The process of responding to supervisory feedback requires student writers to position themselves toward both the provider and content of that feedback, indicating their stance in the interaction and their evolving disciplinary competence. How positionings are discursively shaped, developed, and enacted to influence thesis revisions, however, has…

An important component of fluent linguistic production is control of the multi-word expressions referred to as clusters, chunks or bundles. These are extended collocations which appear more frequently than expected by chance, helping to shape meanings in specific contexts and contributing to our sense of coherence in a text. Bundles have begun to…

Although sometimes considered to be only marginally related to the key academic goals of establishing claims and reputations, acknowledgments are commonplace in scholarly communication and virtually obligatory in dissertation writing. The significance of this disregarded "Cinderella" genre lies partly in the opportunities it offers students to…

The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as "evaluation," "stance" and "metadiscourse," have attracted increasing attention in the literature over the last 10 years and now form an important element of many ESP courses. A relatively overlooked interpersonal feature, however,…