This article describes an investigation into the practice-based doctorate in the visual and performing arts, a genre that is still in the process of development. A key feature of these doctorates is that they comprise two components: a visual or performance component, and a written text which accompanies it which in some ways is similar to, but in…

This study examined abstracts for a British Association for Applied Linguistics conference and a Sociolinguistics Symposium, to define the genre of conference abstracts in terms of vague language, specifically universal general nouns (e.g. people) and research general nouns (e.g. results), and to discover if the language used reflected the level…

Outwardly the rhetorical organisation of sections of research reports in different disciplines can appear similar. Close examination, however, may reveal subtle differences. Numerous studies have drawn on the genre-based approach developed by Swales (1990, 2004) to investigate the schematic structure of sections of articles in a range of…

On film studies courses, students are asked to treat as objects of study the same films which they may more commonly experience as entertainment. To explore the role of academic writing in this, an action research project was carried out on a university film studies course using a systemic functional linguistics approach. This paper presents a key…

The writing of business case reports is a common requirement for students on academic business programmes and presents significant challenges for both native and non-native speaker students. In order to support the development of pedagogical practice in the teaching of case report writing, this paper reports a genre-based study of a corpus of 53…

If assignments are to present clear arguments that a reader may follow without confusion or rereading, learners need to master a range of thematic options and employ them in proportions appropriate to the target genre. This paper builds upon recent theoretical work on a) genre differences in terms of thematisation between two British newspapers,…

This paper deals with interpersonality in research article abstracts analysed in terms of interactional metadiscourse. The evolution in the distribution of three prominent interactional markers comprised in Hyland's (2005a) model, viz. hedges, boosters and attitude markers, is investigated in three decades of abstract writing in the field of…

Academic literacies research has tended to focus on writers in context, while systemic functional linguistic research has tended to focus on texts in context. While literacy practices and written texts may be usefully analysed independently, this paper describes how an investigation of genres of academic writing in the BAWE (British Academic…

The stereotypical view of professional academic writing is that it is grammatically complex, with elaborated structures, and with meaning relations expressed explicitly. In contrast, spoken registers, especially conversation, are believed to have the opposite characteristics. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based…

The view of academic discourse as a rhetorical activity involving interactions between writers and readers is now central to most perspectives on EAP, but these interactions are conducted differently in different disciplinary and generic contexts. In this paper I use the term "proximity" to refer to a writer's control of those rhetorical features…

This study investigates the ways writers comment on the results of their research. Making claims in the form of Commenting on Results is a key move in discussion of results sections. Using data drawn from published journal articles and master dissertations in Language Teaching, the study investigates how published academics and students writing…

As university students are frequently given the tasks of writing research reports to fulfil their respective programme requirements, teaching novice writers to present the results of their reports understandably constitutes an essential component of English lessons at tertiary level. While past research has shown that results are consistently…

This paper reflects on and theorises the experience of developing a postgraduate core subject in EAP, exploring the role of both genre awareness and process management in facilitating writing from sources. Reflection on our initial genre-based pedagogies indicated that teaching the literature review to coursework students was not appropriate, and…

This study investigates the rhetorical organisation of English and Chinese research article introductions in the field of educational psychology using (Swales, 1990) and (Swales, 2004) framework of move analysis. A corpus of 40 research articles (20 Chinese and 20 English) was selected. The English research articles, written by first-language…

English has gradually become the lingua franca of medical publications and conferences across Europe, with scholars from "smaller" languages opting for English because of the greater scientific impact and prestige associated with a wide international audience; at the same time, however, this transition has disrupted well-established textual…