer rather than on
the reader
The empirical analysis of academic writing as exemplified in this collection will
give us a good database for discussing acceptable usage practices by different
academic communities in future.
4.2. Proximity as a reader-related text concept
A concept that has emerged as central in reader-oriented academic writing during
the past few years is proximity (or approximation, when transferred from media
studies). A very wide definition has been suggested recently by Hyland (2010a:
117):
I use the term proximity here to refer to a writer’s control of rhetorical features which
display both authority as an expert and a personal position towards issues in an unfolding
text. It involves responding to the context of the text, particularly the readers who form
part of that context, textually constructing both the writer and the reader as people with
similar understandings and goals. While it embraces the notion of interpersonality,
proximity is a slightly wider idea as it not only includes how writers manage themselves
and their interactions with others, but also the ways ideational material, what the text is
‘about’, is presented for a particular audience. It is concerned with how writers represent
not only themselves and their readers, but also their material, in ways which are most
likely to meet their readers’ expectations.
So proximity captures 2 key aspects of acting interpersonally. The first refers to what might
be called the proximity of membership: How academic writers demonstrate their authority
to colleagues through use of disciplinary conventions. What does the writer do to position
him or herself as a disciplinary expert and competent colleague? The second concerns the
proximity of commitment, or how the writer takes a personal position towards issues in an
unfolding text. That is, what does the writer do to locate him or herself in relation to the
material presented? One points to how we position ourselves in relation to our
communities, and the other to how we position ourselves in relation to our text.
16
Schmied
This covers almost all aspects of metadiscourse. If this is considered too wide, it
could be restricted to “recipient-design”, i.e. “an orientation and sensitivity to the
particular others who are our co-participants through lexical choice, topic
selection, conventions, of argument, and so on” (ibid.).
This concept is particularly useful in comparing specialised to popular
academic writing, which is useful for EAP in journalistic writing:
Science journalism illustrates the ways proximity (and interpersonality) work as writers
set out material for different purposes and readers. Popularizations represent a discourse
which establishes the uniqueness, relevance and immediacy of topics which might not
seem to warrant lay attention by making information concrete, novel and accessible.
Findings are therefore invested with a factual status, related to real life concerns, and
presented as germane to readers with little detailed interest in the ways that they were
arrived at or in the controversies surrounding them.
Readers, in fact, experience the academic world and its discourses as a succession of
discoveries in the relentless advance of inductive science. In sum, science journalism
works as journalism rather than science. It is written in ways which make the research
accessible and allow non-specialists to recover the interpretive voice of the scientist.
(ibid: 126)
The popularisation of science has been a debated issue in English-speaking
cultures for a long time. There have been many small studies to compare
specialised and popular texts on the same topic, but it is not easy to ensure
compatibility. The most common way is to trace back the origins of newspaper
articles or science journals like New Scientist or Scientific American to the
original publication in research articles or even on pre-publication servers (cf.
Schmied 2009a,b,c). Haase (this volume) is a good example that illustrates the
qualitative and quantitative options of research in this thrilling area. In a broader
perspective, even films can be included in a multimedia-corpus of science texts
and analysed, which may make it particularly attractive for students, but what can
reasonably be compared is a real issue.
4.3. Compatibility of data
A major problem of comparative research in academic writing has been the
availability of a compatible database. This can again be seen on three levels (cf.
the case study by Wagner in this volume):
Academic writing on the web, as in Google Scholar, may be useful for finding
usage patterns involving rare linguistic forms but the reliability of the-web-ascorpus in limited. Googlelabs currently includes 5.2 million books published in
English between 1800 and 2000, approximately 361 billion words. The
usefulness of this tool for historical comparisons (even of rare collocates) is
demonstrated by Haase (this volume).
Taking the academic sections of national standard reference corpora, like the
British National Corpus (BNC) or the Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA), is the better option, which has also been demonstrated by Mark
Davies (n.d.) and by Wagner (this volume). The academic component is about 83
million words in COCA and 15 million in the BNC.
Academic Writing in Europe: a Survey
17
The third and most suitable and complex option are, of course, purpose-made
corpora that are compiled for a specific piece of research and may be usable for
another. ůlthough the tradition of ‘disposable corpora’ has been very successful
in translation studies, the small collections of academic writing that students and
teachers have on their personal computers rarely add up to a coherent
compilation. However, their advantage, that they are personal, should not be
underestimated. If students really manage to develop a “detached” perspective
from their own work, the combination of practical and theoretical work would be
ideal, since they can learn from their own work (and maybe lecturer’s
corrections) to improve their future writing, esp. in their final theses. For,
revising this decisive “masterpiece” of their studies is often most difficult
because students are tempted to submit a first draft as a final version, since they
are not used to revising a piece of writing thoroughly enough.
From a more scholarly perspective, all the more or less stratified collections of
student work may not be ideal in many ways: in many English Departments male
students are hard to find, the balance between linguistic, literature, cultural
studies and methodology specialists is difficult, and the level of English
generally very uneven. However, for some high-frequency language phenomena
this may well be enough for a sophisticated analysis (as is shown by Wagner in
this volume).
Krishnamurthy & Kosem (2007: 370f) have discussed the usefulness of
existing corpora (up to the recently compiled British Academic Written/Spoken
English Corpus, BAWE/BASE) for EAP pedagogy and they come to the
following conclusion:
The one thing that EAP seems to lack is a corpus that includes all levels of data—from
pre-sessional students’ writing and speech to academic lectures, Ph.D. theses, and
published research articles and books. Such a corpus would need to include as many
disciplines as possible, with sufficient detailed categorisation to enable the users (teachers
or students) to select a customised set of corpus texts appropriate for their needs. If new
corpora are created to agreed common designs, they could be accessed together, forming
a richer and more extensive resource. The resulting corpus would need a user-friendly
interface that is specifically designed for pedagogical use rather than for research.
The solution to all these problems is, of course, to compile our own corpus.
However, corpus compilation is time-consuming and more resource-consuming
than commonly assumed and funding options are limited. The BAWE corpus is
the result of one of the few corpus compilation projects funded by a research
agency (ESRC). A systematic set-up of a corpus (Table 2) would ideally
comprise of enough texts written by male vs. female, linguistic vs. non-linguistic
(cultural studies/literature) students, thus it would have 5 texts per category.
Again ideally, the compilation would “accompany” students during their studies
in regular developmental steps from the entrance examination to their BA and
MA thesis, maybe with intermediate steps in texts from term papers in the 2nd
year of their BA and again after the first year of their MA programme. If the
number of words is also increased systematically, we would end up with a
substantial corpus of more than 10 million words, which is not that far from the
18
Schmied
15 million academic English in the BNC. This size would make our corpus
comparable with the major native-speaker EAL corpora, the Corpus of British
Academic Written English (BAWE) and its American model, the Michigan
Corpus of Upper Student Papers (MICUSP), although they are far from ideally
stratified and compatible either.
ChemCorpus
files
minimum words/text
entrance examination
20
1,000
BA2Year term paper
20
5,000
BA thesis
20
15,000
MA1Year term paper
20
8,000
MA thesis
20
25,000
100
10,800,000
total
Table 2:
The ideal ChemCorpus of academic writing
Of course, such a collection would allow us to compare the students’
developmental stages through specific writing classes and also before and after
their year abroad (which is compulsory in the BA programme in the fifth
semester at Chemnitz). Over the years, we could even take texts by the same
students (from their “European Language Portfolio” in the CEFRL). Related
research hypotheses to pursue would be, for instance, that advanced students of
English move from overuse to appropriate use for specifically English features
(in the case of continuous forms), from more explicit to more implicit marking
(in the case of cohesion markers), from more extreme to more tentative forms (in
the case of modal auxiliaries). If similar EAP corpora could be complied at other
universities and even international partners (like Chemnitz and Brno), an
interesting comparison would be possible. A major problem is, of course, that the
study programmes are not compatible enough (despite “Bologna”).
4.4. Applications in teaching
The advantages of genre-based academic writing can be directly derived from the
definition: If academic writing constructs the discursive reality of a discipline,
effective learning is also a social activity, it is a constant battle to meet (or
challenge) expected outcomes in conventional genres.
Of course, effective learning must be needs-oriented, i.e. the first step is to
identify students’ needs in their academic life and afterwards, which may be
partly different target situations (when an argumentative essay is the target in
academic life and a presentation of a scientific problem to a general academic
public is the target in a job afterwards). Obviously, determining students’ needs
is a continuous and changing process. Here the teacher is the facilitator who
helps the students to achieve their own goals, and learning to write is a social
Academic Writing in Europe: a Survey
19
activity that helps in a social activity (of academic discourse) through the
effective use of the tool language.
The following model for a teaching-learning cycle has been proposed (Feez
1998):
Setting the context – revealing genre purposes and the settings in which a genre is
commonly used
Modeling – analyzing the genre to reveal its stages and key features
Joint construction guided, teacher-supported practice in the genre
Independent construction – independent writing monitored by the teacher
Comparing – relating what has been learned to other genres and contexts
This cycle can be seen as a scaffold (according to Vygotsky 1978) that empowers
students and raises their consciousness to learn cooperatively and independently
in increasingly complex ways. So they can move from collecting to comparing
texts, from investigating variation within genres and disciplines to differences
between them, from discovering formal differences to explaining them through
specific functional requirements.
The following checklist of good academic writing has been quoted frequently
(e.g. by Hyland 2006: 221), because it seems to be general enough to appeal to
teachers and exemplary enough to apply to students:
Texts are explicit, with clear discussion of data and results.
Texts follow an inductive “top-down” pattern, with topic sentences and an introduction to
help readers see where the text will lead.
Texts contain metadiscourse, such as to summarize, in conclusion, firstly, secondly, etc.,
to help guide readers through the argument.
Texts are emotionally neutral and strive to appear objective.
Texts contain hedges like probably and might to avoid sounding too confident.
Texts are intertextual, drawing on other texts for their structure, form, and patterns of
argument.
Texts adopt the right tone to show appropriate confidence and modesty.
Texts acknowledge prior work and avoid plagiarism.
Texts comply with the genre requirements of the community or classroom.
Figure 5.8. Feature of “academic writing” (Johns 1997)
Academic writing is gradually establishing itself as a central element in the new
BA and MA degree programmes in European universities. The combination of
empirical findings, their discussion and their contextualisation in personal and
university experience with the help of appropriate teaching and learning models
characterises the way forward towards a unified and effective European
education space that may make learning and writing more effective for students
and young researchers alike.
20
Schmied
5. Conclusion
This survey has tried to provide a scholarly foundation for academic writing at
European universities. It is based on a new understanding of writing, and
academic language in general, as interaction between writer and reader through a
text. Non-native academics have always had the problem of finding native
speakers to “edit” their texts. This may become less important in the future if
non-native standards become acceptable in Europe. The differences to native
speakers may be less prominent in discourse pragmatics than in idiomaticity and
usage variation and this may be less noticeable than, for examples, Asian
discourse cultures. The conscious teaching of genre variation may allow nonnative scholars to choose style features consciously and maybe make even native
speakers aware of cultural preferences.
Detailed quantitative corpus-linguistic analyses of native speaker vs. nonnative speaker writing may show “more than meets the eye”. Such a data-based
sensibility for writing conventions would make it possible particularly for nonnative writers to increase their awareness of academic usages and thus be
recognised as serious, committed and still careful researchers by the specialised
discourse community.
Similarly, popular academic discourse also needs trained language specialists,
for this new and conscious style of academic writing in all its ‘translations’ from
specialised to journalistic discourse.
The specialisation in academic writing may be of particular relevance in
countries like Germany where English specialists often do not find a job in state
schools, because few teachers are needed due to population (and student) decline
in the last few years. Thus language services of the future do not only offer
teaching English generally or for specific purposes and translating different types
of texts, but also for editing and web-publishing of academic texts. A scientist
can write a first draft but it takes a real language specialist to improve it
according to the conventions of the discourse community, including an analysis
of the sub-discipline or even the specific journal. This consultancy on web
publications for the different academic communities outlined here would be a
new challenge but also a new opportunity.
Josef Schmied
English Language & Linguistics
Chemnitz University of Technology
Germany
josef.schmied@phil.tu-chemnitz.de
Academic Writing in Europe: a Survey
21
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