This article investigates patterns of systematic metaphors used to characterize various aspects of the doctoral education period, based on analysis of dissertation acknowledgements (DAs) from doctoral dissertations across academic disciplines and written by researchers from four PhD programs offered by a Norwegian university. The primary research…

This paper conceptualises and explores 'the art of critique' in student writing in the humanities and social sciences [Foucault 1997. "What is Critique?" In: "The Politics of Truth." English Translation. Translated from French by Lysa Hocroth & Catherine Porter. In "Dits et Ecrits" for original French. Los…

Administrative language surrounding racist hate speech on campus is rooted in abstract interpretations of the liberal values of freedom and equality. Consequently, these color-blind discourses remove racist hate speech from its historical context of racial violence and discrimination and view it as merely another point of view that is deserving of…

Academic criticism is a fundamental feature of scholarly discourse. It plays a key role in scientific theory building, whereby ideas are iteratively challenged and redrafted (Kuhn, 1962, 1970). It is also how individual scholars create a research space (see the CARS model, Swales, 1990) and establish themselves as members of the research…

This article examines the discourses of writing evident in teacher candidates' memories of writing and considers implications for teacher preparation. Data sources were written memories from 120 teacher candidates from six institutions across the United States. Grounded in a discourses of writing framework, data were investigated using thematic…

Metadiscourse studies, inspired by Halliday's interpersonal metafunction of language, have dominated academic discourse analysis. They tended to exclude the ideational metafunction in discourse and to reduce the reader/analyst to a concordance programme that scans texts for lists of pre-established, but not always clearly defined, linguistic…

Conducting qualitative, critical ethnographical research on disability in Palestine requires deep self-reflexivity, exploring positionality while claiming authorship. As a Palestinian conducting backyard research, I explored ways to conceptualize disability in light of language and macro factors related to Israeli occupation practices. While…

In terms of their directness and modification strategies, this study investigated how undergraduate speakers of Turkish formulate their naturally occurring requests in an academic context, in which they request things from an academic in his office. After a 4-year data collection period, the researcher analyzed 395 of the requests (hand-recorded…

Interest in both Identity and Academic Writing and Discourse has recently remarkably resurged. This has been so in both applied linguistics and discourse studies. As a result, many dominant ideas, practices, and paradigms have been criticized, challenged, or re-considered. The paper casts light on identity features and manifestations in the…

Writing native-like has always been a primary purpose for non-native writers of English and, accordingly, many language components have been investigated to develop writers' fluency. One of these language components is syntactic complexity (SC), which is often regarded as a reliable way to grade any texts from easy to difficult. This study aims to…

Virtually all researchers understand the requirement of presenting their studies in peer-reviewed English-medium journals. Russian scientific writers understand this necessity too; however, evidence suggests that these particular researchers are under-performing relative to similar non-native English speakers. The considerable challenge Russians…

This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and…

Teacher feedback has been reported to be challenging for learners to understand and use productively in revising their writing, especially when it is provided in a monologic manner. There have thus been calls for teachers to ensure feedback is more 'dialogic' or 'interactive', encouraging students to become active respondents to feedback rather…

This study investigates the rhetorical choices of the engagement features in Pakistani Academic Research Discourse (PARD) of natural and social sciences. Using the 'Interaction Model' (Hyland, 2005), it explores how the writers of different disciplinary cultures employ engagement features to define and maintain their knowledge territories in their…

A recent manifest content analysis of manuscripts in leading U.S. adult education journals found a discrepancy between how often academics used meaning making language and how often practitioners and policy makers did. It was suggested this was due to the language being unhelpful to practitioner and policy makers' work. A follow up latent content…