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 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…

Post-predicate that clauses are one of the indicators of evaluative language which shows the attitude, position, and personal evaluation of the writers in academic discourse. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the distribution and frequently used controlling verbs of post-predicate that clauses controlled by verb (VTHAT) in academic…

Systemic Functional linguistics is related to a sign system that can be used to trace the scientific characteristic of academic texts. This study aimed at describing academic texts covering four technical terms: (1) simple, (2) dense, 3) objective, and (4) directness. Data analysis was done through three stages: (a) data reduction, (b) data…

This study examines student discussion fora in a Master's programme. Previous student evaluations of the course highlighted the students' dissatisfaction with the technology chosen for communication and recommended the use of Facebook instead. In this article, we raise the following question: 'How do various digital discussion fora engage students…

This study explores the ways in which master thesis writers position their research in the field of English language teaching in a context where academic literacies are still a developing field. From a social semiotic perspective, this paper aims to identify the resources writers use to represent their object of study and provide a context and…

In the path of academic writing, authors accomplish certain interactions with their readers through the means of meta-discourse markers such as hedges and boosters. There have been many studies that dwell on the function of meta-discourse markers (Abdi, Rizi, & Tavakoli, 2010; Crismore, 1984; Hyland, 1999, 2000, 2001; Longo, 1994). However,…

Adopting Hyland's (2002) framework of reporting words (RVs), the paper investigates the use of RVs in Master's theses written in English by students of two disciplines, Economics and Management and Natural Resources. The data were drawn from two sub-corpora, each consisting of 82 Literature Reviews, where other authors' research is summarised and…

The writers of any scientific community are inherently expected to fulfil some agreed-upon discourse conventions of the academic discourse community (Molino, 2010) in the sense of creating a successful dialogic interaction through their texts. In line with this, Akbas (2014b) raised the question of "how and to what to extent writers…